Hey everyone. I made some good progress last month. Most was about game design and mechanics but I solved a number of issues and wrote down the basis for implementation into code. By next month I believe that there will be a good amount of game mechanics working such as collection, storage and production. Sure that already works in the current version but as I said earlier there will quickly be more diversity and depth to all of it. More can be read here. I know the shop page is out of date and it is still on the list to become updated.

Performance

I am even more confident that the game will work well. I not just learned frm Endciv but also from other projects that early work towards performance optimization helps a lot in the later stage of the process. Because then it can be very hard to start optimization. Better to design your content around optimization systems rather than the other way around. So one solution was that I made a custom LOD system. The one of Unity is not really great for my type of game. Previous Endciv already used parts of that system to control light settings dynamically.
Here you can see LOD stages (Blue, Orange, Red). Red units for instance arent casting shadows. The GPU is definitely the bottleneck for the amount of people on the screen, especially once they have animations. I think that maybe 200 people is already much for this game, but at least technically there is no issue that 2000 walk at the same time. The game systems also work fine and efficient. Each aspect is scheduled successively. So basically in one frame all the production is done, the next frame deals with crop growth, the next does make construction happen. That is actually how Endciv already worked previously, but now much more consequently. Under the hood this is actually a round based game and one round currently is 3 seconds. You might run the game in time-lapse most of the time anyway, that is also the reason why I choose that system. I am a fan of bulletproof game mechanics where timing or other chaotic events do not affect the output. For instance the result should be exactly the same whether the game runs at 1x or 10x speed.

How Graphics will evolve

Art assets are the biggest pitfall of this game. A city builder should be nice to look at besides having great game play. Some people just want to look close and see all the details the citizens do, me included. I had such plans but those where the reason why the previous Endciv failed. There is a simple solution: Lets ignore graphics for a start. I will use simple artwork, maybe citizens wont even have animations for a long time. I hope that you can live with that but this is the only way to get this game forward. Once the game play and performance do what they should I will make updates on graphics. The current workflow will allow doing that without any issues. This sounds like a great workflow anyway. I can focus one a few topics at a time and when the game is shaped it is easier to work on artwork. Aside the fact that I already reserved a budget from previous sales hopefully there will be a few more owners by that time.
Here is how it looks now. Those buildings didnt even take an hour each so there is room for a bit more detail and I can quickly do some dummy models without wasting resources.

Resources and Buildings

I made some updates on the game design and redefined materials there are. Read Part 2 here.

[ 2018-02-04 22:54:15 CET ] [ Original post ]