[Read the original post at Unity Game Performance Pillars — The Gamedev Guru]
What's going on with The Gamedev Guru? What can you expect from this blog in the game performance scene?
Here, let me tell you what's cooking... And what I have planned for you.
Quick Navigation
The Plan — The Game Performance Pillars
[Week 1] Professional Performance
[Bonus] Live Q&A on Game Performance
What Happened This Weekend?
I got very upset, I admit...
And here's why.
This weekend is going to be awesome, I thought.
Just pizza and videogames.
After spending 7 years waiting on a new release, I finally got my hands into Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.
I started playing on a Friday after work... and failed the tutorial.
What a great start!
A few hours in, I was fully immersed into the medieval setting.
My speciality? Delivering sheep to other villages to earn enough denars to hire the troops no one had any use for.
The next moment when I regained real-life awareness, I looked at the window and somehow it was bright... unexpectedly.
Shit, it's 5AM, I cursed.
I sneakily went to bed, trying my best not to wake up my girlfriend (she's usually quite opinionated about sleep interruptions).
I had the perfect excuse... "I was doing game development research.".
Luckily, I didn't need to use it. I'm pretty skilled at being sneaky, apparently.
The next day (actually, the same day) I played a few more hours, but...
It didn't go as well.
I was excited to start my first 500+ battle.
The game was not performing well.
You know, I can handle sub-30 FPS games (after all, I work optimizing VR titles that often run below that).
But there's something I cannot bear...
Game Freezes
Every time I raised the bow to shoot an arrow, the game froze for almost 3 seconds, making me miss all targets.
Take a deep breath, Ruben.
And so I took a deep breath and decided to try the sword instead.
As soon as I charged on my horse to an enemy and prepared to deliver the fatal blow, it froze again for a few seconds.
F*** it, I'm outta here.
Angry, I quit the game.
That's not how an excellent weekend should end.
That's the thing... Low-performing games creates a frustrating sensation that you MUST avoid at all costs in your games.
Low performance breaks immersion
Low performance leaves players frustrated
Low performance makes players refund the game
Really.
This is why performance matters so much for the success of your game.
We all have the same goal, right?
We do our best to publish that we can be proud of. A game that players will love playing. And a game that sells.
So after so much rambling, here's my point...
I'm about to reveal to you the plan I developed to help you optimize your game.
The Plan — The Game Performance Pillars
Over the weekend, I came up with a concept for The Gamedev Guru that I call The Game Performance Pillars.
Here's a glimpse of this concept.
The Game Performance Pillars — The Gamedev Guru
Here's how it works:
Do you want your game to be a success?
Do you want to avoid a big chunk of the 1-star reviews?
Do you want to work more on the features your players want, and less on the features they don't care about?
For all of this, you need to achieve game performance.
And here's what most developers miss: performance is not only about high frame-rates.
It's also loading times, battery drain, development productivity and working on what the users want.
So, what's the deal and how does this impact you?
As a subscriber of The Gamedev Guru, this is what you can expect to learn in the upcoming months...
[Week 1] Professional Performance
I'll share with you performance tips that will make you a better game developer:
Modern C#: under-utilized, yet powerful C# features
Build Pipelines: automate your builds, optimize your build times for lightning-quick iterations
Cloud Delivery: reduce the overhead of delivering updates to your players, sell your DLCs
Analytics: find out what works to avoid investing time on what doesn't
Tools: profilers, debuggers, scripts
[Week 2] CPU Performance
I'll show you some of my secrets behind running high-performing gameplay mechanics that your players can enjoy:
