Devlog disponible en français ici

__________________________________________________________________________

It has now been a week since the Unity version of HopDrop has been on the shelves of itchio, and more than a year and a half since the migration began. Changing the game engine if it ends up changing nothing apart from the fluidity of the gameplay and the resolution, that would be a shame. There's a lot to talk about, so this week let's take stock of the major technical changes that have taken place in the project.

1- The most obvious, resolution and framerate

These are obviously a few things that jump out at you, the resolution of HopDrop on RPG Maker VXace was really weird (544*416 pixels) and was not extensible, playing it on a 2K screen at 120 fps is a real challenge . However, now the resolution of the game adapts to the player's screen. If the game is at constant 60 fps and no more energy intensive than the RPG Maker version, it can be played at any resolution that is 16:9. It would be possible to be able to play it at 120 fps, but in the absence of tests, of the necessary equipment for this and of necessity for this type of game, 60 constant fps is very good... Although a adaptation for playing with 120 fps should not be excluded for console ports.

2- Use of the physics engine

The fluidity of the gameplay goes hand in hand with the resolution and the stable refresh rate. Add to this that RPG Maker, regardless of the version, does not have a physics engine, or it is very limited. This engine is designed for tile by tile, and ignoring it is very difficult or otherwise suicidal. Making a platform game under his conditions was risky. Regardless of the inclination of the stick, there was a button to run and it's not very intuitive. However, with Unity we are now on a pixel by pixel basis and the top speed is determined by the inclination of the stick, which is already more intuitive. Finally, the presence of a real physics engine changes a lot of things.

3- The GPU is the best ally of graphics

This may sound like an aberration for some persons, but RPG Maker games are not designed to take advantage of the GPU. There is indeed RPG Maker MZ which requires a graphics card, but it is for the use of Effekseer... Which exports spritesheets, so in the end the games do not really use the GPU.

However, on Unity the GPU (or the part dedicated to graphics in the microprocessor/SoC) and the rendering of visuals go hand in hand. Without a more advanced graphics engine, it is impossible to make nice post-processes, beautiful shaders, light and particles in real time.

Let's take a very concrete example: water. On RPG Maker, it was an animation that took 3 frames which changed frames every 20 frames, and it therefore quickly became repetitive and not very satisfying in the end... Especially when you have an oceanic world early in the game (the Pacific Islands) this becomes quite obvious. However on Unity, I have a shader to make the water, which does not have the constraint of the number of frames because the only image used is a mask to animate the edges. To create this appearance of water, we use voronoi noises which move randomly to give a more organic effect. Here are some videos to compare:

That's done for this week. Next week we will talk about the differences in the universe. Stay tuned!