Abandoned Sheep is a small team developing the 3d Puzzle game in Unity, Schrodinger’s Cat Burglar. Their game is available to wishlist on steam.
The Challenge
Abandoned Sheep had created a beautiful and slick puzzle platformer. The studio was going to move 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, giving us key areas that would be invested and reported on. We then conducted a short but intensive technical analysis of the vertical slice from the beginning. Our focus was primarily on game 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, were employed to understand where the game was the most performance intense, and why.
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, lights and shadows, post processing, etc.
We ended by discussing the report with the studio, allowing us to dive into the expected impact of the suggested methods to improve performance. 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.