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[Kalentan]

Made my first Elf and their walking animation.

First character I've made that doesn't have a robe and just pants. Methinks I will need to go back to the drawing board with the walking animation. Does sort of look like their just crossing their legs.

My other worry is that... I wonder if these sprites that I'm making are too much like other sprites. I did use the basis of RPG Maker for some of it but haven't looked much at the RPG Maker sprites for inspiration outside the original layout.

 

[frozenmeatpopsicle]

More a fan game than an indie game, but here's a little side project I've been working on, on and off for a while now. Basically I've been recreating the restaurant from Five Nights at Freddy's as accurately as I can, so one could walk around and explore it in VR. Still a WIP, but it's nearly complete.

I know FNaF is far from everyone's cup of tea, but if anyone's interested, you can check it out here. A HTC Vive is required to play it, but there's a video and some screenshots for those that don't have access to a VR headset.

 

[SouSouRocket]

Haha, thanks :-D If all else fails... I'm hoping it'll make a somewhat decent demo reel to crawl my way into an animation job somewhere? I'm only hoping enemies+bosses won't double the amount of work ahead, though I'm definitely planning to make them easier to make... however that happens!



I'm sorry to hear that, though I can't say I'm actually that surprised, the visual novel genre being rather traditionally PC/portable, in addition to being super niche, right? Though hopefully, you're paving the way for some discovery of the genre for a larger audience on home consoles!

I mean hey, I'd hire ya! 8'D

Yeah VNs are quite niche, so I'm not surprised necessarily... it was just a bit odd how many people I talked to there didn't seem to be super hardcore gamers. My expectation was that people will have heard of them whether or not they actually play them, but a lot of people thought I was promoting a graphic novel which was probably compounded by the pretty art demo our artist was doing.

But yeah my thought on VNs is that there are a lot of people out there who just don't know they might like them yet. Even I was put off by the idea of a "dating sim" or a "romance game" before I'd ever played one because I had some stupid ideas about what they must be like, or some kind of internalized shame about romance probably. But I see so many people who are into the character-driven aspect of Bioware games, the romance and friendships and progression of those relationships over time and I think those are the people who could enjoy this too. After all, that was really my gateway into these games--I started an otome game after I'd finished Mass Effect and Dragon Age and had a sort of void in my life lol

 

[MrHoot]

i've seen VN games do pretty good in some conventions but yeah it does need a little extra push to get people engaged, as it's typically harder to get into on a convention floor. People are attracted to the bright, colourful and/or loud. Hence if you don't have an immediate hook it'll leave people a bit puzzled.

TGS has a good VN scene understandably but you gotta have your game translated for it since it's gonna be text heavy. I haven't seen many at Gamescom. At PAX, the most popular one was SUDA's remaster of the silver case (technically not really a VN but it comes close). And usually they can do pretty damn well at anime cons. But usually you'll want maybe to have some merch available showing some of the key characters or the setting.

I've seen people with VN games actually showcasing sometimes in the fanzine area where they can also sell said merch.

But I speak a bit out of line, i've never marketed or showcased a VN game so I guess it's really up to experimentation and finding ways to catch the eye ^^

 

[Kalentan]

A test screenshot of the environment I'm working on. I think I will work on my own tree sprites next, although I think this does convey the idea of the trees overlapping with the wall. To give a sense that it's below. Will probably add a shadow of the bridge as well.

Edit: Here it is with the bridge having the same tiles and the shadow.

 

[DemonNite]

Eeeeeek, so creepy @___@ Nicely done! So to avoid her you want to be a little bit less most of the time?


We've just returned from our first PAX as a company, which was fun and great, but it was sort of mixed for us I feel. We showed VEV and got some great response and a lot of people lining up to play it (I imagine because it's PSVR), but we also went out there to show our visual novel and that half got a lot more ????? from folks. I suspect I might have better luck promoting that particular game at an anime con as that's a bit more their demographic. People liked the artwork but a lot of the time our conversations went like this:

Them: What's this?

