Posted January 27, 2021 by DoctorDog
I put together another release for the end of January. I wanted to have a quick retry screen so when you lose you can retry with a button press. The UI for lives is now icon based instead of just being a number, and by increasing your score past certain thresholds you will earn lives. This helps games go a little longer and overall feels less punishing than it did before.
But arguably the best change is not one you will see. The previous build was over 400 mb. I got a comment on a YouTube devlog asking why the game was so big. I hadn't though much of it until it was pointed out. Turns out Unreal 4 has a way of compressing down content by cooking it as well as a way to remove unused started content from builds. Now the game is about 150 mb, a big improvement I think. I also did some performance profiling and found some areas to improve. I'm pooling objects better and some of the unnecessary work on some enemies tick functions was optimized. A couple of frequently used particle effects were simplified to make the more performant without having to cut back on their frequency.
On the surface this wont seem like a big update if you have played the previous version but under the hood there is more going on. I am hoping the smaller download size will encourage people who visit my page to try and download.