I did a lot of things that no one will ever notice. At least that's what I tell myself when I stop working and go to sleep. What am I talking about?
Well first lets start with the simple gameplay changes I did. The towers deal a lot more damage to give you more reasons to invest into them. They pack a big punch now! The warrior now gets more robots to make early fighting a more viable strategy. There is a lot of these small changes in this update to make the game more enjoyable.
Bunch of nerdy changes
The big thing I changed this update is a bunch of nerdy stuff that makes sure the game will run smoothly without any noticeable frame drops. I have to add "noticeable" here because lets be honest, there is up to 100 robots fighting around 100 enemies and everything is exploding and going crazy. You didn't expect an indie solo dev to code this perfectly, did you?
To my suprise my laptop can handle the game without any problems for most parts. There are some issues though! This update addresses them to make sure there are no sudden frame drops.
For instance when you tell all your 100 robots to attack a bunch of enemies, the game would drop frames for a bit and then run smoothly again. What's the issue? I made sure all the robots immediately get a target to attack. That means 100 robots might run through a list of lets say 100 enemies to see who is in their attack range. I told the computer to do all this in one frame?!? When I coded that, I didn't imagine that the player will be able to control 100 robots. How did I fix this?
I changed the logic from "all robots get a target this frame" to "a few robots get a target this frame, the rest waits". This means there is no huge spike in calculations. Instead it's stretched out over multiple frames. I actually only let two robots get a target per frame. Meaning it takes 50 frames for all 100 robots to get a target. These calls happen every 0.02 seconds, meaning it will take a whole second to get them all to attack an enemy. I initially felt this would be weird as it delays the input of the player. But oddly enough this feels more natural. The positive is that the game won't suddenly drop frames.
The way I solved this issue is how I solved a lot of fps problems, I delayed all the calls to make sure there isn't a sudden spike. The reason I started optimizing the code is that the new level, that I'll release soon, is crazy. There is more enemies, more projectiles, more robots, more everything! And the frame drops had been terrible. With all the changes I did this update I am very close to finishing the final level. Next update will be in February. It features the final character kohi, the final weapon the ... and more optimization nerdy changes.
Thanks for reading,
Deniz
