Long time no update! Oops…
It has been a while since my last dev update, super sorry for the silence! In May, I went on holiday to Poland and Greece, and I had a really good time 🌞
Since returning, I’ve been trying to get back into my typical routine again. Most of my work on Project Stormwatch has been very hush hush behind the scenes. Lots of concepting, planning, narrative and internal bits and pieces.
With all of that said, v0.0.3a is now out! And its a biggg update focused on optimizations and bug fixes!
⚔️ Demo Battle Returns!
This build has the demo battles in them again! The demo battles were taken out of the previous builds due to performance reasons, but now the map is back! Demo battles are way better than they were at the GDLX showcase demo!
They have been heavily optimized, and should feel much smoother during gameplay.
🐜 Softlock Fixes
Some major AI bugs that caused units to get stuck when surrounded, which softlocked the entire enemy phase, has been fixed! I’m super glad to have this sorted now, as during public demos this would be a pain point for players ruining their first impressions and experience with the game.
Theres also a few speculative bug fixes in there for the critical hit calculations making it possible for a unit to trigger a critical hit with 0% crit chance. If you still see 0% crits happening, please report it!
👀 Changelog Board
I’ve added a changelog board to the explore mode! This is a really quick first-pass, but now you can read all the latest changes in-game! Not all the functionality I want for this is in yet, so to close this popup once it is open you just need to walk your character away from the glowing circle.
📖 Looking For a UI Artist!
I’m currently on the look out for a UI artist to commission to help me out with concepting screens for this game! If you know anyone, please get in touch.
❓ Question
What do you personally think is the most important part of a smooth running game? The FPS? Controller responsiveness? Or snappy UI and menus?
Please comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts! Let me know where I should focus my performance improvements next.
🎮 Download Demo v0.0.3a
Download Project Stormwatch v0.0.3a Bug Report Form Manual
✏️ Changelog
- Fixed: [MAJOR] AI units used to get stuck when surrounded causing a soft-lock, this has been fixed now.
- Fixed: [MAJOR] Speculative fixes for critical hits triggering at 0% chance. If you see any 0% crits triggering, please let me know.
- Updated: Changed some post processing to update the depth of field in explore mode.
- Added: A changelog board which users can walk to in explore mode (Hi, you’re here!)
- Fixed: There was a bug where the dungeon battle cam would be in a fixed position and not move to the left or right dynamic battle camera. There was some things unassigned which fixed this issue.
- Optimized: Added a tween bootstrapper to set the tween capacity to a lower number during boot.
- Optimized: Cached unit materials in Awake to reduce runtime allocation. Further reduced calls during update to various things within the UnitManager
- Optimized: Reduced the frequency of calls to UpdateStoodUnit within the node manager
- Optimized: Updated tween animatons for the cursor to restart and pause animations
- Refactored: Cleaned up some camera code and added extra checks
- Updated: Demo Battle Scene small changes
- Added: [MAJOR] Demo battle scene has been put back into the demo mode
- Updated: Added more FPS debug info. Added an average FPS display and colours to indicate performance (green = good, yellow = average, red = bad)
- Optimized: Disabled some cameras when not being used
- Fixed: Default node selection bug fix
- Optimized: [MAJOR] Grid Updates (optimizations to the active node selection update function & setting tween capacity for selection tweening. Not updating or refreshing the cursor visuals if its not active)
- Optimized: Got rid of unneeded magica cloth instances in units (less physics simulations at runtime)
- Added: a FPS display as I’m beginning to optimize the game