This Week in the Forest! #90 (Patreon)

WHOOPS, Super late weekly post! My bad lmao. Totally thought I posted this days ago.

OK SO HERES WHAT WE BEEN DOIN! Starting with A Word from Vixel!

8/22 weekly update:

Heya floofs! Working on the Android builds has shown us some performance bottlenecks we need to improve! Long load times, hot phones, and low framerates being common issues! :O

Last week I worked on graphics optimization in our Upgrade project, which'll help the game run smoother in later builds (on both Desktops and Android) whenever we're able to switch over to that project. These optimizations involved techniques I learned a few months ago, going texture by texture and doing these steps:

- Crop the edges to get rid of extra transparency.

- Extend the edges with transparency to make the texture a square and dimensions a power-of-two. (1024x1024, 2048x2048 etc)

- For the biggest textures, subdivide them into perfect squares. (A micro optimization that gives back a few FPS.)

- Tell Unity to use the highest possible compression. (This requires squared & power-of-two textures.)

- Realign any broken textures in the game world.

Big textures use more graphics memory, make the download size bigger for monthly builds, and have some effect on framerate. In Central Forest, for example, we have four large textures:

6.9 MB background

9.1 MB shadows

9.1 MB treetops 

64. MB river

= 89.1 MB total

And a bunch of smaller textures that don't matter as much. Following the process to optimize these textures, we now have:

4.0 MB background

4.0 MB shadows

4.0 MB treetops 

4.0 MB river 

= 16.0 MB total

This greatly reduces the amount of graphics memory and disk space needed to run the game! I'll finish the texture optimizations for the whole game, then do another layer of optimizations to make our slowest code run smoother.

I also did some Android touch input troubleshooting. The DPad goes unresponsive when spamming touches on the right of the screen, such as when playing the Plant minigame. I'll tackle that bug this week, as well as script the remaining content for our August monthly build!

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Whew! Lotsa stuff there!

On my end, I've been sketching out this month's voted content which features Rascal, Bucky and some Bears!

As I'm roughing it out, it looks like it'll be another multi-feature one :O! 2 Different tracks, but you could select a 3rd option which is just both right after the other!

Part of it wrote itself? but also because I did some thumbnails for what might be cool, and 2 sequences stood out to me. Maybe a 3rd bonus image, not sure xD

On one hand it's a good idea to cram a buncha content into a game, but on the other hand, we risk over shadowing other content. Like our earlier "dates/gossip" images pale in comparison xD! SO, the solution is to either pull the punches a bit, or maybe consider upgrading some previous content? 

This is a form of feature creep, but it's more like, production/quality creep. It's not a BAD problem to have per se, but as a project grows/exists for a long time, so does the creators and vision. I think it just happens?

I haven't decided how particularly to solve this problem, for now, I'll try not to worry about it, and if we end up with some bloated content at the later parts of the game, I don't think that's exactly a "bad problem" to have haha.

But yeah, writing and drawing on my end!

I believe we have some builds that'll be coming out pretty soon, so keep an eye out!

That's all for this week! See ya guys next week!