Tag

measurement

Development posts tagged measurement. Tags cut across the categories, so this pulls together work on the same subject from different parts of the game.

16 posts · page 2 of 2

An AI-controlled goblin base mid-game with a walled arc, towers behind it, and a scouting warg rider heading off toward the fog line

Game Design

How an RTS AI opponent thinks

Seven personalities, difficulty expressed as behaviour rather than as free resources, and an opponent that reacts to what its scouts have actually seen.

23 Jul 202610 min read

A grid of baked unit sprite frames covering the screen, with a browser crash page showing through behind them

Engine & PerformanceMaking things fast

Keeping a browser game inside its memory budget

Compressing the art seven times harder cut the download and did nothing for the crash. A decoded image costs the same memory whatever file it arrived in.

11 Jun 20269 min read

A vertex animation texture viewed as an image: a wide horizontal band of coloured noise, one column per vertex and one row per animation frame

Engine & PerformanceMaking things fast

Baking animation into a texture

Four hundred animated units is the worst thing you can ask a renderer to do. Storing the animation as an image instead removes the skeleton entirely.

18 May 202611 min read

A packed sprite atlas sheet of dwarf units and buildings on a transparent chequerboard

AI Tooling & PipelinesMachines making art

Shipping thousands of sprites to a browser

A dwarf versus goblin match downloads dwarf and goblin art and nothing else. Getting there took atlas packing, a format bake-off and a content hash on every file.

24 Apr 202611 min read