Tag: Graphics

From now until the end of development, I’m going to do a monthly wrap-up of what’s been done with BattleGrid. Hopefully there won’t be too many of these before BattleGrid is finished.

How’d May start?
At the beginning of May, I still had two major problems that were holding back development. First, the number of draw calls was far too high for the simplicity of my game, and without lowering the draw calls, BattleGrid was unlikely to run well on the iPad. Second, the AI was eating up far too much CPU time, mostly because each turret had its own AI all trying to run at the same time, which was hurting framerate.

What got done?
An epiphany on the draw call issue ended up solving the problem. Even if the problem isn’t totally solved (I have a feeling it will pop back up later), I know how to tackle it to improve the draw call count. A similar epiphany struck me related to the AI, which has eliminated problems with too many AIs trying to run at once.

In addition, I’ve added an extra animation to one of the turrets, which looks great and adds some life to the game. I’m planning on updating the remaining turrets with similar animations. I also added a new effect when shields are hit, and I added or improved several sound effects.

What’s left?
AI Rewrite and Updates
I want to rewrite my AI to use a finite state machine, custom code, or a new behavior tree system. Currently, the behavior trees are created with Behave, which is free and works great, but it requires a 3-second logo to appear when the game starts. BattleGrid has a long enough load time as it is, so I want to trim out everything I can. The AI also needs some general tuning to run faster and make sure I don’t have any memory leaks or excessive garbage collection.

Effects
While I love the style of the game and think it’s gorgeous when it runs at 60FPS, it’s still a bit bland. It’s lacking anything that makes you go “Wow” or even “Neat.” I think what’s needed here are more of the effects that make the game feel more alive, and I’ve begun adding those.

Defense Mode and Editor
Defense mode and the editor need testing and bug fixing. I play skirmish and challenge maps a lot, but defense doesn’t get as much love. The editor, likewise, hasn’t seen any work or bug fixing in a while. There are also several bits of the game that need finishing, like the victory screen.

Map Sharing
I need to create a site for BattleGrid where I can support map submission, viewing, and downloads. I plan on letting players upload, rate, and download maps from the server. None of this has been set up yet.

Music
I’m not a composer, so this is going to be incredibly difficult for me, even though I know the style I want.

Goals for June
I’ve been playing a lot of Diablo lately, so I’ve cut back on how much I expect to get done. For June, I just want to get those extra effects in, and maybe some bug fixes for the editor and defense mode. I’m also planning on looking into what it would take to rewrite my AI as a finite state machine. I like behavior trees better, but my AI is so simple a state machine may work just as well.

Since I’m kind of stuck progress-wise until I figure out what to do about the draw calls in my game, I decided I’d do a post on some of the updated graphics in BattleGrid. Looking over the images I’ve posted in some previous posts, I realized that things have changed a lot since I posted those images.

New Tile Graphics
Tiles have gotten two big updates – first, I reduced the number of planes used for a single tile from three (base, owner highlight, and an extra highlight) to one, which cuts the number of polygons on a single map by two-thirds. Always a good thing.

Second, I found a really cool (and more importantly, free) circuit board drawing that I put on the tiles. I love the way it looks, and it makes the grid a little less barren.

The “contested” tiles also got a graphics update. They’re now “cracked” tiles. I like them, but they’re likely to see some updates before the final version:

They look best on defense maps where it looks like the gateways have “infested” the map. Speaking of which…

New Gateway Texture
The original gateway texture hasn’t been shown before, but it was using a noise-generation function to animate the portal. It looked neat, but killed performance, so I scrapped it. I use a flat texture and a particle system now, which looks pretty good:

If the gateway looks a bit like the obsidian portals to the Nether from Minecraft, that’s good because it’s exactly what I intended. If they don’t… Well, that works, too.

New Buttons & Windows/Dialogs
I’ve said before I hate the gradient backgrounds on most of my buttons. The idea I’ve been thinking about for a while now is using scan line backgrounds, sort of like a holographic display. I finally created some, and I’ve updated practically the entire UI to use them.

The new “holographic” buttons come in two styles – the main menu buttons:

And the window/dialog style:

The dialogs themselves are supposed to look a bit like a holographic display. They’re lacking in depth, though, but with my new UI framework, I should be able to eventually do something about that.

The new UI uses a package called “NGUI”, which is actually pretty cool. I’ll write a separate post about NGUI soon, since it has totally changed how I think about the UI.

New Factory Model
The last time I mentioned factories, I said the factory was likely to see another model update, and they have. The new model looks a lot like the original:

However, this one is animated, so when it’s building the “wings” fold down and spin:

It looks pretty cool in action. I also added a “platform” under the factory to make it a bit easier to tell that the factory covers 9 tiles. The platform isn’t in these images because I took them before I added it. Maybe next time.