[WIP] Heget - iOS game

thebamboobear

Hey everyone,

Heget is a personal iOS game project that we are doing for fun. There were two people involved in this project at the start and recently we are getting help from two others, one programmer and one character artist.

In the beginning, we planned to make this into a short term project (~2 weeks). It has been about a week and a half now and here are some low poly models and progress that we have so far. I posted some of this before in other threads too, but I thought to keep most updates in this thread from now on

Feedbacks are welcomed!
Cheers,

















screenshot from iPhone:


[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQo-_h_ZPK0"]Stranded UDK Game Dev update - YouTube[/ame]

DWalker

The polygon count seems very high for the scenery compared to the player and monsters.

Torch

Agreed, it looks great but the plants could be drastically lowered in tri count with just using an alpha, if the player isn't getting too close to the object it shouldn't be that apparent anyway.

DanielSnd

DWalker wrote: »

The polygon count seems very high for the scenery compared to the player and monsters.

Torch wrote: »

Agreed, it looks great but the plants could be drastically lowered in tri count with just using an alpha, if the player isn't getting too close to the object it shouldn't be that apparent anyway.

I'm working with thebamboobear on this game, and when thinking of doing the plants using alpha masking or just more polys (Considering the game is for iOS/Mobile), I did some research and bumped into this thread: http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/762522-Do-transparent-textures-work-on-mobile

This is a good way to destroy FPS too. When you start laying alphas on top of other alphas (say, lots of vegetation) the computations go through the roof. We loaded up our Dear Lord map which has some bushes and some trees (a rural city map - nothing too crazy) and we were getting 8-11 FPS. Deleting all the vegetation bumped us up to 20-25 FPS.

From Autodesk's talk on Mobile games using UDK ( http://area.autodesk.com/migs2011/MIGS06-AAA-on-Mobile?KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=525&width=650 ) and Epic's Twitch Stream on mobile game making with UDK ( http://www.twitch.tv/unrealengine/c/2716784 ) I learned that drawcalls are more important than polycounts for mobile devices (I remember them mentioning that the most recent mobile devices are capable of eating up tens of thousands of polys with ease, as long as it's all 1 mesh with 1 material (more materials = more drawcalls)), so we're trying to make meshes that share textures (so we can merge lots of meshes in each part of the map and have fewer drawcalls) and we're avoiding to use Alpha masks (Only using them on particles right now, because there is no other way around it).

Again, we're pretty new to this, so if this information isn't correct, or if I misunderstood it and we should be doing this the other way, please let us know ^^

thebamboobear

Thank you for the feedbacks! I agreed with using alpha for foliage to reduce the polys, but considering what Daniel read about alpha masking on mobile games, we decided to go without alpha. Although, as he mentioned, we are fairly new at this and if there is a better way to optimize it, we would love to learn ^^

Here is just a render that Daniel did today with the game assets xD

brenanmayer

Just like a diversified 2D era of gaming.. I like it.

brandycarson

Perfect game, love not only how it was designed but the simplicity and the characters used themselves.. just like the idea of designing your own stuff at http://www.kekacase.com/design-your-own.html.