Hey everyone!
Welcome back to another update on the development of Wave Defense: Trappist! This week has been a continuation of last week’s focus on optimizing the game, particularly when it comes to memory usage and reducing the overall size of the game. I’m tackling this now to lay the groundwork for smoother, faster development in the future. The goal is to make the game much easier to work with, allowing me to test out new ideas and iterate rapidly without being bogged down by performance issues.
The Optimization Journey
Optimizing memory usage and game size is completely new territory for me, so this week has been a steep learning curve. I’ve been spending a lot of time diving into tutorials and talks from Unity developers to better understand the tools and strategies available. One of the great things about being a solo developer in today’s world is the wealth of resources available online, and I’ve found some fantastic content that’s helped me along the way.
If anyone reading this is also interested in optimizing their own games, I highly recommend checking out a few of these talks from Unity developers:
Memory Management for Unity
Reducing Build Size
Advanced Memory Profiling
These have been incredibly helpful in guiding my optimization efforts and pointing me in the right direction when it comes to managing memory and game size effectively.
Why This Matters
The work I’ve been doing might not be the most glamorous part of game development, but it’s crucial for long-term success. By optimizing the game now, I’m setting the stage for faster iteration in the future. It will be much easier to test out new game design ideas, add new features, and tweak existing systems without worrying about performance hits or memory issues.
In essence, I’m laying a solid foundation that will allow me to be more experimental and agile going forward. As a solo developer, being able to quickly test and iterate on ideas is key to finding what works best for the game.
Looking Ahead: More Intense Battles
I’m really excited about what these optimizations will allow me to do in the near future. One of the first things I want to test out is increasing the number of aliens in each wave. As the game’s performance improves, I should be able to push the battle intensity further by having more enemies spawn at once, creating bigger, more chaotic fights that challenge the player even more.
This will make the waves feel more intense and give players a greater sense of accomplishment when they successfully defend their base against a larger swarm of enemies. I’m looking forward to seeing how the game feels once I can test these changes in action!
A Shorter Update This Week
I know this is a shorter update compared to some of the previous dev blogs, but a lot of this week’s work has been behind the scenes, continuing the efforts from last week. I’m excited to push forward with these optimizations and start testing out what they enable for the gameplay itself in the coming weeks.
As always, thanks for following along with the development of Wave Defense: Trappist! I can’t wait to share more with you next week, and I’d love to hear any thoughts or suggestions you have. What kinds of optimizations or performance improvements have you tackled in your own projects? Let me know in the comments or on Discord!