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Nelson da Cruz
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Love Thy Framerate

This is pretty much "The Indie Dev's Guide to Not Shipping a Slideshow"
A lot of games have cool mechanics but if it runs at Low fps on your players' potato PCs, that might ruin sales and the overall fun.
Meanwhile, you're sitting there with your Gaming PC with a RTX 4090 wondering why steam reviews keep mentioning "optimisation" like its a greeting. 


Choose your Engine (the foundation that determines your fate)
There is no such thing as the right engine but there is definetly the one that will make things easier for you, this decision is pretty much like choosing your starter pokemon, except you cant change it later without starting over.

We went with Unity 6 URP (srp) mostly because of its performance options like:

It's pretty barebones and designed to be stripped down

Good batching options and a handy frame debugger

You can understand what's happening without a PhD in engine architecture.


Our games required 8 characters and 8 vehicles to be painting the floor simultaneously at high speeds, while they bumped into each other, all while hitting +60fps on a Steam Deck. +90fps on pc

 

 

Art Style:

Photorealism is boring and overrated. You know what's not overrated, a game that runs smooth like butter, especially for a racing game, makes the cars seem even faster. So stylized graphics is more of a get out of jail free card.

Hiding that your LOD system is basically "blob at distance"

Using 512x512 textures instead of 4K monsters (we even have a lot of 128x128 textures)

Making players think simplified geometry was an "artistic choice" helping asset production time.

Our paint effects are actually decimated and our paint colliders a simple cube, the style hides a lot of it.

 

 

The "We'll Optimise Later" Death Spiral  (A Horror Story in Three Acts)

Act 1: "This particle effect needs more particles! they should collide with the ground"
Act 2: "Why is the game running at 15fps?"
Act 3: "Ship it and patch it later" (Narrator: They never patched it 🥲)

True story: Someone once shipped a game with a Zbrush sculpt as a static character that had a cell-shaded look to make it look 2D, it could have been a PNG, it was 1million polygons.

 

 


Multiplayer  (Choose Your Own Suffering)

We chose distributed authority architecture because we do like to live dangerously, the tech is new, the documentation is scarce, ChatGPT doesn't know shit about it. Having the collisions work properly has been like herding cats. Juan has been living inside the matrix for months, trying to solve this.


Pro tip: If someone suggests multiplayer, ask them who hurt them. (jokes asside start with simple local multiplayer and have steam help you connect players instead of jumping into a concept that needs a more complex architecture)

 

 

The Sacred Commandments of Not Sucking

  1.  Profile Like Your Game Depends On It (Set performance targets early, find your minimum supported device)
  2. Pack Your Textures Like You're Moving Apartments (Got 4 channels in a texture? USE THEM ALL.)
  3. The Art of Faking It (Does that waterfall need actual physics? No, use a shader)
  4. Clean Your Project (Every random asset and unused plugin is like a tiny weight on your game's shoulders.)

 

 

Platform Reality Check 

Test early, test often, and don't forget to test on: