Hello Space Cadets,

Time for another monthly update. A huge part of my time working on Raygun Gadabout this past month has been fixing bugs and polishing things to try and get out another alpha test.

I’m pretty excited at the state of the game at the moment. There’s a proper loop with objectives and some story. You can travel between multiple star systems and planets as well.

Bug fixes and polish aren’t super interesting though so let me talk about some bigger stuff.

Quamar Station

Added a new space station area. Having lots of fun creating the atmosphere here. What you don’t see in this GIF below is some of the NPCs who populate the place.

InControl

Unity’s input system is kinda bad. Out of the box PS Dual Shock Controllers are all messed up with inputs swapped and non-working triggers. So, I opted for a third-party solution from the Unity Asset Store called InControl.

The great thing was how relatively painless it was to make my existing code work with InControl. And I’m hoping this will make rebinding way easier to implement as well.

I also added gamepad vibrations, which was way more fun that it should have been.

Optimisation

Okay. So, I will talk a bit about optimization. Snore... maybe?

I started messing with the Unity Profiler and as I suspected my animations were a huge by far the biggest resource hog. They have until now been giant sprites with lots of wasted alpha space. I had intended to eventually get around to fixing that.

Since my old test computer, I use for minimum spec benchmarking hasn’t been able to get the game above 30FPS for a while now. I figured now might be a good time to fix this.

I used the great software called Texture Packer to create some more tightly packed sprite atlases, also it allows the use of polygons for the sprite shape. See below.

Some sprites repacked

Not surprisingly this has done some wonders for the size of my sprites. I’ve seen a 75% reduction. Which is massive!

I’m not finished converting all of the sprites and replacing them. (It’s a pretty slow and monotonous process).

Another great bonus is I’ve also made some gains in the quality of the sprites. Not only are the sprites taking up way less RAM. They are also crisper. Win Win!

Before

After

That’s All For Now

As always thanks for stopping by and taking the time to read this latest update.

The Official Raygun Gadabout Discord Server received its verification! That’s pretty exciting! With that comes a fancy banner. And a vanity URL.

https://discord.gg/raygungadabout

Feel free to stop by and check it out!

Until next time!

Cheers,

M.