I’ve scaled back my work on BattleGrid a bit. Through February and March, I was working on BattleGrid like it was a second job, and I could definitely feel some pressure building. I was making a big push to get something ready for PAX, and even though I missed that target, I’m happy with the work I got done. It’s just not a sustainable pace.
That said, I’ve been working on the problem I mentioned in my last BattleGrid post – draw calls. I’ve been trying to get batching working properly, and to that end I’ve got my texture atlases set up and all my meshes updated to use the atlas. In theory, a scene in my game should be using less than 10 draw calls: 1 neutral material (for the neutral player and projectiles), 4 colored materials (1 for each player), 2 for the UI (foreground and background), and a few for particle effects. Instead, I get 300 – 400 draw calls. For those of you keeping count, that’s 3x more than before creating the texture atlas and updating all my meshes. It’s the exact opposite of what I expected.
I know the atlas is supposed to work, so there’s obviously something else I’m doing wrong, I just don’t know what yet. Maybe I’ll have an epiphany and realize I’m doing something stupid, or maybe I’ll spin my wheels for a month or two and get very little done. I’m hoping for the epiphany.