Me: Are you familiar with visual novels?

Them: No.

Me: *explains, then...* Do you have a PS4?

Them: No.

Me: Ah, okay.

Not really what I was expecting from PAX, lol. We gave out a lot of pins which was nice, but I suspect we got more benefit out of announcing we'd be there than our actual presence at the show itself (one of our actors is quite popular online so he'd RT our announcements). We did do a lot of theme business there though so... still a success lol. Just learned a lot. There was another visual novel there as well and they seemed to have the same experience but theirs was playable so they have an easier time showing people I suppose.

Welcome back. I would love to goto PAX one day. Not sure how but maybe one day I'll make it!

As for the girl in my game and how to avoid her, stay in the light to keep your sanity in check. Light is sparse in the dungeons so look for candles and light it to have temporary light with you. You can throw out candles to also create light spots but these also make noise so beware. Lastly, if she is aware of you don't look at her and just run away and find a hiding place such us under a bed, in water or a cupboard etc...

 

[missile]

This is the main antagonist to be afraid of in the dungeons. Easily gets angry and pretty deadly if you are found. Right now she can be alerted by noises you make and appears when your sanity is High. Sanity is affected by you staying in the shadows too long.

The chamber room is where she sleeps but also the place you need to get to so it's gonna be tough.

I see. Like an Alien.



Nothing entirely new but still;

 

[AusRoachman]

I am currently doing an art overhaul on one of my turn based game prototypes

I am also revamping the gameplay to make it more of a mix of tower defense and a traditional turn based rts game. Alot more variety of units and towers and.

Focus on building towers for defense, and units to attack the other teams base

 

[DemonNite]

I see. Like an Alien.



Nothing entirely new but still;

Indeed I've been analysing Alien a lot recently.

Will you be trying any render textures (for mirrors, portals etc...) down the line? That will probably open up some crazy stuff

 

[DemonNite]

Finished creating her sleeping chamber room... until another idea pops up

 

[missile]

Finished creating her sleeping chamber room... until another idea pops up

Looks frightening! xD You are doing the game fully on your own? Not bad!

Indeed I've been analysing Alien a lot recently.

Will you be trying any render textures (for mirrors, portals etc...) down the line? That will probably open up some crazy stuff

Hah, that was exactly what kept me awake two days ago, also realizing that I
need a much more flexible texture system to do so yet at the same time it gets
more and more complex and computationally demanding. Standard mapping really
has some computation advantage, but currently I'm experimenting with a system
where I can set up any polygon as a projective plane being able to project
whatever is needed. That way the term texture becomes somewhat meaningless for
it becomes something like projecting worlds within worlds.

Anyhow, what I want to realize in my game is sort of some cool transitions
between maps/levels/areas where you race towards a portal seeing the world
behind yet with the portal still being a part of the world you are currently
in. Such effects are esp. cool when the whole sky changes, getting the feeling
going into/approaching another world. Crazy stuff, you name it. Will see.

 

[SouSouRocket]

i've seen VN games do pretty good in some conventions but yeah it does need a little extra push to get people engaged, as it's typically harder to get into on a convention floor. People are attracted to the bright, colourful and/or loud. Hence if you don't have an immediate hook it'll leave people a bit puzzled.

TGS has a good VN scene understandably but you gotta have your game translated for it since it's gonna be text heavy. I haven't seen many at Gamescom. At PAX, the most popular one was SUDA's remaster of the silver case (technically not really a VN but it comes close). And usually they can do pretty damn well at anime cons. But usually you'll want maybe to have some merch available showing some of the key characters or the setting.

I've seen people with VN games actually showcasing sometimes in the fanzine area where they can also sell said merch.

