Devlog # 14 - Trouble and Turkeys
Happy Australia Day! It’s pretty much just been optimization again, although, there have been some new additions.
One of Dinkum’s biggest resource guzzler at the moment is the navmesh. The navmesh is used by all NPCs and animals, so they know where they can walk, its kind of like an AI map.
Because the world is randomly generated and can be changed, the mesh has to be created while the game is running. So the navmesh gets generated a certain distance around the character as the player runs through the world, and depending on how many characters are in the game, the mesh needs to get bigger and bigger.
(The blue mesh is the navmesh in the gif) I’ve been cutting the fat so to say, by making the navmesh change as little as possible I’ve got a pretty big performance boost, and the game is hitting a solid 60fps in most cases. There are still some stammers here and there, but I think this is an unrelated problem with unity’s animators so I might look at animating tile objects through code…
Now, why don’t I show you what you’ve really come to see. Turkeys. Scrub Turkeys that is.
So. Damn. Beautiful.
These lil’ darlings will spawn in the tropical forest areas. For a long time, I’ve wanted some animals the player can farm, and scrub turkeys will be the first of those animals. The player will trap turkeys and bring them back and placed in a farm.
I’ve been trying to think of a way this could be costly to the player. A coop with limited space might be a way to control how many turkeys the player can have. Maybe the traps could be costly? Maybe you would have to bring them to an NPC “domesticate” them. Or maybe they just need little turkey collars that cost money.
The point is, I just don’t want someone to catch 2000 of these bad boys and live off that egg money, never having to work again and completing the game entirely though turkeys.
I realize in a lot of my blog post I talk about how to make things harder on the player, but the thing is, it’s still too easy to make money and the game relies on how much money the player has or doesn’t have. Hopefully, soon you will see a blog post titled “Fixed the whole game's economy.”
Sorry, that’s enough rambling. Here, check out this scythe I added.
You don’t have to cut down every blade of grass individually with your axe anymore! Swing this bad boy and you’ll clear that land for a building in no time. I’ve already started to make some crops require this to harvest them.
So yeah, I didn’t get to add much to the game, but I did clean up a bunch of code I hadn’t looked at in months. This always feels great to do, but at the same time, it looks like you’ve done nothing at all to an outside observer.
Anyway, leave a comment if you have an opinion or suggestion on the turkey farming ideas, and thanks for reading.