So, I started working on a game I call “Wildfire”. It’s really just an exercise in putting the basic modules for a game together in one place and seeing what sort of results I can get if I optimised Unity to display 3D environments well.

It’s very much a prototype, but the game currently looks like this…

I’m starting to chip away at it again in my spare time. Halfbrick work will always take the priority but I need something to give me another focus so I don’t always feel like I’m focused on one target

Quick overview…

Assets

Assets used for the game come from “Synty”. You can find their content in the asset store here

I’m NOT currently part of an affiliate program and I’m just recommending these assets as I honestly think they’re really good.

If you’re prototyping something and need to be up and running quickly then I can’t recommend them enough. All models are well set up and are a reasonable poly count. Materials are set up well, so you’re not going to burn a whole lot of draw calls on a single asset

Camera Control

I was experimenting with a spline camera to move the main character and to handle the movement and targeting of the camera. I used to love the old Virtua Cop games from Sega and the fixed path means that I can control where the camera is and what’s visible in the scene.

You can see the spline paths in the screenshot below (green lines and markers)…

Obviously, the downside of a fixed path is that the player doesn’t feel like they’re fully in control. This is something that I’m still playing with. May throw it out… may find a way to make it work. Time will tell.

Scene Management

Anyway, as I know what’s on the screen, I can optimise the scene draw to remove content that would otherwise be shown. For now, I’m just using the Unity Dynamic Occlusion. I’ll explain how I set that up in another post if you’re interested.

When I set the game up, I was using 2021.3.6 and there were bugs when using occlusion culling on Android. When I’d worked around them, I has a scene that updated at a smooth 60fps on a low-end Android device.

So where is all this going…?

Well, I’m going to take the code I’ve done for Wildfire and push it to Github so you can use it as you want. I’ll split out each of the pieces of code and write up what they do and how they work.

I’m also going to start writing up how to do general iOS and Android development work. Planning to write up everything from setting up a dev account to pushing a game live, handling OTA (Over The Air) updates and anything and everything that you might need. It’ll be a long trip, but looking forward to it.

Please ping me a message if you have any areas you’d like me to cover first. Planning to start with the basics and work through everything

Keep smiling!

Andy