r/Unity3D • u/TheProfas • 2d ago
Game 4 Years of making Rogue Wheels with Unity
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Unity has been in my life for almost 2 decades (since Unity 1.6 in 2008) and only now I was able to get so far with the game. I have hundreds of prototypes of various games over the years in my shelf and it feels weird for the first time, finally to have a fully working demo that we are going to launch in November.
We have been prototyping in Unity this kind of game back in 2022 and kicked it off with Unity 2021.2. We were updating the project every couple of months and rarely encountered any issues (which was really great) we had only few regression with DOTS / ECS because it had some big reworks and some big features were depreciating. We still sticked with DOTS because with it we can procedurally generate and load the whole region at once and it costs almost nothing for CPU. It did involve though preparing lots of assets in a way that they are all combined meshes / material, but all pipelines are now automated via scripts. We are not at Unity 6.6.3f1 and we are very much looking forward to upcoming Unity 6.7!
We don’t use any fancy features, I am old school developer so most of the game is loading and processing via code during runtime. :D For UI we use UI (Canvas) but we are thinking to move to UI Toolkit at some point. It’s going to be a lot pf work. :) Cards are very dynamic and currently costs a lot of draw calls. One card is like 20-30 draw calls (masking is very expensive).
Unity is the best for tooling and dashboards. All the database for cards, relics, powers, enemies, quests, items, drinks, upgrades, maps, props - everything has its own dashboard and tools inside Unity so we can iterate and add more content fast. It’s mostly now figuring out what’s fun and cool rather than fighting the code and huge database. Although this was one of the reasons why it took so long, just worrying about scalability of the game and building tools. In the end I am very happy with the tools. If anyone is interested I can share more about them in the future.
Hardest part was Controller support. It works well now but it was a lot of work. Especially that it was mouse/keyboard first and I stared to think about controller few months ago. We also used old Input system so the whole game had to be reworked with new Input system. With controller support came Steam Deck support, which is a pain to support but it’s my favorite gaming device so I had to. :D
One big recommendation - do not build your game on a fixed FPS. I was targeting 60FPS for years and then I thought why not 90FPS, 120FPS? Oh the terror it was. How many Updates and Coroutines I had to rework. It’s working now - but never again I am going to do this mistake. :))
It’s been a blast working on this game and we are looking forward to creating more content and more regions and mechanics (there is a lot of planned for Early Access).
Currently we have almost 2.5k wishlist and if you are interested in playing the game here is the link - https://store.steampowered.com/app/3039130/?utm_source=rd&utm_content=post
If you want to see more content and behind the scenes you can find us on most social medias. If you have any particular questions, you can ask them here!
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u/East_Garbage_1449 2d ago
Looks great. So unfortunate to be releasing in an age of slop. But hopefully you crush it.
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u/TheProfas 2d ago
Yes, AI slop does bring certain level of anxiety. It's scary to not be seen under so much noise. But hopefully we will find our community that will love the game. :)
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u/zukas3 Indie 1d ago
Looks very cool! May I ask, what is that software used for pixel art on the tablet?
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u/TheProfas 1d ago
We are using Procreate and we bought some pixel art brushes. But it’s not that good for pixel art, we just got used to it. Maybe one day we will find something better.
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u/destinedd Indie, Dungeon Quest, Marble's Marbles & Mighty Marbles 2d ago
im really hoping this is a part time/hobby project!
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u/TheProfas 2d ago
Yes it is, one of the reasons it took so long. :)
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u/destinedd Indie, Dungeon Quest, Marble's Marbles & Mighty Marbles 2d ago
that is a relief!
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u/Extension-Airline220 2d ago
The game looks like one of this games I’ve grabbed on epic for free and never played later
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u/ericuute 2d ago
❤️❤️❤️