monster sketches and optimizing sprites
So I've been working on a few monsters, mostly creepy humanoid ones and insect themed ones, here are some sketches. I'm pretty much finished with painting the middle one but who knows when I will get to putting this into the actual game. I'm working on fully integrating a couple other monsters right now and I drew those months ago, but things are moving.
I did get to making some important optimizations for running the game just a couple days ago. Turns out when you import sprites into unity, they should be in pixel sizes divisible by 4 for image compression to work properly. I feel like I should have known that but somehow I didn't. Dumb. All the monsters are 1000x1000 pixels so no problem there, but most of the environmental artwork is basically at whatever size it happened to be when I drew it. I spent a few hours going over all those and now the size of the whole game build went from 700mb to around 250mb. This is with way more art assets as I've been focusing on the new level art so the size actually reduced by around a factor of 4.
This may not seem important for a small indie game, but with a size this small I might be able to include a browser version, maybe. More importantly, I found out when trying to publish my previous game, Human Upgrade Labs, that Steam makes it way less of a hassle to do that if the game file is under 2gb. I wasn't sure I would be able to fit into that size when eventually I get to publishing the final version to Steam, but after all these compressions I'm pretty sure I will.