Posted February 24, 2024 by sjforeman
I took a few months off from developing DNL (five months, to be exact), partly due to personal life reasons, partly because I had grown to hate that which I had made. I think maybe every person who creates something goes through that (or maybe I'm a weirdo). A few weeks ago I finally came back to give it a shot, and was simply overwhelmed by my own code. Basically, I forgot why I did anything.
So instead of trying to fight my past self to understand why I made certain choices, I decided to start over from ground zero. I wanted to make the code cleaner, more efficient, and more modular, so if I ever took more than a day off ever again, I wouldn't be flummoxed when I came back. I also decided to do this work on my desktop PC rather than the laptop I had used for previous projects.
When I dropped back to check on how the old build was working, I was horrified to see how terribly the game was running. It was essentially unplayable compared to how it ran on my laptop. It's a lesson I learned during a past game jam, and it was reiterated again very strongly in this case: the Unity Editor is not the game. I tried to understand what was causing such a dramatic framerate death, but it became apparent that the problem was not skin deep. Rather than fight Unity for hours and possibly days, I decided to switch the build from WebGL to a Windows Application (download), which was very fast and easy to test.
That is all a very long-winded way of saying: the game is a Windows download now, and nothing else has really changed. Except for a small text box at the top reminding players how to pause the game (the tilde key). It is now a fun relic of the old WebGL build, where it was extremely annoying to have the pause button be the escape key.
I am continuing to rebuild DNL v2, and will hopefully be back to the same point in half the time.