Happy Labor Day everyone! In August we began kicking the tires on some existing systems, making sure the foundation is solid going into the second half of developing Strange Seed. Here are some of the major tasks we completed: [list] [*] New player/enemy creatures: pig and failed evolve slimes (enemy only) [/list] [img]https://i.imgur.com/laLBkie.png[/img] [list] [*] Added NavMesh-based enemy AI / navigation and more AI behaviors [*] Improved the look and timing of ranged and area attacks [*] Exhaustively investigated various potential refactorings to our ground collision system [*] Completely revised and replaced our evolution UI and HUD styling [*] Studied performance: on most of our dev machines, the game runs at 60fps or well above that, but on a couple older laptops, it’s experiencing drops under 30fps; this appears to be mainly an issue with draw calls, which means it’s very solvable by offering alternate performance options for lower-end machines [*] Evaluated and tested various occlusion and frustrum culling methods to get higher FPS across all devices [/list] Overall I’m pretty happy with the results of our refactoring and reevaluation of the core systems. In early August I found myself feeling semi-panicked about the quality of collisions in the game — not based so much on anything that was actually going wrong, but more on what might go wrong in the future. (Hey, I just get nervous sometimes, alright!?) As a result, I got together with my engineer Felix and we evaluated a bunch of potential options. First, for the ground collisions, we considered replacing an existing torso-based system with a per-foot system, which would also change up how we did walk and run animations. In the end we got together with our artist, Jhulian, and did a team evaluation of the old system versus the new idea. And as a group we decided… our existing system is actually the best option! This might sound like a story that goes nowhere (hah) but for me, it was a great moment; it means we’re on the right track. We actually did end up changing the attack collision system, to use primitive colliders (mainly capsules and spheres) to register combat hits. That’s a fairly standard system for 3d games and for us, it worked perfectly from the first test. [img]https://i.imgur.com/zCRCEbm.png[/img] As a last word, when I was writing this post I realized that a comic from a book on gamedev (by Matt Hackett) described this month perfectly: [url=https://www.valadria.com/game-dev-comics-by-matt-hackett/][img]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FzrWUrSagAA_TvF?format=jpg&name=4096x4096[/img][/url] We clearly spent August in the Slog Swamp — except for Jhulian, who spent half his time on Content Mountain. Our team has been working together for years now with various finished projects under our belts, so the Swamp isn’t nearly as uncomfortable as it used to be. It’s actually a fairly satisfying place, when you manage to make some progress. See you next month!