Entry #11 - Performance, polish, professions and playtest

Performance

Lately I've spent a looot of time on making 2 first levels a bit better. Adding foliage, polishing landscapes etc. It also highlighted a very serious issue: performance. I had to upgrade UE version as it had some fatal bugs, started testing things and realised that 15fps might not satisfy most of the players. I've spent ~2-3 weeks focusing solely on profiling, optimizing and searching for possible culprits. Well, It's much better now, but I still can't find answers to some issues. It seems that ue is just poorly suited for making 3D strategy games with top down view, fast moving camera and zoom. At least I got to the point of being able to smoothly play in cooked build.

Polish

Maps look much better now, there is more details, foliage, better structure etc. It was necessary to do this before the announcement as I need some decent quality screenshots, gameplay trailer and gifs. Not perfect, but at least decent.

Professions

Shitlings now got some additional weapons and profession-specific items. Thanks to that, it's easier to quickly recognize which one does what and it also adds some variety to their visuals. Is it finished? for sure not, but at least I have sth to test and see in the screenshots.

Enemies

Enemies finally got proper attack animations. It's much clearer now what happens, previously they would just approach their target and deal damage over time. Now there is both animation and some weapon trails added.

Playtest

As part of preparing for the announcement, I've decided to run a first bigger playtest with people who haven't seen the game before. It included preparing some playtest instructions, survey to gather feedback, starting a discord channel and playtesting myself. A lot. There were some serious bugs I needed to address before handing it to other people. Playtest is on as I'm writting this, so we will see the results in the next post. Also discord server is here: https://discord.gg/QbenU94X

Announcement preps

Basically all I do now contributes to making the announcement as good as possible. I have most likely less than 2 months left, Steam page is ~50% done, story trailer, capsules, short description are done. I still need to prepare screenshots (which dictates priorities within game client work), gameplay trailer, gifs and long description. Aside from that, I want to prepare a marketing plan, including social media preparations, planning posts, maybe contacting some smaller game media or influencers. It will be a busy time now.