But I speak a bit out of line, i've never marketed or showcased a VN game so I guess it's really up to experimentation and finding ways to catch the eye ^^

Yeah we have these cute pins with the characters on them and people seem to love free pins so I'm hoping if we try it again at an anime con we might accomplish a bit more than just giving people pretty swag lol. 8D

 

[Kalentan]

While I'm not 100% decided. (Won't be for a while).

I think this might be my main character, at least one of these.
(Note: Unless it's not clear, it's supposed to be a skull on the head)

Edit:

Tried to combine two of them in the walking animation.

Existing on another plane of existence, the Celestial Academy sits in a mountainous forest of endless snow. It is forever night and the stars are
always in the sky. It is where people, human or otherwise from around the galaxy, go to when they wish to learn how to hone their Aura.

Hana is from the world of Lyrii and is the 15th Daughter of the Priestess of Amurdun. Unlike her siblings, Hana yearns for the freedom to leave
the family behind and see the world for herself. When a mysterious being appears, he offers her the chance to escape and thus she finds herself
at the Celestial Academy.

There she learns that she is the holder of the Grey Aura, a very rare type of Aura that allows the user to manifest their aura in any way they see
fit rather than being stuck with the one determined at birth by the Aura's color.

I like the design and I think her backstory could be fairly interesting to the story.

The whole idea of the game is you will play out a year of this school but your classes you will determine at the start based on what elements you wish to learn. You get to then see those mini-stories play out in those classes. However there is an overarching story, with dungeons and such, that takes place outside the classes.

I'm also thinking that the game will use a "partner" system rather than a full on party. Where you will only go into a dungeon with 1 other individual and it will use that to play up the ability to cooperate spells and such.

 

[Timeaisis]

New mechanic I'm working on...

The middle dude is basically an NPC that reacts to either player. If you miss too many times when he's alerted your way, he shoots ya dead.

Also, I've had a problem in playtests where players don't initially know which side they are on (right or left) until the end of the first room (as they randomly just fire off everywhere and discover which player they represent) so I've put in kind of a veiled attempt at confirming which side your own: color selection!

In the future those will be actually different, discrete sprites. But for now, good enough.

 

[tamaster92]

Super duper early prototype of hover loot whatever game is now around 60% done

Should have more to shower later this week, wanna get a very core gameplay loop finished to show off.

Some of it isn't 'functioning' (menus that don't do anything etc) but it's getting there Aim is to have a basic greybox level with enemies, a boss and stuff to loot

 

[neko.works]

Its super cool really. The curves really look good and love when we can see one coming in the distance. However, I would need much more verticality. There's no enough hills of different heights. Look at some huge cool ones that were in some old school games like Top Gear 2 SNES or again Outrunners. Your game needs that

Thanks! About the verticality, my target was something similar to Super Hang-On rather than Outrun, but yes, it might be too light indeed -.-

Looking super slick!

Hey, that looks much better!

Thanks guys

The game is currently 50% off on Steam. I've tried for my first time the visibility rounds with the recent update, and I'm having a view to click conversion of about 4.5% ... Sounds pretty low. Can you please share your numbers if you have experienced with visibility rounds before?

 

[Kalentan]

Making my intro. Early stages of the tileset.

 

[DemonNite]

Looks frightening! xD You are doing the game fully on your own? Not bad!



Hah, that was exactly what kept me awake two days ago, also realizing that I
need a much more flexible texture system to do so yet at the same time it gets
more and more complex and computationally demanding. Standard mapping really
has some computation advantage, but currently I'm experimenting with a system
where I can set up any polygon as a projective plane being able to project
whatever is needed. That way the term texture becomes somewhat meaningless for
it becomes something like projecting worlds within worlds.

Anyhow, what I want to realize in my game is sort of some cool transitions
between maps/levels/areas where you race towards a portal seeing the world
behind yet with the portal still being a part of the world you are currently
in. Such effects are esp. cool when the whole sky changes, getting the feeling
going into/approaching another world. Crazy stuff, you name it. Will see.

