Sandbox Logo
Page Header

First Blog

A little bit of what's been done so far

Modular Kits

Since I need quick and easy iteration for the jam, I settled on creating a modular kit for all my buildings. This also lets me improve upon them later down the line and propagate the changes to every building in the game.

Hammer Tricks

I wanted some pretty edge details around some of my modular kit pieces, so I just blend paint them in Hammer then export them back out. Scaling them in the Scene keeps the blend data, while scaling down the texture to tile across the object. I'm not worried about the density of my verts since these assets wind up getting scaled 10x their starting size anyways. Mix and matching piece sizes within big chunks allows me to be a bit more intentional with where the grunge lies.

Trim Sheets

Thanks to Facepunch's trim sheet library, I can easily sketch out a few models and feel comfortable with shipping them for the jam. The glass sheet I made came in really handy, wound up needing to optimize the layout for more variety instead of trying to cover every possible size.

Performance

Performance has been a huge challenge through the whole jam, thankfully I'm starting to float around 60fps instead of 100ms per frame. Still some hitching when spawning enemies on the host's end, but hopefully it'll be fixed before the jams done! The main issue is the unholy amount of GameObjects needed to decorate 34 zones. I wound up fixing this in two ways: Not updating transforms every frame, and completely disabling them when they disappear into the fog.

User Comments