This last week has been an adventure into the world of Relative Paths. Currently our game is hitting a snag in that it is too big for our release. Currently our game would have to be a $3.00 game but we want more people to play this game and enjoy our hard work so we are trying to cut back the memory size to a $.99 game.
Since the beginning of our FBX exports we have been doing an 'embed media' option. The issue with this is that once it opens to the game it creates a file and stores the image reference in that file. This doesn't seem like much of an issue since the file and folder need to exist anyways but in our game we re-use many textures so we end up with 30 or 40 of the same texture file - it's becoming a learning experience on a need for a more efficient process. Another issue is found when the other artist cut corners in texturing and would apply 3-4 different textures to a single object instead of making a single png image and then mapping out the UVs.
To fix this issue we have set up a new file system for myself and John Nielson to work with. It emulates exactly how the file structure for our game is currently set up so that we can have the easiest switch over. What I'm doing is taking ALL the fbx files for the game and opening them extracting the embedded texture to a new filing system then re-exporting the fbx with the file path through the workspace root to the texture. To fix the other issues I'm identifying all the fbx with multiple image reference along the way and creating one image then mapping the UVs to match. So far I have put in 17 hours or so toward all the assets and I am almost done. Once I am done with my work John will begin taking the images and rescaling them to save even more memory. Along the way he will make sure that they still look good in the game so that we don't loose our quality.
We currently need to cut back about 70MB on our size but we are trying to do more since we are still in development of the Village and Cave level.
Along side that other work I was able to fix the twitch in the goblins hand and finish all of the exporting and importing work to get my level art for the swamp levels in the game. Last night Jon Futch showed me what was in the game so far and I'm really excited about how it looks - although I still need to create one asset that will look better for part of the levels obstacle system.
On the programming end we are hitting a snag with some lagging once the game is run on an Xbox. Since Jon F is the only other one besides myself seriously working over the break to get our release back on schedule I have asked him to try to work out what is going wrong. Since Jon was on level design and this problem is taking up a lot of time I will take over for the Cave and Village. I have already been doing all the art for the levels but this is the gameplay part of design. Jon already had a good idea down for the cave on paper. I just need to take the tools that we have and make sure I build and space everything correctly.
Last but not least I need to continue my work as the Team Lead and start doing more work on Kickstarter, Facebook, and Twitter. I did create some more promo art that you can see as my Blog image above but I still have a bit of work on that as well.
I cannot wait for the world to see this game. I truly believe it has great potential and the potential to move outside of the indie game market.
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