The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians | 3rd Weekly Update : Unity Roadblocks & Beta Testing

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 !