Hi everyone!
Here comes a not so spectacular, but hopefully funny update for I Am Overburdened. As the name suggest version 1.2.5. is way more swift than the previous one, plus it is equipped with a nasty new trick to terrorize artifact hunters
Hallucination 2.0Please welcome "positive" hallucinations. Previously when you accidentally drank poison or a venomous creature attacked you, monster phantasms (non-existent hallucinated creatures) would be placed randomly on the following dungeon level.
This feature always felt fun, but a bit insignificant. Its impact was quite low because if you played a lot you could figure out in many cases which of the monsters are hallucinated and you never feared extra monsters when in a good shape (health and loot wise).
Now other entities (chests, pickup, etc...) can be hallucinated and their placements are influenced by the level templates and the dungeon generator. The new version is way more effective, a.k.a. confusing
If you have an existing save-game no worries. The new save files may be a tiny bit bigger (due to the more complex hallucinations), but the game is backward compatible.
Inventory trivialityA tiny ease of use feature. Now when opening your inventory while standing next to an item or opened chest the relevant item slot will be focused. The slot of the last picked up item still has priority though!
OptimizationI keep saying that I Am Overburdened runs on a toaster, but what does this mean and is it really true? Well, for the most part, it IS true. I have a 10+ years old laptop on which I test the game from time to time (1st gen 1.5Ghz Atom CPU, 1Gb RAM :O for real) and the game is able to run at 60 fps (not that it matters a lot with a turn-based game
but still). My work desktop is also quite modest so a performance mistake surfaces easily. The more taxing parts where the real problems lie are switching between screens and launching the game.
Checking lootSadly the inventory screen had a blatantly unoptimized implementation. Opening it could cause almost a second long halt on my older machine. It was still my original prototype implementation. Silly me, sorry for the inconvenience. I simplified the layout data of the screen, remade the loading algorithm and voila. Now it can load within the same frame of the press/click even on a simple computer.
A bit slowed down recording of opening the inventory in the old and the new version for comparison.Parts of these changes got into the previous version so you may have experienced the speedup to an extent already.
StartupSo on the before mentioned toaster, it took 5+ seconds to show the title screen after launching the game. This was mainly due to pre-loading almost all the assets and saved data so that handling the content while the game is running can be simple. I postponed tiny parts of this, but the logic largely stayed the same and instead I choose to simplify the majority of the game data to speed-up load times. Still not lightning fast, but I measured a hefty 40-50% win which is really nice
Was all this work worth it for faster startup and inventory opening? Yes, absolutely! Besides improving the user experience, I always had plans of porting the game to mobile platforms. In the last few months with all the optimizations I've done I believe it is going to run flawlessly without sucking the batteries dry
Tech talkSo I wrote a lengthy tips & tricks technobabble about how specifically I optimized I Am Overburdened.
I did not include it here, because it is full of technical jargon (code samples, profiling, data formats, and other generally boring stuff
). You can find it
on my blog in this post if you are interested in the nitty-gritty parts or if you think it should be here as well, just drop a comment and I make it happen
Don't say I did not warn you though
Upcoming?My hand is only a tiny bit better, but at least it is not killing me nowadays. I'm slowly and carefully working towards finishing the expansion for I Am Overburdened. Sorry for not sharing new details about it with this entry. To make up for it I'm going to post images and gifs showcasing some of the new monsters and items with the following update
For next time I'm planning to release another tiny graphical enhancement.
Thanks for reading my post and much love for your support.
Stay tuned!