It’s been another busy week of development for me as I’ve just rolled out version 0.1.6. I’ve spent most of the week working on optimisation improvements for the game after finding a mysterious situation where on lower-end systems the game would drop significantly to lower than 5fps in build mode, which turns out was a memory leak due to having an event listener being generated on every node of the grid and with over 1000 nodes in the grid you can see how this may have caused performance issues! Rookie mistake. To counter this I instead flattened the grid entirely when it’s created, with an event listener paying attention to where the mouse is and working out, based on each node location on the grid, which index you’re closest to. I’ve also managed to get Starling running at 60 FPS instead of 30, so the game now manages to perform much better on lower-end systems throughout.
As well as this, I’ve worked on implementing the Steamworks API which allows for implementation of Achievements, Stats and Workshop. Although I’m not looking at modding the game, I’ve wanted to be able to support achievements from the beginning of development, so I’ve finally gotten around to implementing this. Right now there are 10 Achievements on offer and I’ll be improving the selection of achievements that are available as development continues but this should suffice for the meantime.
I’ve also made some changes to the gameplay mechanics and the way that the quest system works, adding improvements to the way that stats are generate and how the system handles working with multiple Heroes and the way that you’re scored at the end of each quest.
One of the other things I’ve been trying to get started is the implementation of Rival Kingdoms that you will compete against. Previously the game would notify you as rival kingdoms had been discovered, now you’ll also be ranked against them at the end of each year through a report system that pops up and shows each Kingdom’s success. I’d like for players to be able to interact with them further as the game moves forward with things such as events that you can hold.
Most of the game-breaking bugs should now have been fixed due to the amount of optimisation I’ve been working on. I’ve tried to force bugs to happen and trace down what’s causing them, so plenty of them have been ironed out over the week. I’m aware that there’s still more and some of them are quite hard to track down but that’s part of the development process and hopefully as I add new features more and more bugs will be fixed in alongside them.
On the topic of new features I’m going to be working over the next couple of weeks on trying to implement the Weapons system and develop the store and sale system further, improving how Adventurers work in the kingdom. I feel like the game doesn’t have enough to-do at the moment and it’s very limited in features so I want to start working on giving more control to the player over what they’d like to do. For example, quests will retrieve potions and weapons for you to sell in the stores in your kingdom or you could just purchase them for a more expensive price on their own which would return a lower price in comparison, so if you wanted to avoid quests entirely you could, but you’d make less money from the items you sell.
I’m not sure how much I’ll get done next week as I’ve got some other prior commitments, so although I’ll be getting work done on the game I’ll likely be leaving it a while before pushing an update.