Yeah working alone much like yourself I'm assuming?

Let's be honest, it's better this way

 

[missile]

Yeah working alone much like yourself I'm assuming?

Let's be honest, it's better this way

 

[GroundCombo]

My periodic "make the coding environment great again" urge manifested itself. I've been using Sublime Text with Unity, because VSCode doesn't seem configurable or comfortable enough for me and friends don't let friends use MonoDevelop. It's been pretty good, but having dozens of files open with a lot of plugins made it sluggish after a while and Sublime's macro support is lacking.

So I gave good old Emacs a shot to see how it fares with C# these days. A couple of days of tinkering, add omnisharp-emacs and an assortment of other packages, and now it autocompletes like a beast. It might not do live debugging or some other fancy tricks IDEs do these days (looking forward to Unity's REST API for editors), but I can jump to references and usages and my workflow is faster and more comfortable because I have 25+ years of Emacs muscle memory. Happy.

 

[Pehesse]

Bit of a random question, but does anyone have any thoughts or references regarding music composition?

I'm always annoyed at my lack of vocabulary and understanding when discussing music with composers, and eventually I'd love to at least be able to rough out ideas to have a better base of discussion and iteration... but I have no idea where to start, both in terms of tools to use to rough out music (I know there are "chiptune maker" software out there, but how does one go about making different sound textures?) and in terms of actually thinking and planning the composition itself, apart from going "oo that sounds nice" (I realize this is a bit of a wide question and a possible answer could be "learn music theory", but I'd like to know if there are more pointed answers as well).

If anyone has any help to offer on the matter, I'd greatly appreciate it, thanks

 

[anteevy]

Bit of a random question, but does anyone have any thoughts or references regarding music composition?

I'm always annoyed at my lack of vocabulary and understanding when discussing music with composers, and eventually I'd love to at least be able to rough out ideas to have a better base of discussion and iteration... but I have no idea where to start, both in terms of tools to use to rough out music (I know there are "chiptune maker" software out there, but how does one go about making different sound textures?) and in terms of actually thinking and planning the composition itself, apart from going "oo that sounds nice" (I realize this is a bit of a wide question and a possible answer could be "learn music theory", but I'd like to know if there are more pointed answers as well).

If anyone has any help to offer on the matter, I'd greatly appreciate it, thanks

I always try to give my composer as much freedom as possible, so I don't really need the deepest understanding of music creation. I usually just describe what feelings it should convey and send some examples from movies & games. For my next game I'm actually writing the design doc with the sample tracks he composed for it in mind. As it's a music game (again), I'm trying to capture the feeling of you being part of that music if it makes any sense. Not sure if that answered your question at all though...

The hard part (that especially applies to games with dynamic music) is to get the structure right. Different layers, time markers, modules, loops, transitions and stuff. But that's mostly technical stuff and not part of the actual creative music creation.

 

[Pehesse]

I always try to give my composer as much freedom as possible, so I don't really need the deepest understanding of music creation. I usually just describe what feelings it should convey and send some examples from movies & games. For my next game I'm actually writing the design doc with the sample tracks he composed for it in mind. As it's a music game (again), I'm trying to capture the feeling of you being part of that music if it makes any sense. Not sure if that answered your question at all though...

The hard part (that especially applies to games with dynamic music) is to get the structure right. Different layers, time markers, modules, loops, transitions and stuff. But that's mostly technical stuff and not part of the actual creative music creation.

Thanks! Though indeed, that doesn't really answer my questionn as that's what I've been doing so far as well (stay as much out of their way as possible and give emotional indications+refs), but I get the distinct feeling (+feedback) it's sometimes *too much* freedom and I should narrow it more somehow.

Plus, I'll admit my question also aims at eventually learning how to do it by myself without relying on someone else's help :-D

 

[MrHoot]

Bit of a random question, but does anyone have any thoughts or references regarding music composition?

