Monthly Archives: December 2014

Built-in Map Editor

Ok, this week didn’t go exactly like expected.

In the 9th level of the Dungeon,  I want to create an underground forest. To do so, I bought a Tree pack on Unity Asset Store. They look very good, but their texture mapping was really sub-optimal : a lot of space was wasted.

Wasted space = lost VRAM = less total textures = lower visual quality.

So I decided to redo their texture mapping. 3D pipeline is not exactly my speciality, thus I lost the best part of a day to set everything till I reached a satisfying result.

Once that done, it reminded me that I didn’t check since long time how much RAM the game was needing to run. Last time I did that was for Beta 1, in last September, and the game needed about 450MB. That was quite reasonable and in part with my objective for the game to use 2GB at maximum. According to Steam Hardware Survey, there are 2% of players with less than 2GB of RAM, 10% with 2GB, 14% with 3GB, and the rest ( = 74%) with more than 3GB. For me, it’s important that at least people with 3GB be able to play the game, so the game using 2GB should ensure that. If I can manage to stay under 1.6GB, that would be even better, as it might allow player with 2GB of RAM to launch the game ; although people with such low system RAM might not have a good enough GPU to run the game, so it’s not a big concern.

Anyway, I checked Beta 2 RAM usage, and it was at a massive 1.7GB ! As the Beta 2 is bundled with less than half of the game content, that came at quite a big shock !

After some in-depth checking, I found out it was the creature Animations that were taking more than 1GB : it turned out that with the method I was using to assign animations to creatures, Unity was duplicating the animations instead of sharing them across the creatures like expected. Of course, Unity documentation didn’t have a word about that matter. Once again, I had a big issue because of Unity basic shortcomings. Like I said before Unity is globally great, but it’s trapped with plenty of deadly stuff like that.

Fortunately, Unity introduced a new animation system with its 4 version, called Mecanim (also plagued with a bunch of stupid issues, but I had already solved most of them a few months back). This new version didn’t have the duplicated animation issues, but it means I had to upgrade all my creatures to the new system. I had already planned to do so, so the system was already in place & working, but it meant I had to spend a couple of long days on integration, while I already had more than enough of it in this month.

Once I upgraded all creatures (30% were already using Mecanim), the animations RAM usage plummeted to less than 100MB, which lead the game to need only a bit more of 600GB. Things got back on track, and the 2GB objective should be relatively easy to keep in line now !

So after that, I took a break and as today, I didn’t work on the game for more than 3 days in a row, which didn’t happen since long time..!

But it makes me eager to get back to level design, and hopefully, I’ll get the energy & time to create a level in the next few days (I may take again some break for New Year ).

So as a little teaser as much for you than for myself, I put a screenshot of the built-in map editor. If you’re into level design, you’ll likely enjoy it, as it’s really fast & simple to create a level (except for puzzle mechanism which requires to understand a few advanced stuff).

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Cave Patriarch Casting Fire Flood

Last week was spent mostly integrating new creature assets into the game, still for the 3rd part of the Dungeon (ie: levels 9 to 12). It’s now almost done, it just misses the 4 bosses, but I’ll do them later, when the levels are finished.

I also integrated the 4th and last environment, the Dark Crypt, which will be featured in the final levels of the game.

With that done, I have not much integration to do anymore, and it’s good news, because I’m getting somewhat bored by it. It’s slow, it’s long, and it’s not exactly exciting as the creativity needed is pretty low, and over the past few months, I already spent nearly a couple of months doing that.

In last April, after have finished the 2nd Alpha, I did a planning to know how long time it’d approximately take me to finish the game, and I totally underestimated the asset integration part ; I thought it’d take something like a couple of weeks. Now, it’s clear it’ll take me a bit more than 2 months, and it means the game won’t be finished before end of April instead of end of February as expected (I also slightly underestimated over little stuff  ). Anyway, it’s nice to feel I’m getting closer to the end, I’m getting impatient to see the final result !

Now, I’m going to focus back on the level design and create 4 new levels within next couple of weeks (or a bit more if I take some Xmas holidays ).

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Menu Design Test

Here a small & quick 4th weekly update.

As I worked quite a lot to finish the Beta 2 in the past few weeks, I really had to speed down & rest a bit, and thus I worked less last week.

Still, I managed to try out a menu design I had purchased a couple of months ago. As you can see in the screenshot above, the buttons look great, but it feels like they don’t integrate well with the 3D background. So maybe I’ll have to hire a 2D artist to create a more tailored solution for the menus.

Anyway, after that I started to integrate the creatures for the levels 7-12, the 3rd zone of the game. This zone will have 10 new creatures (not including variations) and 4 bosses. Integrating them means mostly grunt work to put them in the game, handling texture importation, animation setup and other boring stuff like that, but also the skill & ability settings. This one I do it in 2 steps ; 1st step, I just do something very quick, usually re-using existing abilities ; and then I’ll do the 2nd step later, a bit before or when I test the levels, adding abilities and their respective FX. It’s better for the creative process as it gives me time to think about what special stuff each new creature should be able to do.

