Welcome to another Soulstone Survivors devlog! Today we got some cool stuff to share with you about performance but also about how we work together as a team, so if you are curious about game development this might be a cool one for you!
As we get progress further into development, we also invite you to sign up to our new mailing list and be among the first to find out when its released!
Reducing quantity of particle systems
Almost every special effect you see in the game, such as explosions, trails, slashes… are made out of multiple particle systems. We can create really cool visual effects with them, however they can really become a hit to performance.
Fellipe, one of our programmers has come up with a cool solution: normally if you want to play the same effect in two different positions, you will have two separate particle effects, one in each position, doing their own thing. However, there is a way that we can essentially “play” just one effect, in two (or many) different positions at the same time.
When you are talking about 1 or 2 particle effects this wont make much of a difference, but when you are talking about thousands of arrows hitting enemies such as in Storm of Arrows… we can convert literally dozens of thousands of particle systems into a single one that is played thousands of times, allowing Unity to perform additional internal optimizations to their rendering and processing. Check out the difference it makes with the two videos below:
Before
After
With the new changes, we have one single Particle System, and every time we need to play said effect, we can do so a lot more efficiently without changing anything in the visuals of said effects.
New Projectile Type
Juan and Lucas have been working on a new projectile type, which we are internally calling “swarming projectiles”. Check out this video of the new projectile type in action! The skill in the video uses placeholder visuals but you can expect it to make an appearance very soon!
Build Tools
If you are a game developer or just interested in how the sausage gets made, this section will certainly be interesting to you.
As you may know, we currently support 3 versions of the game: Full, Prologue and the Demo. For each of these versions, we currently support 3 platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux. This means that we often have to make 9 builds of our project to test everything before submitting it to Steam. Each of these builds have a different set of configuration parameters. Needless to say, making a batch of builds is not only time-consuming but also error-prone.
To solve this issue, we’ve recently developed an internal build tool to help us manage and automate this process:
With this tool we are now able to configure and build many builds — all 9 configurations in fact — at once, with just one click. The tool takes care of the game configuration for the given flavor, distribution channel and flags. If you are interested in more behind-the-scenes stuff, do let us know, we’d love to share more of this stuff with you!
Behind the scenes of Mh’thaeus Design
We thought it would be really cool to show the really simple sketch we made in our initial design discussion of how the Unholy Cathedral boss and fight would work. We gather the team together and we start throwing ideas out, thinking of how the arena must be shaped, how skills interact with each other, how the boss skills will interact with the different void hunters (such as the Death Knight that doesnt have dodge)… and then we start pulling back and filtering into mechanics that seem like will work well together! Check out the beautiful art below by Allan, our not artist! (please don’t bully us for our amazing drawing skills =P and don't mind the Portuguese!)
This was all we had for today folks! Hope you enjoyed what we had to show. Keep an eye out for news, it might be worth your while... Let us know what you would like us to talk about next!
We hope you all have a lovely day or night,
~Soulstone Team