Hello, everyone!
In todays devlog, were diving deeper into our decision to make the switch to the Godot game engine, and why its been a crucial move for the games future. We'll also have a look at how the updated graphics are coming along!
Moving to Godot
As we talked about in our previous update we took at step back to really review the feedback and suggestions from our community and players after releasing an updated demo last fall. During this review we uncovered several limitations with the original game engine we were using which would have been very hard - if not impossible to overcome. After investigating our options and looking for the option that would give us maximum re-use of the code and functionality we had worked on so far, we made the difficult but ultimately worthwhile decision to port the game to Godot. Porting everything to Godot promised a more robust engine, better performance and most importantly allowing us to expand and build the game in ways we had previously been limited.
So, what has this rewrite / port given us?
Performance & framerate: Despite all our efforts to optimize the game within our old engine, there were still significant performance bottlenecks that caused the game to struggle - not only on lower-end systems, but we were not able to take proper advantage of more performant hardware either. While the demo looked and felt polished (when it ran well), the performance wasnt up to our standards. With Godot, however, the game runs at a smooth 60+ fps on decent hardware with very little optimization, and even on lower-end systems, we're getting stable and usable framerates an improvement were really excited about!
Memory Usage: The demo was notoriously memory-hungry, requiring over 4GB of RAM just to start and play. As a result of this we had to scale back on animations and image quality in the demo just to ensure it ran smoothly. With Godot weve reduced memory usage by over 75% with the same content - already a massive improvement in efficiency.
Animations & Building Quality: One of the biggest compromises in the previous engine was the quality of animations, especially for characters. Because of memory constraints and increased load times we had to lower image quality just to make things run properly. With Godot, weve more than doubled the quality of each animation without any performance loss, and load times are snappier than ever. As we continue to work on and expand the game, were excited to introduce new character professions, which will come with more complex animations. The power of Godot is allowing us to make what we want and add it to the game with no issues so far.
Sneak Peek of New Buildings and Characters:
That's a lot of technical talk, but we're excited and hope you are too! Of course weve also got a sneak peek of some exciting new additions to the game!
Check out these concept drawings of some of our new buildings and an introduction to the new "Baker" character who will be wandering around town. (Keep in mind, this is still an early version, so expect plenty of changes as we continue to refine things along the way to the final release.)
Thats all for now, folks! Were thrilled with the progress weve made so far, and we cant wait to share more with you in the coming months.
Until next time!
[ 2025-01-07 09:04:00 CET ] [ Original post ]