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Hopefully Temporally Loading Screen

Already the 3rd Weekly Update !

Unity Roadblocks

So last week was spent on testing & tuning everything to build up the 2nd Beta of the game.

I quickly ran into a couple of roadblocks brought by Unity.

Unity is the game engine I’m using to create The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians. It’s a great engine at 80%, an ok engine at 15%, and the last 5% are “what the heck is that?!?”. So last week, a lot of my time has been wasted on the last 5%. Mainly, I ran into a limit that makes it impossible to have the whole dungeon active at the same time. I still can load it all in memory, but I have to activate only one part at once. Moreover, activating/deactivating parts is slow like hell.

So far, it was working ok, except for my save/load system, so I was forced to put a temporary loading where stuff is activated/deactivated till everything is ready for play & available for save. So now, the game takes nearly 20 seconds to load on my PC, instead of less than 5 seconds.

The good news is that Unity 5 should be released before Dungeon Guardians, and it’ll remove the limit that gave me headaches last week, which means I should be able to update and get back to a fast load time (else, we’ll get near of 1 minute when all the 20 levels will be there).

The other roadblock¹ I hit is that there’s no automatic way to save/load the current state of animation of the new Unity animation system. In Beta 1, I was still using the old one, but I partly moved the dungeon creatures to the new one as it offers some interesting features (mainly: reusing animations on different creatures). Anyway, I had to find some ruse to make the save/load work for it, and it ate some of my time as well.

Beta Testing

It’s official, Beta testing my levels take me much more time than planned, almost 1 full day of work per level, while playing normally requires around 1 hour per level. There’s always stuff to fix, small bugs, tuning to do, and boss fight to balance, so all in all, it’s pretty slow.

Moreover, I changed a bit the save/load system, so I had to restart a playthrough from the 1st level. Fortunately, the tuning needed for the 1st 4 levels wasn’t too big, as they didn’t suffer much from the changes since the 1st Beta.

Anyway, Beta 2 is all done and the result is pretty nice ! There are 8 levels now, and our party Toons get enough abilities & talents to make the gameplay feels more or less complete, so it’s getting pretty close of the final result (although there’s still a ton of new abilities & talents coming in next Betas, so the game will still get better!).

See you in next post for more details & screenshots about the Beta 2 as a whole !

1. more of an hiccup actually ↩

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Rain of Fire Burning Imperial Guards

Here we go with the 2nd weekly update !

So last week, I mostly worked on adding abilities & talents to our party members. You can see the new Elemental Mage ability in the picture above : the Rain of Fire. It’s a AoE spell, to deal with a whole group of enemies at once.

I also did a small re-haul of the talent system ; so far, it was close of WOTLK system, but I had 2 problems :

• when you select your 1st talent in a tree, you get a significant bonus that types right away your Toon ; for example, a health bonus for the Tank, or a damage bonus for the Dps ; as you could freely choose the 1st talent in other trees, it was possible to get 2 or 3 of these bonus easily
• the Kick ability of the Tank allows him to interrupt the current ability of his target (some abilities are unstoppable, though) ; it’s a very important ability, and you’ll have to use it in most important fights if you don’t want your Party to die ; the Warrior tree is divided in 3 specializations : Protector (tank), Man At Arms (dps), and Paladin (mostly dps, with a bit of tanking) ; so it was also possible for a warrior dps to get the Kick ability, and thus greatly unbalance the game

To avoid these 2 issues, I moved the Kick to be attributed when getting the 1st Talent of the Protector specialization, and now the 1st Talent of all the other Specializations is locked out once you have chosen your 1st Talent for your main Specialization, but you still can select Talents from other Specializations as soon as your get your 2nd Talent point, so it’s kind of a mix between WOTLK and Cataclysm systems.

Here a screenshot to illustrate all that :

Warrior Talent Tree (Work in Progress)

In bonus, you can get a sneak peak at the 2nd environment : the Abandoned Palace !

I also added the possibility to reroll (ie: reset) all your Talents, but it will consume 1 Reroll Point, and you’ll get 1 of these only every 4 Levels (or maybe even less).

So now, everything is done, I just need to test the 4 new levels and their deadly creatures, and I’ll be able to send the Beta 2 to the Beta Testers. Hopefully, it won’t take long, but for the Beta 1, I had to spend 1 week and half of tedious work to fix a bunch of things before every worked smoothly. This time, there’s less new game mechanisms, so it should be faster ; the main points will be to tune the Bosses fights to be sure they are challenging without being impossible to win !

I’ll post a series of screenshots of the Beta 2 when it’s done !

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