Feedback Friday #135 - October 16-19, 2020

G'day folks, as we head into the last quarter of 2020 those new years resolutions to ship a game are coming up fast! .. what better way to lay down some progress than collaborating with your fellow devs to smash through design issues or quickly test an idea!

Feedback Friday runs from Friday to Monday every week. Share a build of your work in progress game to get playtesting and feedback, get new perspectives to help you overcome your biggest obstacles and take advantage of the Unity Community to boost your game development.

What To Show

• Minimally Viable Product (MVP) - Core game play > everything else
• How To Scope Small (Unity tutorial)
• Post a link to a playable game, preferably WebGL. If you don't have a playable game, post something substantial, not just text.

How To Ask For Feedback

• Be concise.
• Specify what you want feedback on and what you don't.
• Resist the urge to write an immediate defense. Take the time to understand their points. Remember that your friends here are taking time out of their busy schedules to help you for free.

How To Give Feedback

• Be positive. There's something of value in every game.
• Focus on the design, not the designer.

Feedback Friday #134 is here.

 

I have a playable WebGL build (with links to Windows and Android builds in the menu) and it's active development towards release of a title, so I hope that qualifies this to be posted here.

The feedback I'm currently seeking is how the world shown below is performing on desktop browsers for Windows, Mac and Linux (does it load, is it working, does engine audio play, is the framerate high enough to be considered playable).



There will be a lot more to my game than just a car driving around an environment, and I'm still evaluating my options for vehicle control - as-is works okay for testing purposes but I know it needs work (or replacement). I'm also still refining specifics of my game's concept and deciding on visual style, but feel I've just reached an important milestone with functionality. It's working fine for me but I wonder about what other people's experience with it is / whether it's just randomly going to crash on whatever browser and so on or if I should consider it stable.

The foundation of this took a lot of time and effort (textures "rezzing in" as loaded, infinitely-repeating scenes with a floating origin, automated LOD systems, world-space fonts, ability to have semi-randomized buildings, UI color scheme/themes, a reasonably-efficient workflow/tools, etc.). I'd like to consider it solid enough that I'm comfortable moving on to a focus on art and gameplay ASAP.. and feedback is a part of that, so I'd definitely appreciate any. I already created a thread specifically for that a few days ago, so if anyone gets a chance to check this out, please post feedback there: https://forum.unity.com/threads/seeking-webgl-performance-feedback-2020-2-0b7-urp-10-1.986778/

WebGL: https://tentatively.online/open/test

Thanks

 

@polemical tried it on my windows laptop, WebGL player on low end gaming laptop (MSI GL63), took a while to load the scene (could be my internet connection), but once loaded it was smooth with provided FPS counter never moving from 60. Everything seemed to be working.

Will also try it on my mac and/or desktop if i remember when I next log in to one of them.

 

@polemical played on PC.
Working smooth.
Controls are ok. But lack atm of option, to place back on the road. I stuck somewhere near pavement and ground, hung by the car bottom chassis. Took while, to get back on a road.

Drifty camera is too drifty for me. Makes me a bit dizzy at bigger speeds and turns.

Gold Nitrate theme is nice.

Dynamic Texture blending map is too gloomy in my opinion.
2D ish in 3D ish mini game?

 

That's great to hear, thanks @JohnnyA - and yes, it can take a while unless internet is fast, some of the textures are a few mb each. There are two progress bars, the segmented one is related to loading assets like textures from the server and depends mostly on internet connection speed. The solid one is instantiation/generation of the scene and the time that takes depends mostly on CPU (starting with content near the camera position and loads outward by distance).

 

Thanks @Antypodish - yeah I get stuck too, that will definitely be something I'll prevent during gameplay / make recovery simple. You can click on the vehicle if you're stuck on your roof, but as it only "moves the car up a bit and faces wheels down again" there are times it's not enough because like you said, bottom of car hung up on terrain or rocks etc. you just drop back onto the obstruction. At least can pause the game and click "restart" for now. My vehicle control needs a lot of work still, like preventing rolling over so easily - that will be a priority as I move on from the current phase.

The blending one is pretty dark, yeah.. at one time there were random emojis on the things you squash, including a "game over" skull emoji you could tap by accident ..2Dish world, yes it could definitely be a mini-game or bonus round of some kind, I have had lots of ideas of arcade/fast-paced action time slowing down and having to quickly do stuff etc. but would probably be closer to the action, more arcade-ish, zoomed into during primary gameplay and flashy, as opposed to a focus on "how to get this working..". And yeah, probably not the same kind of mini-game at all The worlds are pretty much unrelated, aside from functionality (i.e. world-space font shown in 2nd world will be a part of my gameplay - particularly the scoring mechanic / points floating around etc.).

Edit: Based on your feedback I'll add another Control Option, akin to "Drifty-cam Driftiness"

 

I played in Chrome, Windows 10, mid-range gaming PC. Everything stayed an even 60 fps. Side note: The camera and controls felt floaty to me, too.

 

@polemical I wasn't able to connect, I get 'Secure connection failed' in Firefox and 'This site can't be reached' in Chrome.

Definitely a good time to get some ballpark performance feedback, though bear in mind that the art phase will definitely impact performance depending on how you do it.

If you're aiming for a webgl/browser platform, you might want to check out this video on how Ballistic which is a very detailed fps managed to achieve a 100mb download size using procedural substance textures: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=152105012

Bear in mind this was some years ago and the substance integration managed by Unity was deprecated, though I believe it still is distributed by Adobe and many people use it to good effect.

 

@Billy4184 that's too bad about the network issues. I couldn't reproduce the problem you're having with Firefox, but anything's possible. Thanks for the tip about procedural textures - I'm pretty sure Shader Graph, Addressables and code will be enough for this project though. It will have reasonably simplistic environments, pretty cheap graphics mostly with approximately the amount of detail shown now - not counting what's related to gameplay (and yes.. that will have an impact for sure).

I haven't made anything with Unity before. I'm not a company, nor do I have a team or a budget, nor will I be charging money for this game. If I can get the ideas I have to work and it runs well and it's fun to play (for me, and hopefully others), that will be good enough for me

 

Yeah no point complicating things if you're not trying to cram in details. Looking forward to seeing you progress! Definitely nothing quite like the feeling of putting your hard work out into the world.