Devblog 40: Cool charts & cool waters!

We’ve been doing this for 40 weeks now, so you know the deal: we made stuff last week, here’s the devblog:
FENO (@madebyfeno)
Hey,
Over The Moonlight
Last week, I implemeted a few of the features needed for the first release of this evening. For instance, we realized that it was a pain in the ass to find the right ball size while painting the Joconde.
Fenalytics
I worked on some bugfix for the Unity implementation of Fenalytics, our custom Analytics system. I also started a wrapper on top of Chart.js in order to ease to process of creating charts to visualize the data we’ll gather.
MAZE
On Friday morning, I also made some fancy shots to showcase our progress!
KERYANN (@KeryannM)
Hey! This week I worked on…REPULSE! What a surprise!
REPULSE: Galactic Rivals
I have finished what I could do about the UI. Last week, I told you about the Crown on the Results Menu, so here it is! So shiny :D
I have integrated the Steam Achievements, there are 41 for now, it’s cool! They’re cool! They’re funny and are beautifully named by Nielz!

By the way, this Steam interface is so annoying to use!! It’s long and not efficient at all to add achievements and modify them… What a shame!
Anyway, I’ve also worked on the Replay system, as my PC during the summer at my parents was really slow, I could see if REPULSE was optimized or not!
Soooo, I have a real problem with my In Development Replay System! I’ve noticed some framerate drops on my main PC but with this shitty one that lags when I’m playing Club Penguin, it’s really horrible ^^
NIELS (@NielsTiercelin)
Website
The website’s new layout is finished! We’ll make some tweaks here and there but for now it’s pretty cool.

Over The Moonlight
Over The Moonlight’s first version is coming out today, so last week was also about finishing up some things. I made the remaining sound FXs we needed. I only used FL studio to make the sounds. I really like having musicality in our sounds instead of more “realistic” ones, it fits well with the rest of the game! I’m getting better and better in FL studio, I can now create the sounds I’m looking for (kinda), mix them and iterate faster than before.

I’m also responsible for this horrible copy of the Joconde Feno showed. I feel terribly ashamed don’t worry.
IronEqual
I continued making progress on ROBBERS’ presentation but it’s not finished.
NATHAN (@grange_nathan)
HELLO YOU BEAUTIFUL HUMAN THING.
Goods Train Fever
This week was, again, all about Goods Train Fever. We debugged and integrated our homemade analytics tool (Fenalytics). We can now have real time datas about how players are playing the game.
We should be able to use this system for any game we want!
I also started working on the Tutorial. We don’t have any graphics for it, please excuse the programmer “art”.
It’s ugly and all that but at least we no longer have to explain the game ourselves at everybody that tries it out. There is still a lot of work on Goods Train Fever to be done in the coming weeks but it’s ok. I’m fine. Really.
Have a nice week and see you on Monday!
BENJAMIN (@Valgoun16)
Goods Train Fever
Last week on GTF my main job was to optimize the game as much as possible.
This time I worked on the shaders : most of them were using the PBR lighting from Unity. Because our game doesn’t require such fidelity I switched to a more low cost Lambert shading. According to the scene, we gain between 10–15 fps on our low mobile target ( a Samsung SM-T800) with a *0.5 screen resolution.
It wasn’t enough, so I decided to use the instancing materials which were introduced with Unity 5.4 if I recall correctly. Basically, it lets you batch into one draw call every objects that have the same mesh and the same material.
With all of these improvements, the game runs between 35–50 fps on * 0.5 screen resolutions according to the complexity of the level. It’s still not enough, but for now the game is playable and we have more urgent tasks.
I also, worked on making the water more interesting. My first idea was to make a low poly shader with a animated vertex offset to mimic the waves. But I found out I wasn’t able to do it because some of the function I use weren’t compatible with mobile hardware. it’s not impossible to do it on mobile, but the solution I found were very tricky and would required a lot of time to ding into.
Therefore I decided to find another way. What I did was to make an array of cube that scaled themselves vertically according to a perlin noise. On top of that the shader modify their color according to their height.
Have a great day, see you next week!
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