Not the biggest Metallica fan these days but we had a great day today with the project and even Unity (WHAT ARE THE FOOKING ODDS?) so let's celebrate with a cringey metal song.

Started with a bit of despair before getting to work. I decided to try out the Unity 6 preview and saw no performance increase, was hit with a terrible bug, and I left pretty deflated. ON TOP OF THAT the news came out that the new Unity CEO was replacing Jim Whitehurst whom IMO represented the last hope of this forsaken engine ever getting its sh*t together. In that moment I honestly felt like all might be lost, that this project was doomed to failure and obscurity along with most all Unity projects in development. It's a bit  terrifying when you realize we're all dependent on one another for all this gamedevs stuff to come together and work.

This crazy, mad world is full of curveballs.

Despite my better judgement (Ha, as if!), decided to soldier on with Unity 6, and we were able to sort the bug, and turns out there weren't more major issues awaiting us, (aside from some repository bugs that are manageable). The new CEO looks solid upon further research, and Jim Whitehurst is the head of the board of directors at Unity. That's F*CKING GREAT!

Call me old school but they're both fathers, they both seem to give a damn about the engine, and they seem to give a damn about hard work and making cool stuff. Could be wrong, but who knows, maybe this sh*t show is turning around.

Turns out we were able to get some solid performance gains from updating to Unity six, the framerate of the game is now butter f*cking smooth, and the performance hits only appeared on web builds during loading moments.

Builds were taking about 30 mins a pop to crank out, but after gritting my teeth and diving deep, we did a LOT of adjustments to sounds and loading and I found an area in the editor where you could preload various assets to avoid that hiccup moment where sound and texture files need to load on impact effects and new fish loading on screen for the first time.

Today was a great fooking day. The downside was it was a slog, but that's gamedev. I was even able to get the game running on Iphones which has routinely been an issue. Unfortunately, I had to undo all the preloading to get it running on that platform, so all the performance issues came back, and IMO it's more important the game run well on half the platforms than run like a sloppy, stuttering mess on others, even if those stutters only happen the first time something loads.

So my plan for the future is to try to reduce the # of sounds and textures and try to get this game really small so we can preload everything AND get it running on all platforms. I love the idea of this game only being like 25 megabytes like the good old days, but I really gotta poke around and ditch unnecessary assets. Hoping I can reduce audio file size without making it sound like garbage.

The input lag on screen touch DOES still occur, which sucks, but god damn the game runs so friggin' good on phone now and on web. It really finally feels quality and I know where to go to get rid of these stutters now in the web build, it's all about the preloading of assets.

Captured a bit of yesterday, most of it was just waiting on load bars converting files and creating builds.