Balancing & Profiling

The Ceros Project

This week was mostly spent balancing, bug fixing, and optimizing The Ceros Project. I fixed up several bugs relating to the new UI, and updated the pointer system to allow for text pointers rather than only images for things like warning the player that one of their units died. I also updated the camera to have better collision & sliding and be able to be pitched up and down by the player.

My goal when balancing was to make this first tutorial level easily beatable since it was impossible to beat previously. I struggled a bit because I kept making it harder since I wanted there to be some challenge but I realized that the challenge shouldn't start on the tutorial level.

The game was also starting to get laggy so I spent some time learning the profiler, and I think I narrowed down the source of the lag to one UI function and having too many lights. I fixed the UI function via storing a function result so that function got called way less, and I fixed the lights by removing them from the colonists since there were so many on-screen even in the mid-game. I think there are also a few more sources of lag that I've yet to identify and fix.