A Year of Work and it has Problems - Hex Game DevLog
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- Опубліковано 5 лип 2024
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I've been working on a low poly hex tile strategy game in Unity for the last year. I've built systems for procedural map generation, upgrades, tech trees, and enemy spawning and they all work. But the frame rate can plummet and the game is slow and boring. This indie game devlog video is all about the design changes and choices I made to (hopefully) fix both issues.
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Timestamps
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0:00 Intro
0:22 Sponsored Message: Nova UI
1:14 What's the game about?
3:13 Problem #1 - Low FPS
3:42 Looking for the cause
5:20 Problem #2 - It's slow...
6:08 Small tweaks = Big Changes
6:34 Smaller land mass
6:52 Better enemy spawning
7:46 A shift to base building
8:18 Is it fun?
9:21 If you made it this far!
#devlog #Unity3D #indiedeveloper - Ігри
One thing that many strategy games use to make the early game interesting is exploration - the fog of war totally obscures undiscovered areas, hiding potential goodies spawned throughout the world. It gives the player something engaging to do at a time when base building, management, and combat are undeveloped. While most of your world is unformed, there is still dashes of resources presumably scattered throughout that void (?) - you can potentially make use of that same fog of war system to further improve the early game perhaps. Also, the game is starting to look really interesting, keep at it!
Love this idea! I think you are totally right that it could help spice up the early game.
Design ideas to mull over:
1) Tie enemy spawn points to player expansion - have them occasionally revealed by player tile placements to make a risk/reward of expansion. Uncover a spawn point, and you'll debate if you should risk exploring further (each spawn point = more enemies next combat phase)
2) Make tiles a primary target for enemies. They could corrupt/destroy land, making it unusable for building on or expanding from (can't put tiles touching corrupted pieces). This would have lasting ramifications from battle, reinforcing the core loops of land management and expansion puzzles. Combat can also spread to several targets, requiring forward troops to put out fires away from defenses.
Awesome! Working on a hex generator myself, I love your art style
Very glad you are more unstuck - appreciate your content and wish you the best. You're very wise to put yourself into some weeks or turmoil by facing the truth :)
Nobody said inventing was easy and judgement is so easily clouded!
This game looks like fun.
Really, good job 🎮👏🏻😁
Looking good brother! Keep grindin!
you asked for ideas so: What if daytime was not real time, but instead would let the player take turns, or maybe just one turn. Buildings would take X turn(s) to build, resources would be gathered at X rate/turn, units can move X steps etc. Then when the player is done he can just press a button and it turns into night time. This way there is never any downtime.
one question, why you dont desactivate path finding once the enemies are pretty much on target. If the monsters are going to either destroy the tower or die. You could deactivate path finding once they are close enough to the target or hitting the target and only once they destroy it they get their pathfinding back and maybe not all at once.
Also what about desactivating some enemies collision between other enemies once you have that many enemies in the game. Maybe not all of them but for some, at least for the ones that are colliding close to other hundreds once they reach target.
Also maybe reducing the fidelity of their collision as once you have 100 or more enemies, maybe using one way collision or instead of a entire collision shape just some vertices, etc.
Incredible video! I am new into game dev and I am learning godot, so far having a lot of fun!
btw your game looks a lot of fun
Finding a solution that solves multiple problems is such a rewarding feeling as a gamedev. Thanks for sharing your struggles with the most dreaded problem all game devs face- making a game that isn't fun.
On the side, your game looks like it'll be really fun! Keeping an eye out.
I feel like so many times, I've had this experience. Totally jammed up. Only coming up with complicated solutions. What I really need is to see the problem from a different perspective. And you're right. Such a good feeling!
@@OneWheelStudio yeah you're right about that. For me personally, I tend to get tunnel visioned trying to make some idea or implementation work, but taking a step back and reassessing your design is def an important skill.
@@ZenryokuFGC So easy to get stuck. Felt like I almost needed to hit a wall before I could force that new perspective. Game dev is hard!
Wonder if a flocking behavior algorithm would work for better performance so you wouldn't need physics on the enemies.
Unless that's what your already doing?
Have been using Nova UI ever since you compared UI frameworks, and i love it!
Glad to hear your liking Nova! Such a good tool.
Implmenting or at least testing a flocking behavior is definitely on my list of things to explore and frankly learn more about. I've played with them just a bit and years ago. Right now each enemy unit is its own agent. Which is not awesome.
Game looking great!
Looking forward to more of your updates 🙂
How did you make the bloomy bullet impact effects? They look great!
I will admit that at least 75% of the blue laser bolt looking projectiles are from an asset pack. There projectile itself has 3 particle systems plus a point light and a trail renderer attached. The impact is a separate object again with multiple particles and a point light. Then to really make it pop I'm using some postprocessing with bloom enabled. It all adds up :)
This is the particle system asset: assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/particles/sci-fi-arsenal-60519?aid=1100lHSw
if you have used navmesh agent than maybe its because of obstacle avoidance property in that component. When large number of object collide with each other it may affect the performance.
It was both useful and helpful, thank you! When gauging fun, do you have trusted friends with blunt opinions to help give you perspective?
No good play testers at the moment. That stage is hopefully coming soon!
@@OneWheelStudio I'll playtest!
Game is looking cool
1500 draw calls isn't doing any favors to the performance either. I probably wouldn't use Animator components (I don't know if you are or not) and I'll try to batch them draw calls
For the pathfinding, just throwing some random ideas, maybe you don't need enemy-enemy collisions and you can get away with adding obstacles to your navmesh (maybe you'll need to subdivide your pathfinding nodes further, but it may be worth experimenting with. Encapsulate all the movement in the pathfinding system instead of having physics fight over and salvage the pathfinding behavior
The individually animated skinner mesh renderers is very much on my list of possible things to get rid of! From my profiling the physics engine was definitely the big hang up - which I think (but surprisely didn't test) is the agents trying to avoid each other. I added this to help the enemy spread out and not walk single file or just pile into one precise location. I think some flocking behavior might be a big win in this regard.
my fail RTS project had the same problem.
Apparently troops pathfinding is costy, and deserve a whole seperate engineering apart from the game...
i wonder how starcraft did their pathfindings...
Right! Interesting to think how pathfinding was done on such old machines.
Two wheel studio
JEREMY
?
Are you from Oregon?
I was born and raised there 😉
Now begs the question how a guy from South Africa can possibly know that. I don't know myself.
Impressed by your mental toughness and grit in managing technical and gameplay issues at the same time!!
The discussion of pathfinding for large numbers of enemies reminded me of this war story... maybe it will have someplace useful ideas.
ua-cam.com/video/S-VAL7Epn3o/v-deo.html