I don’t know why, but it’s hard to focus and make progress on my current project. It seems when I play around a bit with making the level, I end up moving backwards… this week, I did some testing regarding Unity3D’s “Terrain” system and looked again at my tree models.
Generally, using Unity3D’s “Terrain” system yields comparable visual results…
Deadlines are important for developers. Yes, we all hate deadlines, and professionally I keep seeing ridiculously unrealistic ones from customers who don’t know the difference between software and a operating system. It leads to bad quality: my games in particular could have benefited greatly by an extra few months of waiting and thinking. But it also gives a goal and motivation, something that it difficult for indie developers to find.
In past years, I relied on public events to showcase my game and spread the word. I’d work day and night up until a deadline to make a short demo and video to submit with an application, and would continue working several hours each day up until the event to improve what I’d be showing, even making last-minute modifications in the hotel room the night before. So when a deadline was announced for March for an event I was eyeing, I realized I hadn’t even enough of a game to showcase: only walking around worked, and a huge portion (the turn-based strategy bits) was never implemented. So, I got to work…
Working Prototype of Tactical Strategy Gameplay Map
I hoped I would be finished with trees sooner rather than later for “True King,” but as I continued to place trees by hand, I realized my frame rate for this large open world was dropping bad before I had placed all of the forest. I noticed that the scene had a few million polygons, which is a big no-no (some sources online claim to target under 1 million polygons in Unity3D to avoid bad performance on most hardware). So I had to fix it…
Trees don’t need high-polygons…
Of course, I haven’t slacked off at all, I’ve just been busy. As far as game development goes, I’ve just about finished painting the landscape textures for “True King,” and made some discoveries along the way.
The Kingdom is in sight…
So I announced my newest project “True King” a couple weeks ago… it featured a tiny character you could barely see.
While most of the game will be like that, I spent a lot of time experimenting with my animation systems for the characters in this game. Here’s a cool video that shows what I’m working with.
