Within the scope of the project was always the desire to create an interactive story with an atmosphere to boot. With this in mind we set out to create as many of the assets ourselves as possible, to ensure it would stay consistent throughout.As we've closed in on the project's end-date we realized the amount of work that'd be required to see that vision through was staggering, so we resorted to sampling models from various artists through the websites opengameart.org and blendswap.com.
Thankfully the resources provided there were not only of good quality, but mostly consistent and game-ready to boot, requiring only minor alterations to fit in better.
With the visual fidelity kicked into high gear we also started seeing significant performance drops when certain situations and combinations of objects arose. The hunt for performance increase was on!
Stripping assets of their general usability and only leaving the attributes we needed saved us some performance and smoothed things over slightly. Necessity is the mother of invention, in this case she also birthed curiosity for some of the aspects of rendering a scene on screen that's handled and nicely tucked under the hood in Unity, out of sight and out of mind, at least until it's optimization time. As we scoured the net for information about Unity's culling and algorithms for calculating light we quickly realized several mistakes, some of which were very basic and easily corrected, on our part.Armed with a better understanding we tackled the problems caused by prior mistakes, and made sure our final changes would follow stricter standards.
With the deadline looming it's looking pretty good on a general level, but as with all things we're noticing prior mistakes and omissions (such as a varied set of sound effects) that we're now frantically working at to improve to an acceptable level, even so, there's only so much one can do with the time allotted.
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