I’ve talked about E3 every year since this site started, and I wonder if I should stop the tradition. It’s fun to talk about the new announcements, but I can’t help but feel that I repeat myself, and that it’s just adding to the thousands of other opinions that came out this week (never mind that this article is a few days after everything is over). That being said, I have something to say about how indie games were represented this year.
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…
