Abandoned Sheep is a small team developing ‘Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar’, a 3d Puzzle game in Unity. Their game is available to wishlist on steam.
The Challenge
Abandoned Sheep had created a beautiful and slick puzzle platformer. The studio was moving from a vertical slice phase to full production. Creating many more levels and assets in the process. Before embarking on this journey, the studio wanted to ensure their approaches, visuals, effects, and gameplay systems were going to run smoothly on a range of consumer PC hardware, including the SteamDeck.
The Solution
We began by discussing the existing known areas of concern with Abandoned sheep. Providing us key areas to investigate, report, and advise on. We conducted a short, intensive technical analysis of the vertical slice from the beginning. Our focus was primarily on performance, as this was an important area for Abandoned Sheep and one with potentially many underlying causes. This analysis was conducted with access to the game’s source code and assets within Unity. Unity’s builtin profiling and analysis tools, such as the frame debugger, and external tools like RenderDoc. Our analysis of early levels allowed us to understand and articulate where and what was the most performance intense.
Result
Among a number of smaller directed areas of investigation, graphics and rendering were found to be the main contributor to the game’s overall performance. This was compiled into a technical analysis report. Detailing the main causes of performance pressure in the vertical slice, discussing use of vert counts, shader complexity, texture map sizes, lights and shadows counts, post processing, etc.
The effort concluded with a discussion of the report with the studio. Allowing us to dive into the expected impact of the suggested methods to improve performance and address questions and theories from the developers after they had read the report. Perhaps most valuable, sharing the next steps and value vs effort estimations, that Actuator would pursue if it were tasked with improving and monitoring the performance of the game as its development continues.
Learn More
Their game is available to wishlist on steam on steam.
Read more about Abandoned Sheep on their website.