As I typically do after working on a project I would like to do a postmortem about Micro Quest to look at what went well and what could have gone better. As far as the team goes, there were not any major issues. There were a few instances where work could have done to a slightly higher standard, such as unclean code or overly high poly counts, but those are minor issues and not unexpected at this level. One of the major issues we had from the start was poor organization. There were several attempts throughout at maintaining a trello board for tasks but team members would often stop using this after a week or so. This made it much harder to review and manage tasks for the team. Additionally this led to some wasted or poorly prioritized work. Along with the organization issues, communication was never quite as good as it should have been. There were frequently times were I was unsure of what certain team members were doing. Going with that, our stand ups and checkouts were never quite ...
After adding in the grass barriers to the game last week we immediately ran into performance issues and saw our framerate drop from consistently over 80 fps to roughly 3 fps. This is obviously a huge issue that we needed to resolve otherwise the game would be unplayable. I spent part of the weekend looking into various ways to help deal with this issue, such as occlusion and draw distances. Unity automatically does some occlusion so I focused more on the draw distances. Mitch and I fired up the build today to try and work through the current issues. While implementing the new draw distances we ran into some issues which I will get into in a moment. To do draw distances we used unity's built in layer culling distances. By doing this we could set the grass to a much lower draw distance while still allowing the play set and other set pieces to be very visible even from a distance. This worked quite well and helped bump the framerate back above 60 fps. As for the issues we encounte...