Taking a cut, New Unity, Performance, and Daves - Devlog 19/06

Burglary is too profitable. It's been very easy to build up money in the game in the past, because you can get so much from one mission if you get the right items. This needs to change to add some sense of difficulty and progression to the game, so as the first step in this, I've generously given a cut of your profits to the intel team and the getaway driver.

Ignore the blank space, that's a separate bug on the to-do list

As part of this, I revamped the goal board a bit to make it cleaner and easier to read. These cuts will be adjustable in future, and will be dependent on the intel team and getaway vehicle you select. Some getaway vehicles like bicycles won't require a driver, so in future these will save you some money on your haul profits. If you alert the resident and the cops are called, the getaway driver is given a larger cut due to the extra danger. 

New Unity Version

This is probably not as exciting if you're not a developer, but this week I upgraded to the latest version of Unity, from the old 2019 version. This is always a big risk in Unity, because the people who make Unity love to ruin and break things. There were a bunch of weird issues to deal with as usual, but in general the upgrade was well worth it this time around. I now have much faster load times, and a bunch of great quality of life improvements

Performance

Continuing on the theme of boring topics, I've also being doing some performance work. Being much larger than the other levels, the mall level really put the game to the test performance-wise, and revealed some areas I need to work on further. Part of this work is improving the overall performance, and part of it is adding new options for players on lower-end devices to reduce the graphics and improve framerate. One major addition will be a view distance setting, which should give a big boost for players who need it.

Daves

And finally, we have Daves. I started working on some new room varieties for the mall level, since we don't have full randomisation. This is the first new room variation, Daves. It was suggested on stream by a presumably very hungry viewer, and features a bunch of delicious-but-not-particularly-valuable snacks. There may be some hidden cash inside though 👀

Dave leaves all of the food in-store overnight to save on staffing costs

If you haven't checked out the streams yet, do come by! I've been going live a couple times a week at twitch.tv/oliverjoshdev and taking suggestions on what to implement. I have some fresh VIP roles, which I'll give out to patrons who message me their twitch username here on Patreon. There are a limited amount so first come first serve! (I'm going live today at 2PM EDT, so swing by if you're around)