I'm always annoyed at my lack of vocabulary and understanding when discussing music with composers, and eventually I'd love to at least be able to rough out ideas to have a better base of discussion and iteration... but I have no idea where to start, both in terms of tools to use to rough out music (I know there are "chiptune maker" software out there, but how does one go about making different sound textures?) and in terms of actually thinking and planning the composition itself, apart from going "oo that sounds nice" (I realize this is a bit of a wide question and a possible answer could be "learn music theory", but I'd like to know if there are more pointed answers as well).

If anyone has any help to offer on the matter, I'd greatly appreciate it, thanks

Here's a tweet I remembered from a sound engineer which I found pretty helpful

https://twitter.com/MaizeWallin/status/826269838624448512

 

[Pehesse]

Here's a tweet I remembered from a sound engineer which I found pretty helpful

https://twitter.com/MaizeWallin/status/826269838624448512

Handy reference sheet, thanks a lot! If all else fails, I can fall back to that

 

[MrHoot]

Also heyo, Devblog number 2 is here for helvetii

https://kevpec.com/2017/02/07/helvetii-dev-blog-2-forever-games/

I feel like I didn't go as in depth i wanted to (I didn't say much on enemy design although it wasn't really the point), but I also didn't want to overextend. I'm still anxious as hell to lay out so much so it's a learning process (also english isn't my first language, after all).

 

[MikeHaggar]

Developer here. Looking for artist(s) and/or Designer(s) to team up with and develop something cool. Interested in virtually all platforms. Would prefer to work with Unity at this point. I have a Comp Sci degree and work as a developer in the business world for my day job. I have previous game development experience and plenty of time/motivation to put into a project. Very open to ideas/concepts. PM me if interested

 

[Timeaisis]

This new mechanic got a little out of hand lol. Not sure if it will be in the final, but I'm at the add random designs I have thoughts about at 3 in the morning stage of the project aka my favorite part.

 

[Dlink16]

Thanks ya'll ! I can't wait to experiment more with actuals. There's some fantastic stuff I could do with lighting



Sprite Dlight is easily the best solution. And yeah it's close to "one click" (well you still have to adjust in the program for ideal settings but yeah, it takes almost no time =p)

I experimented basically with three different methods to get to this. I first tried using the normal maps generated by the nvidia plugin in photoshop but it does almost nothing really. It will only give volume on things you've shaded yourself so it won't have that full 3d volume effect.

Crazy bump also isn't really adapted, it's better for 3D than 2d and the normals it generates are really messy

Then you have spritelamp which is the first thing I found. Technically it's capable but it basically requires you to draw your shading yourself. It took such a ridiculous amount of time I didn't bother.

Sprite Dlight is honestly the best option. Now it doesn't handle really large files well due to the amount of calculating power, but you can resize 4096x textures to 2048 and then boost them up once it's done since for normals it's not that important. It also generates great specular maps and depth. Honestly, probably the best tool to have if you wanna do "fake 3d in 2d" style with good bump mapping.

Plus it's rather cheap and still updated (latest update from december)

Played around with a couple different options recently and found Quixel's NDO to be great as it integrates directly in Photoshop so you can use all of the PS tools to create and improve the normal map. Of course if you're not using PS it's not much use.

 

[Kalentan]

Slightly more updated rainy scene.

Spoiler

I love rain.

 

[MimiMe]

hi folks,
so this is my first post, now that my account got finaly validated!
Aloha to everyone and I am glad to be here.

Today I finished my online leaderboard implementation and it was kind of a pain in the %$& for the last week(s). At first I went for Steam Leaderboards in UE4 (while I am only doing blueprints - please dont hit me now) and after creating a few blueprints via c++ I ditched it, as I would have to do this for every plattform.

In the end I decided to go with a service and I'd like to know how you handle it and on what engine you are on. I feel like I am the only one on this planet who had so many problems getting online leaderboards to work.


