Weekly Devlog: Week 11 of 16

Hey friends! Tyro here. I want to touch on a couple things this week as I do not have a new build nor any major changes to report as of late. However, I'm finally over that bronchitis so I'm at least able to get around more than I could before. That being said, here's what's happening. 

Last week, Kaiden had mentioned that the scale of the assets we are using are kinda all over the place. The reason why, is because I have been doing a fat "game-dev no-no" this entire time; The Pixels Per Unit values in the Unity editor are different for a very large number of sprites. For those who don't know, pixels per unit is what Unity uses to help measure the size of a sprite and generally speaking how much space it's size is equivalent to. For example, if my camera is 200x200 pixels, and I have a 10x10 sprite, setting the pixels per unit to 5 will make the 10x10 sprite equivalent to 20x20 pixels on the screen. This also means my camera is now equal to 40 units in width. The trick is to balance the scale of your pixels per unit alongside the size of the orthographic camera in the scene. When you don't do this, it results in a good chunk of artefacting and visuals that don't render quite as clearly as they should be. This is at least partly why up until now the player sprite as well as other parts of the game look more pixelated more than they likely should be. For those who know this, it is likely more obvious to you, but there may even be some players who have zero clue that this kind of issue even is an issue. That being said, many of the prefabs/building blocks of the game were made even with these off-kilter PPU values, and therefore need reworking not so much that their pixels need redrawing, but that they need editing so they fit like they're supposed to at a scale that they are supposed to have. 

One of the bigger issues of this that I am heavily concerned with is the game's physics and how changing the scale of objects will affect them as a result.  Namely, player movement, which if you have played the game, understand to the fullest extent that it is the core of the game's mechanics and relies HEAVILY on Unity's physics systems. This change will probably take longer than others and It's entirely likely I need to re-draw certain sprites, but it'll depend on what there is down the road. However, there's a major upside: It means that once finished the game should render way cleaner and the game's sprites should come out in a much more visually appealing way. That being said, it may mean certain aspects of the game could be held off for a week or so depending on what gets broken and what needs changing once this is all implemented. 

As always, Kaiden and I will always be posting updates as we have been for the past few weeks. See you then!
-Tyro.