Hello Steam,
July was not a great month for game development. I spent several weeks in June and July working with a particularly heavy 3D environment asset which was really slow to work with. Scenes took forever to load and save, they were sluggish in the viewport, and I experienced frequent stalls and crashes. I was really happy to finally be done with that asset, but then I discovered that the stalls and crashes were persisting even after moving on to the next scene. This really slowed me down. I was constantly waiting out my PC to see if the system really had crashed or if it was going to settle down, but more often than not I was having to shut down my computer by physically pressing the power button.
After a lot of testing I finally determined that the problem was my SSD whereon I store all of my 3D assets is frequently overheating. Adding a heatsink to an SSD shouldn’t be that big of a deal and I’ve done it on another PC but I’ll spare you the details of the hours of black comedy which befell me trying to add a heatsink to this particular drive and motherboard. Today I am simply planning to clone and replace that drive. I’m really hoping this will fix my problems.
If the PC experts are groaning to themselves right now, try to remember I didn’t even own a desktop until I started working on this game—I was using a Surface Pro and a ten year old laptop for all of my computer needs. I do not have a lot of experience on the technical side of game development, and I’m still just a guy working on a desk in his kitchen after coming home from his real job.
Anyway, I’m continuing work on the final release. I want like hell to be done with this thing by the end of the year, but it’s going to be a fight to get it done by then. In the meantime, I thank you for your patience.
Check out my latest public renders here: Aghavni 1, Aghavni 2
--Monk