Sitting here with a beer in hand and finaly doing the stuff that I like again without doing c++ stuff of which I don't have a clue ^^


cheers
mimi

 

[superNESjoe]

Popping in to let all you beautiful people know that my game, Super GunWorld 2, is now available on PlayStation 4. Also shouts of encouragement that even though being stuck face first in development can be a struggle, the end of the road is awesome!

 

[ZServ]

If y'all could fill out this survey on the presentation of loot in games like Borderlands and Diablo, that'd be swell. Specifically, it covers the idea of how Borderlands obscures what the abilities on items are, where as Diablo will flat out tell you what it does.

Here's a link!

 

[_Rob_]

Popping in to let all you beautiful people know that my game, Super GunWorld 2, is now available on PlayStation 4. Also shouts of encouragement that even though being stuck face first in development can be a struggle, the end of the road is awesome!

Congratulations! I can only imagine how strange it feels to be "done", fingers crossed it sells well for you

 

[FloatingDivider]

Hello game development brodudemans I need some help because I'm a serious scrub who has no idea what he's doing. Lately I've been messing around with unity/blender because I'm hot for videogames, and I'd like to try making some.
But I'm also a scrub with at best a few dozen hours of experience in unity/blender so I figured I should follow some tutorials. I wanted to mess around with Mecanim, because I'm hot for moving characters, but I wanted to do it without using the standard assets because they're no fun.
So I followed a tutorial to get a simple humanoid modeled and rigged up. Which I thought would be well within my skill level considering I once finished the ball game tutorial and half of the blenderella dvd. But it appears I was wrong because I cocked it up like a half mast rooster(?), and I'm trying to figure out what I did wrong. Unfortunately these warning messages are vague and my google-fu has abandoned me so I'm going to ask you guys for some help.

Basically I imported my character into Unity and the toes are rotated 90 degrees in the x-axis..
Blender:

Unity:

Now I know from prior fucking around a year or two ago that blender uses a different coordinate system which used to shit in my lunch all the time. But it seems like Unity automatically adjusts for it now which is great?. But I think somehow my toebone is super messed up. I've tried fixing it by re-applying all of the scale/location/transforms or whatever in blender using the ctrl+a menu but that has done nothing.

Now I could go back to my meticulously made save file prior to it fucking up but I'd have to redo like 20 animations I made to mess about with before noticing it didn't import properly.

But I'd also learn nothing from my mistakes so if you guys know what I might have messed up I'd appreciate the help. If it helps this is the video where I probably made a mistake, I'm assuming it's something about the addition of the toe bone that I messed up but I've gone over that video like 5 times and I can't figure out what I messed up.

 

[tamaster92]

First gameplay prototype finished

Lots more to do before its a finished full prototype but the core gameplay is there now!

(warning I suck at my own game)

Keep note of the abilities being used, noticed by the fact that they start recharging

sphere pickups are health, cube pickups are weapons, but currently just upgrade your gun

 

[DemonNite]

Finally got it working and she can now jump out of ceiling holes. She can sometimes jump from holes further away and not be aware of you or you can be unlucky and happen to be close enough to alert her.

Having a candle lit will keep her away as long as your sanity isn't cracked yet (as shown by the red cross that fills in the top left)

 

[Minamu]

Can someone help me understand draw calls and performance in my unity game? :/ Take a look at this picture and you'll see what the game looks like in the editor:

http://i.imgur.com/tfgbbTX.png

Apparently, I have over 600 draw calls and all I'm using are cubes! That seems like a ton of calls to me. Is it really all that important in a game of this tiny scale to use a texture atlas? Every single piece of geometry that is not a character (most of which are just 8 verts each) is using the very same texture material, a standard gray color, nothing fancy at all. The material files for the players' colors are about 3kB each.

As you can see in the bottom left, I'm using a lot of texture memory, over 115 MB and I don't understand why :lol The reason I'm asking is because pretty much as soon as I look into the center of the levels, my frame rate drops to half, about 30. I've gone over every setting I can think of, and while I don't think it's the draw calls per se, but instead having dynamic lights and shadows all over, I can't figure out the bottleneck. It's difficult to see but I'm using the built-in fog system to make the distance appear blacker, but that doesn't seem to bog down the game all that much either. I have like 5 textures in the map, and never more than, let's say, 10 (that I've created anyway) in total. As far as I know, my occlusion settings are fine, I've also gone over every single object for excessive verts and backfaces. Granted, my lights are not baked at all, but I only around 20 of them (and they should occlude behind objects). The geometry is marked as static so it should be batching.

Could my compression settings be bad? My skybox is apparently fairly large, several MBs actually, could that be an issue?

My PC ain't exactly fresh, it's an old Core 2 Duo, 4GB ram and a Radeon 4870, but still, it's cubes! :lol The game is running better on more modern hardware of course, but to me, this should run on a toaster, if not for the shadows. My graphics card only has 1GB ram I think but this whole game could fit inside that memory 50 times over.

Edit: Seems that forward rendering ups the tri count massively depending on the number of lights you have and that counts toward draw calls. Still, I'd like to reduce this if it would help performance.

 

[JeffG]

Can someone help me understand draw calls and performance in my unity game? :/ Take a look at this picture and you'll see what the game looks like in the editor:

Here is an article that is pretty good overview

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/how-to-plan-optimizations-with-unity

 

[DemonNite]

Can someone help me understand draw calls and performance in my unity game? :/ Take a look at this picture and you'll see what the game looks like in the editor:

http://i.imgur.com/tfgbbTX.png

Apparently, I have over 600 draw calls and all I'm using are cubes! That seems like a ton of calls to me. Is it really all that important in a game of this tiny scale to use a texture atlas? Every single piece of geometry that is not a character (most of which are just 8 verts each) is using the very same texture material, a standard gray color, nothing fancy at all. The material files for the players' colors are about 3kB each.

As you can see in the bottom left, I'm using a lot of texture memory, over 115 MB and I don't understand why :lol The reason I'm asking is because pretty much as soon as I look into the center of the levels, my frame rate drops to half, about 30. I've gone over every setting I can think of, and while I don't think it's the draw calls per se, but instead having dynamic lights and shadows all over, I can't figure out the bottleneck. It's difficult to see but I'm using the built-in fog system to make the distance appear blacker, but that doesn't seem to bog down the game all that much either. I have like 5 textures in the map, and never more than, let's say, 10 (that I've created anyway) in total. As far as I know, my occlusion settings are fine, I've also gone over every single object for excessive verts and backfaces. Granted, my lights are not baked at all, but I only around 20 of them (and they should occlude behind objects). The geometry is marked as static so it should be batching.

Could my compression settings be bad? My skybox is apparently fairly large, several MBs actually, could that be an issue?

My PC ain't exactly fresh, it's an old Core 2 Duo, 4GB ram and a Radeon 4870, but still, it's cubes! :lol The game is running better on more modern hardware of course, but to me, this should run on a toaster, if not for the shadows. My graphics card only has 1GB ram I think but this whole game could fit inside that memory 50 times over.

Edit: Seems that forward rendering ups the tri count massively depending on the number of lights you have and that counts toward draw calls. Still, I'd like to reduce this if it would help performance.

Your dynamic lights are creating extra draw calls on the same materials used and shadows add on that too I believe. Another thing to make sure if you haven't is allow for dynamic batching of objects and make sure all those cubes are the same including the scale.

Lastly, I remember reading somewhere that if your framerate is fine don't worry too much about the draw calls

 

[Makai]

The primary optimization for Unity is reducing heap allocations. Use more structs - use less classes and MonoBehaviours.

 

[wwm0nkey]

Just bought Amplify Shader from the asset store...LOVE this thing! Anyone else been using it?

