Status report - 24.07.14

Good evening ladies and gentlemen,

I've decided that from now on, I'll try to give a little status report everyday, containing what I did today, if I finished any milestones etc.

So for today:

1.) Increased performance

The morning was spent looking for potential places to save some drawcalls and/or memory. I was able to eliminate 4 drawcalls for a typical scene without any difference to the looks of the game. That does not look like much, but it produced roughly a 5% increase in frames per second, not bad, eh?

2.) Went through some music from Incompetech, found a few songs that could fit the game, but I haven't decided anything yet.

3.) Made a ToDo-List which can be found here. Some things are still missing, like audio, but other than that it has pretty much everything in it that needs to be done to finish the game.

Ok, that's it, thanks for reading,

have a good one.

Predictions - I'm not good at them

Hi everyone!

On the 25th of January I showed you my plan, which was, with hindsight, as wrong as it could be. It looked like this:

27.01. InGame-Setup (Starting the level/map - setting of players, buildings, mines, etc.)

29.01. BASIC Interaction (sending them around) with RTSUnits (Workers, Warriors etc.) 

19.02. Complex interaction with Workers - Building things

22.02. Running Inventory-System

26.02. Menu

14.03. Complex interaction with Warriors - Attacking
20.03. Complex interaction with Heros - Casting spells
23.03. GameOver/Won - conditions

28.03. Multiplayer Setup


Well, I sticked to the plan for the first 5 points or so, then, I slowly noticed there is now way to keep up with it. The reason is simple. A day only has 24 hours - screw you earth, rotate slower - and I would need some more. A typical day for me looks, on average, like this:

6 h of sleep
1 h to get the day started (coffee, shower, newspaper, walking the dog etc.)
5 h of work for my company
3 h of studying at the university
1 h of studying at home (ie. preparing for tests)
3 h of working for this game
1 h of working for different projects
4 h with my girlfriend                                                                                        
24 h

As you can see, I'm on a pretty tight schedule, I barely find the time to do something other than work, and it's pretty exhausting. And still, I'm only a month behind my plan. (Compare that to the 19 centuries that Jesus is behind his plan ^^ ) Now, even though my plans are bad, I somehow need them, so that I don't fall in a hole of procrastination.

So, I propose a new timeline to finish this project, this time a more realistic one:

• The Hero System
• Walking                          ✓
• Attacking                        ✓
• Special attack                 31.04.2014
• The Fighting System
• Position Players               ✓            
• Differentiate them            ✓
• Fight between them         ✓
• Winning conditions          03.05.2014
• Campaign
• The forest                        ✓
• The Ridge                       18.05.2014
• The Burning Mountain     ✓
• The Glacier                     12.05.2014

• Copy the above two to the        10.05.2014
  Human side

• Update main menu
• Campaign menu               29.04.2014
• Multiplayer menu             16.05.2014
• Config menu                    02.05.2014
• Shop menu                      20.05.2014
• Award menu                   25.05.2014  
• Multiplayer
• Serverside                       15.05.2014
• Clientside                        16.05.2014
• Ingame                            20.05.2014
• Finish the game
• Sounds                           10.06.2014
• Effects                            14.06.2014
• Testing                            07.07.2014

Alright, that sounds like a plan, hopefully I can stick to it this time.

What are your thoughts on timelines. Do you just work on what comes to your mind, or do you have a full plan of everything you're gonna do before you actually do anything?

Thanks for reading!

• Write a post in bed      ✓

My top 5 Assets from the AssetStore!

If I had to name one reason why I love Unity, the first thing that'd come to my mind is the AssetStore.

Let's be honest with ourselves, none of us is perfect in everything. I mean, I'm a programmer, and a, well let's say not the worst, 2D-Designer. However there simply are things I'm not good enough to create myself. So, in order to still create good looking games, you need someone who can do this for you, and thanks to the AssetStore, that's pretty cheap nowadays. Also there are enough situations where you just go: I could work 50 hours creating this, or I'll just spend 20$ for pretty much exactly what I want. Well, what you gonna do?

Over the last Year I bought quite a number of Assets there, so here's my top 5! I'll focus on "programming" stuff, because these are things you need in most projects. I bought a lot of models too, but these where pretty "project specific".

#5: Pool, Target, Constrain Bundle

The targeter in this package works fast and efficient, I could not have done it better myself. And the pooling is great, no more lagging when instantiating objects!

#4 Mesh Baker 2

I used this extensively for Empires-Rising, and without it, the game wouldn't even run on high-end Desktop machines! Merging together different Meshes with different textures into one saves you alot of draw-calls, and this thing makes it so easy!

#3  KGFMapSystem (minimap)

The best minimap system I have found so far. Tons of settings, different designs, you name it! It also includes fog of war, but only for the map itself. However, with a little tweaking I made a quite decent World-Fow out of it. I'll post how you can do that yourself this weekend.

#2 NGUI: Next-Gen UI

Did I mention that I love Unity? Well I do! BUT, the integrated GUI System sucks! Tons of drawcalls, it's slow, no editor, so you have to code everything "blind". It's just sad, Unity deserves better. And thats what NGUI is for! WYSIWYG design in the editor, TONS of settings, fast and efficient, and dozens of precreated tweens. It's all there! The price is a bit high, but I got it when it was a 24 hour-sale for 40 bucks, and I'm sure it will be there soon again.

#1 Playmaker

If you know this thing, and haven't bought it, you are an idiot. Ok, that sounds a bit harsh, but it's the truth! It reduces the time I'm working on small things like "selectors" (i.e. selecting a unit or building), raycasts for different things and so on by HOURS! Also, you can combine it with NGUI, which makes these both tools even better.

Thats it! Thanks for reading!

Here we go! Demo-Video!

Here it is, a little preview of the game!

It's not even close to finished, but I think you can see in which direction this is going. 

I have to apologize for the bad audio quality, the microphone I used was, well, shitty.

I'll arrange a better one for the next video, which will be uploaded in the next few days,

showing the barracks and the first warriors.

Thanks for watching!