Playing Around With the Web Build

I decided that I really wanted to make the web build a viable solution. We felt pretty strongly that it would increase the likelihood that people actually play it and rate it. I know when I was looking at the existing submissions for the game jam, I looked at all of the submissions except the ones that required a download. Granted, I plan on downloading them once the game jam officially ends to give them a shot but until then I didn't want to deal with the hassle.

Anyway, the last time I looked at everything, it looked like the assets from the asset packs we were using contributed to the bulk of the file sizes. Here is a reference of what the current project is.

As you can see, the textures are a massive chunk of the final build size. One thing I didn't try last time was removing all of the asset pack models from the levels and doing an "empty" build. That dropped the total build size by over 400MB! That is insane!

This build pretty much just included all of the custom models we have made plus some other things, like the skybox and snow texture. This was looking promising though, since it was under half the max size limit that Itch imposes. This gave me hope that a web build was actually possible. This could be taken further if we wanted to actually review all of our custom models and reduce the texture sizes as much as possible. That is a problem for later us...if we want to clean it up after the submission period ends...not very likely!

The problem was that the levels were now completely barren, except for the actual terrain. The main things I had removed were an outpost, trees, and some rocks.

Redoing the Outpost

I wanted to start with the outpost, since it was a focal point in the game and designates the start and end of the run. I found this little ranger station on the internet and decided to use that as the inspiration for our outpost.

I made an incredibly simplistic model and textured it in Substance Painter. I couldn't find a texture for the roof that I liked and went with a corrugated metal. Ideally, it would probably be something like shale tiles or thatch or something more period appropriate but none of those exist as default materials in Substance Painter and I was in a hurry.

It looks pretty rough under normal lighting but it looks half-way decent in game!

You may have noticed that there are now lights in front of the outpost. This was something I wanted to do for quite a while but hadn't been doing any real modeling for the project in a while. I whipped up this simple light pole to hang our existing lanterns off of. Super simple but effective. Now the Player spawns in a safe zone and it also adds a nice highlight when you see the lights of the end outpost in the distance.