Hello everyone,
I have been spending the last months upgrading the MicroFactory core, which is still not finished yet. 😣
Well, this project was created more than 3 months ago. And as a solo developer on it, I learned and grew a lot during this entire proccess.
This means that I've made some decisions in the past that I don't think are the right ones, right now. And there's also a lot of cool features and technologies that came up in all this time, and I've never really had the interest of upgrading some aspects of MicroFactory.
However, I decided to upgrade everything at once before working on any new feature. The proccess is almost finished, but I think it's a good time to talk about these improvements.
For those who are into Unity, this upgrade was originated from my interest to upgrade from the built-in rendering pipeline into URP and also use the latest DOTS features, and other stuff...
😎 Graphics
Many people had shown particular interest in the game because of the graphics. But honestly, after working on it all this time, I grew tired of it, and felt that the game had a really poor graphic aspect.
I think the only noticeable caveat about this is the transparency. I had to remove the translucent fade effect when the players goes behind the objects. Now, the players have a highlighted silhouette around, instead of the objects becoming translucent. I really liked the old effect, but I was not able to replicate that effect after this upgrade due to the Unity Engine's URP shader limitations.
🚀 Performance
The main concern that I've always had for this game is performance. I've spent much time many times trying to improve the performance of some parts of the game, specially the conveyor belt system.
This upgrade drastically improved the frame rate even with the improved graphics, which is great.
😭 So, When is the release?
Well, there are a lot more stuff that I could talk about, but I will leave it for later. Honestly, I don't know when the release will be but I'm looking foward to release a demo before the end of this year.
Until then, I will "try" too keep you guys updated!
Cheers!