 

[timetokill]

Just bought Amplify Shader from the asset store...LOVE this thing! Anyone else been using it?

I have it on my wishlist. What do you like about it?

 

[wwm0nkey]

I have it on my wishlist. What do you like about it?

I got it for $30 *its $50 now, but its pretty easy to use, I just didn't want to manually code shaders and being able to do it visually and seeing live updates in the game is sooooo nice.

I am working on a LED shader + testing out Unity's new video option, need a more seamless and higher res texture for the screen but here's what I got in like a day

It's playing a video on the material while the shader is doing its thing.

 

[Kalentan]

Another updated scene with grass and slightly altered player model.

I guess I should ask... If it isn't evident from the scene, the character pixel resolution is different then the environment. So my question is... Is that okay? Or should I go back in and redo all of the environment art to match it?

 

[Jobbs]

I'm working on a new in-game pop up menu with status screen.

This type of work isn't particularly a strongsuit of mine, but I think it's getting close to where I can live with it.

Mockup: http://i.imgur.com/zPAA2Vz.png

I plan to have some animated elements like the pink art will appear glowy and maybe flickering.

Feedback/suggestions are welcome.

 

[electroflame]

The primary optimization for Unity is reducing heap allocations. Use more structs - use less classes and MonoBehaviours.

Depending on how heavily someone relies on the Unity Editor (mainly for Inspecting stuff) I'm afraid that this is terrible advice. Structs aren't serialized the same as fully-fledged classes and MonoBehaviours, so their data can be lost or messed up when serialized/deserialized in the Editor.

If the data only exists at runtime (for example, I use structs all the time for my event system) that's great. They'll absolutely be better, as they won't be adding extra Garbage Collector pressure.

But before anyone gets to that point, I'd wager there are many, many other optimizations they could do, before delving into converting classes to structs. Due to their fundamental differences, a "quick" conversion can quickly turn into a mess (especially with how Unity handles serialization differently).

I'm working on a new in-game pop up menu with status screen.

This type of work isn't particularly a strongsuit of mine, but I think it's getting close to where I can live with it.

Mockup: http://i.imgur.com/zPAA2Vz.png

I plan to have some animated elements like the pink art will appear glowy and maybe flickering.

Feedback/suggestions are welcome.

Looks pretty slick, I like it. Having the pink art glow/flicker sounds pretty good (or combine the two effects, maybe?).
I'd suggest making the text option you have selected be a different color, in addition to having the selector next to it. It'd make it easier to tell what you're on at-a-glance.

 

[timetokill]

I got it for $30 *its $50 now, but its pretty easy to use, I just didn't want to manually code shaders and being able to do it visually and seeing live updates in the game is sooooo nice.

I am working on a LED shader + testing out Unity's new video option, need a more seamless and higher res texture for the screen but here's what I got in like a day

It's playing a video on the material while the shader is doing its thing.

Very cool! I tried messing with Shader Forge a bit, but didn't quite get results I wanted.

 

[timetokill]

Another updated scene with grass and slightly altered player model.

I guess I should ask... If it isn't evident from the scene, the character pixel resolution is different then the environment. So my question is... Is that okay? Or should I go back in and redo all of the environment art to match it?

Anything is okay if it's okay with you.

If you're worried about pleasing purists then you'll make things unnecessarily hard on yourself. Just making the thing is hard enough.

 

[DemonNite]

I'm working on a new in-game pop up menu with status screen.

This type of work isn't particularly a strongsuit of mine, but I think it's getting close to where I can live with it.

Mockup: http://i.imgur.com/zPAA2Vz.png

I plan to have some animated elements like the pink art will appear glowy and maybe flickering.

Feedback/suggestions are welcome.

Looks good

I would say the font size is a little on the small size for decent usability especially the pink text on black making it more problematic. Playing this on a TV might be troublesome.