A whole new world
It’s finally here! Polish month! I’ve been waiting for this month for a long time. I had to have a lot of restraint during development because I was so tempted to make everything look better. I’m glad my producer kept the last 3 months on functionality rather than on the aesthetics. It made the project more foundationally sound to begin with. Even if not everything looks perfect the game plays well.
The very first thing on my list was to make the world less flat. I always how the world looked like a boring plane. So adding hills not only added some depth to the world but it also prevented the player from exiting (falling off) the map.
The next thing I spent a long time on was the molten metal factory. I wanted to really bring this thing to life. I originally had wanted to add tons of animation but time won’t allow that. So I went through and made sure that every surface has a texture. I also added a new obstacle to the second floor. In the original version the second floor you could run past the enemies. I didn’t think that was very challenging so I repurposed the elevator platforms logic to create a platform that only lowers by standing on it. I also timed it so that the enemies could attack you before you could get the platform to the bottom. I feel like that added more complexity to the stage.
The molten metal factory also needed a coat of paint in the areas final area. The boss’s office needed to feel more like an office. So I added windows and some office furniture to make it more realistic.
One thing that was extremely stressful was the performance of the game. At one point the game was running at 20 frames per second! I was so confused as to what could cause that! I had actually reduced the map size so it seemed counter intuitive. I had to look at various videos on optimizing an Unreal game. First I tried to lower some texture resolutions. Specifically the resolution size of the textures I used to paint the entire landscape. That didn’t help! Ultimately what I had to do was change the reflection resolutions and turn of the new nanite rendering in the engine. That seemed to fix my issue. I’m sure there are further alterations I could have done to improve performance but there isn’t a need. The game runs at 144fps on my screen at 1080p and at least at 60fps on a 4K display with a RTX2080 Super card. I’m pretty happy with the performance at this point and how things are looking.