low poly

Mind the Trap

Found the Culprits Affecting In-Game Performance

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For such a simply designed game, the Mind the Traps build for the Epic MegaJam was running around 47 FPS on our high performance computer, which was not a good sign. We had some culprits in mind but given the one week time crunch, we unanimously decided to forgo efficiency for a more complete game. Plus, the judges would be using hardcore computers to test the games, so any FPS drops wouldn’t be noticeable.

The week afterwards we played the same build on gaming laptops and the frame rate was unbearably horrid. That’s when we realized that the first thing we needed to take care of to make this game even worth selling was the frame rate. Who’s going to play a game where the characters are teleporting all over the place?

So, what exactly was causing the drop in performance?

Crazy scientist. Young boy performing experiments (more…)

Wispy Willows

Fishes, Water and Rain

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Woohoo FISHIES! And RAIN!! MOVING WATER!!

Fishies

These are kept simple because they’re so small. The models were made in Blender and have no animation. The movement is done in Unity by script using “Random.insideUnitSphere”. Each fish uses this function to swim around random points in a sphere of a pre-determined size.

I may add waggling tails at some point… You can’t have fishies without waggling tails…

Rain

This is done via a really neat tutorial that teaches you how to take advantage of 2 particle systems working together—one to create the rain itself, and one to simulate the “splashes.” I highly recommend it for a nice raining-and-splashing effect.

Water

This is actually the same gradient color shader that is used on all objects in the game scene. The only difference is that this one allows for transparency. The “waves” or “white caps” were drawn in GIMP on a png texture, which was then added to this transparent, gradient color shader.

We would love to hear your thoughts!

Here’s a bonus screenshot in case anybody wants to use it as phone wallpaper:

Wispy Willows

Testing Color Combinations on a Low Poly Setting

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Testing Different Color CombinationsSince this game focuses a lot on aesthetics, we used https://coolors.co/ to come up with some nice color combinations that would give the eerie yet mystical vibe we’re trying to go for. All the models were made in Blender, while the shading and particle effects were done in Unity. Every single object, including the background, uses a gradient shader with directional coloring.

We love to hear your feedback. Any criticism would be greatly appreciated!