Hi Everyone, I'm Fergus, the lead developer of Towers, Turrets, Turtles, And I'm making a blog post!
Today we launched on the steam store, It's been a long road getting here, and I'm really hyped to talk to you all about it.
Most of the work left to do before our launch on the 16th is going to be focused on optimisation and refactoring existing content, but I'm going to share some of the stuff we already did, and some of what we're doing, as we go along.
So here's my first feature to discuss, our new transparency system.
Unity by default, has a Transparency system built in, but this has problems, especially regarding the concept of a Z axis
our old solution to this was to use a secondary camera and limit the opacity on that, meaning that the objects it rendered were transparent, but that was tanking our framerate to a level that really wasn't going to work for anyone.
Fortunately, I got to spend this morning looking for a faster result, and I managed to get one.
By applying a dithering effect to an alpha cutoff we were able to make an effect that makes the turrets placement on the grid visible without making it harder to see what's going on.
Also, it happened to work really well with the outlines.
although this doesn't sound like much, small work like this makes the difference between a lower end machine running Towers, Turrets, Turtles at 60FPS, or struggling and catching fire.
Hoping to post some more tomorrow, where I'll talk about some other technologies we made for the game,
Until then!