Alpha v6.0 Progress Update

I've been hard at work figuring out how to increase performance. See the video for the current comparison. I have a new render system that does a better job of culling unviewable objects compared than before. It's also more aggressive at removing small objects to save on performance. There are other improvements as well, but it's this new render system that's helping the most.

I apologize for the video's poor quality. I didn't really plan that out. The fps is hard to visually differentiate, but trust me the fps number really go up.

I admit that I spent a week on ideas that I thought would improve performance, but resulted in very little to almost no improvement. In one instance, it made the performance worse! So much hair pulling for naught, but it is what it is.

I have a better understanding on what causes performance drops in my game. As obvious as it sounds, the laggiest areas are when you can see half of the village from a particular angle. Because there are no castle walls blocking your vision, I am forced to render all those buildings!

With the new 100 fps on the biggest level, I do not have to worry as much about addressing the laggiest areas. That being said, I would like to start doing two things that can help future-proof performance while adding some new content to the village. I will start some of these ideas for this update.

1) Add more village scenery that isn't just buildings. Buildings are busy so replacing even 25% of them with simpler village scenery can help performance. It will also make the village look less samey which is also great. It's also a great place to add small ways to interact with the gts. I have an idea for small shrines where you can offer food in exchange for a buff or item, while the gts grows just a little bit. I am interested in more ideas, gameplay focused or just for fun.

2) Add line-of-sight blockers to some castle walls. This is to help reduce instances where you can see too much of the village, hurting performance a bit. They can be simple doors that act as teleports. They can be dark souls fog that just block your vision. They can be walls that require the player to dig under. I could even add walls that require the player to shrink to get past.
As a final idea, long long time ago I had someone suggest that certain tiles have a magic aura around them. The aura can act as a fog for blocking line-of-sight. Being in the aura could provide some benefit to the player, and also boost gts growth if her foot happens to be inside. A win-win don't you think?

And no matter how many line-of-sight blockers we add to the village, we will always be able to see the gts' smile above. Isn't that just swell?

I still haven't optimized destruction and terrain terraforming. So to be on the safe side, I plan to finish the update at the end of September.