Hi everyone this will be the first in a series of monthly dev blogs. First off I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Dan, an engineer and designer. I’ve been working on video games since around 2010. I’ve worked on a mix of web and mobile games; AdVenture Capitalist and a couple unreleased games at NCSOFT, up to more recent games; Onward and Batman Arkham Shadows. I left Downpour / Meta back in July in order to focus on Dagger Directive full time.
Dagger Directive has been in development for about 4 years now. It started as my fun side project that I used to test out ideas for things like grass generation and AI behaviors, but has since grown into a full game.
I’ve been pretty busy since the publishing announcement. Adding content, upgrading Unity, and fixing bugs found by the MicroProse QA team. Plus, artists from MicroProse have been re-doing older art and creating new characters, vehicles, and weapons for the game.
Weapons Additions and Improvements
First up is the M4. Dagger Directive is heavily inspired by the old Novilogic Delta Force games and the M4 was a big part of those games. It was the first weapon in Dagger Directive and I made a few different versions before the artists at MicroProse came in and did an amazing job with the final version. Here’s the evolution of the M4 over the last few years, the old one is on the bottom.
Next up is a new weapon to the game, the PKM. It’s the second belt fed machine gun to be added. It comes with built in bipods for stability when shooting from a prone or supported position.
The SVD is a solid marksman rifle and can be equipped with the PSO-1 optic.
Finally, the first bullpup rifle in the game, the AUG A1. It’s the older model and comes equipped with a foregrip and the built in 1.5x scope.
Technical Changes
The engine has been upgraded from Unity 2021.3 to Unity 6. This brings a variety of improvements, not just to the built game itself, but to the development experience in the editor.
Using the new rendering features I’ve seen up to a 20% increase in rendering performance. The game is running at a solid 30 FPS on the Steam Deck during intense fighting and can reach 60 FPS in many areas. (Note: Steam applied some compression to the exported screen shot)
Using the updated asset management features I’ve been able to get the game size down from 4.1GB down to 2.6GB. There’s still content to add so this may go up some more before release. Builds are also a bit faster. They were only about 10 minutes before but they’re down to 3-4 minutes now.
There were of course some issues that came with jumping up 3 years of Unity changes. The grass system had to be updated due to a memory leak, Vulkan had issues creating frame buffers and would cause crashes, and various shaders had to be fixed. Overall I’m pretty excited about the new possibilities that come with the Unity upgrade!
Thanks!
That’s it for the first dev update! If you want to follow along you can join the Dagger Directive Discord server here: https://discord.com/invite/NnY2JrNPPd Thanks for reading through the update and come back next month for more news. You never know what I may drone on about next.