Thousands of Enemies
One of the biggest technical challenges behind this project was making large-scale enemy waves possible without sacrificing performance.
The game is built using Unity's DOTS/ECS architecture, allowing thousands of enemies to process their behavior simultaneously. Every enemy still needs to handle pathfinding, target selection, attacking, health, visual effects, and audio, so how the data is stored and processed becomes just as important as the gameplay itself.
Rendering thousands of units introduced another challenge. Traditional skeletal animation quickly becomes too expensive for a simulation of this scale, even on modern hardware.
To solve this, I replaced conventional character animation with a well optimised low-poly mesh-swapping system. This significantly reduced the rendering cost while also creating the distinctive visual style that defines the game.
The result is exactly what I was aiming for:
Larger battles. Thousands of active enemies. Smooth performance.
And all without compromising the game's visual identity.
"30,000 Armored Orcs are shown in this image, captured during a performance test. The game will not include this many enemies (it just too many), but theoretically, the system could handle this number of enemies."
Thanks for stopping by! More soon.
- Patrik M.