Current Status v0.2

Hey :)

I haven’t updated this project for a while. Behind the scenes, much has changed though. Let’s talk about what has changed since the last update, and give you a rough overview about what still has to be done.

Completely redesigned the look of the game.

Old look:

New look:

This means:

• new hero design
• new environment art & Level design
• new lighting
• islands are floating now (definitely the most important change)

This has taken up most of my time until now. But I am finally at a point where I am happy with the look of the game. For now.

Huge props to Mitch, the game’s environment artist. He did all of the level art, without him the game wouldn’t look half as good.

Performance improvements all around

On my target device the game was barely able to hold 60fps in most situations. I did a lot of optimizations to improve performance in pretty much all situations. Still not consistently hitting 60fps on my target phone, but way better than before.

In particular, this means:

• improved memory usage
• reduced particle complexity
• simplified Shader & Material usage
• reduced texture sizes

With the new look, most of the changes shouldn’t be noticable, while still giving the game a sizable speed boost.

Build size reduction

Especially on mobile, having small app bundles is key to not scare away potential players. Especially for users with low spec phones that don’t have too much size to spare, large apps are just not suited.

Therefore I got the build size from around 130mb to roughly 65mb. Pretty much half the size it had before, so a major improvement. Quality didn’t suffer, at least not noticably.

The size will undoubtly go up once I add content and include more assets, but this gives me a good starting point to work with.

Upgrade from Unity 2021.3 to 2022.3

A change that isn’t noticable to the player but helps me a lot in my workflow, is the upgrade to the newest LTS version of Unity.

This gives me way shorter loading times, import times, and most importantly, build times. So all around a big improvement for the development, allowing for faster iteration.

Smaller improvements

There are a lot of adjustments and Bugfixes I did since the last public version. Here a selected list of some of the changes:

• removed the small dash (too many abilities otherwise)
• icons are smaller & cooldown numbers are rounded.
• recolored slimes to a more visible color
• ability buttons can be held now to continuously cast them
• ability icons make more sense now
• you can now dash in any direction while casting another ability
• slimes don’t ignore damage when jumping back from their charge
• …

That’s about everything I did the last 2.5 months.

What is left for version 0.2?

• creating the dungeon system & the first playable Dungeon
• adding some more oomph to the combat
• improving the AI system (better performance, easier to setup)

Especially the dungeon will be a lengthy task to complete. I already completed some work in version 0.1, but I still have to do some gruntwork for traversable rooms to happen. Let’s see if I can get the version done by October.

I hope that I can keep up with semi consistent updates. Probably not interesting to many people, but these posts might give me (and therefore the game) some kind of urgency. Will see how often I can create one of these.

Thanks for reading!

Brut