Website Refresh and Wiki
We recently changed the look of our game UI to a more readable design and since our homepage used the same design as our UI we decided that we should change the design here aswell. We also wanted to add a blog to our website for a long time so you could keep up with what we are adding to the game. After changing the general look of the page we also decided to rework the content. With the help of some great WordPress plugins we made everything look much nicer and clearer. There’s probably no need to show you a picture of the new website since you are already sseing it right in front of you. Below you can see the old UI (left) compared to our new look (right).
The last thing we worked on this week was creating a Wiki for Valnir Rok where players can find information about the game, such as recipes, buffs, conditions and items. It takes a lot of time to set up pages for each and every item but it will grow over time with our game.
Marketing and Content
This week I worked a lot on thinking about more content for the game. I thought about concepts for events that could happen on Valnir Island and tried to take a look on the game from the player’s perspective. What could a player miss on Valnir Island, what would he like to do and what would be his expectations?
I wrote down some ideas to make the clan-system more interesting and thought about possible items for our housing-system. Also I worked on special events that can suddenly happen when you roam the wilderness. Let’s see if they find their way into the game.
Optimizing
This week I continued with optimizing our code. I finished up the caching of animation parameters from last week and went over our code base again. I did simple optimizations like using for loops instead of foreach or variable caching. Also read a lot of threads regarding performance optimization as well as Unity Documentation (like Understanding Automatic Memory Management and Optimizing Scripts).
We have a lot less spikes now, but still have them though. Some of those are caused by UMA, which we use for our player and human NPCs generation. So besides script optimization I’m also looking into that, updating code base and experimenting with some settings like texture size etc.
More of Jobs and Bugfixes
This week I fixed some UI problems. The Job System should work properly now, although there is one little bug that needs to be fixed next week.
You can now modify your biography text without opening Windows while writing.
Item weight is now displayed with two decimal places.
Crafting recipes are now greyed out if you dont have enough ressources for them.