Nurveil update journal Day 259


All Optimizing and no play, makes Rita a very dull boy

All Optimizing and no play, makes Rita a very dull boy

All Optimizing and no play, makes Rita a very dull boy

All Optimizing and no play, makes Rita a very dull boy

All Optimizing and no play, makes Rita a very dull boy

All Optimizing and no play, makes Rita a very dull boy

….. How much longer before we see the sun and move on to actual tasks?
I do not know how much more hours we can spend on this but if you find this blog please remember us ~

 

OH BOY! Let’s talk about 3D game asset optimization,  the holy grail of performance, and apparently the Achilles heel of the Nurveil project. (Crying while writing this) 

The game was full steam ahead. Everyone was pumped. The world looked incredible. The maps were golden, and Nur was punching and slashing and doing freaking backflips across beautifully crafted terrain. We were feeling it. Until...

The programmers opened the build folder.

A GIGA. AN ABSOLUTE GIGA-ZILLA-TITAN-OUS.

The Nurveil app was the size of a small continent with two mayors and a naked beach that somehow brings all the creepy tourists in. We’re talking over 1GB on mobile. On startup. Before anything had even loaded. I nearly cried. The phone wheezed. The app store laughed in our face. Our team stared at each other like we’d just built a AAA console epic and shoved it into a tiny cereal box.

Why? Because no one talks enough about the 3D asset bloat until it's strangling your entire project. Everyone’s in love with detail,since our game is taking such a rich cultural that has plenty of detail and patterns and trims.

Let’s be brutally clear:

• You do NOT need 120k poly models for a background pot. That’s not ambiance. That there, my friend, is a mobile seizure.
   
• You do NOT need 8K textures on a cat NPC that walks by once and never speaks to you again.
   
• You do NOT need complex shaders that simulate real-time algae growth on a fountain that 0.0005% of players would even find.
   

We were so busy being artistic, we forgot to be smart. A mobile game needs optimization. Without it, you’re just dragging a dead whale onto players' devices and asking them to have fun with it.

So now, post-giga-revelation, we’re redoing meshes. We’re crushing textures. We’re baking lighting. We’re sobbing over UVs. And every time we downgrade a 200MB file to a blessed 2MB, we feel our souls crawl back into our bodies.

Lesson?
No one cares how pretty your world is if it won’t load T_T
Art is beautiful. Optimization is survival! 

And Nurveil?
Nurveil’s gonna survive… smooth, light, and full of secrets. Just as it was always meant to be.

 

Also we started working on the VFX now as we optimize.