Nero's Adventure DEVLOG [NOVEMBER]

Game

Nero's Adventure

6 years ago

Welcome to the devlog of November, this month I had a lot of time and thanks to my last black Friday's purchase, Alexa, setting up a good mood while programming has never been this easy.

This month I worked on.

Fish mutation
Website
Physically-based particles
Portal Metroidvania like behavior
Huge performance boost
- Physic optimization
- Rendering Optimizations
- Garbage Collection optimizations
Minor(particle generation, better in-game text visualization)
Level Editor(layering)
Stalactites

Fish Mutation

I've changed the algorithm of the fish generation to make it even more random and sometimes

a fish will have inverted or missing bodyparts that will create monstrosity like this:

Physically-based particles

The player will now get affected by every particle inside

the game and this will create cool game mechanics

Huge performance boost

After several nights of profiling the game, I was surprised

that the biggest bottleneck inside the game were: physics calculations, and the frustum culling performed by unity.

To fix those problems I wrote some custom systems and did some smart optimizations:

Enable/disable rigid bodied based on the distance from the player
Automatically group objects inside quads and only shows the quads that are visible(using the good old bounding box) by the camera
Located and fixed every garbage allocation(most of them were inside the AI system), inside the code to avoid the garbage collection and ugly lag spikes.
replaced every Coutourine with tasks when I could since Coroutine allocates garbage every time they are called.
used Sprite Atlas to batch multiple sprites inside a single draw call
Removed every unnecessary polygon collider with basic geometry shapes
Optimized physic layers, by removing unnecessary casts between layers.