Performance

Believe it or not, I was being mega dumb when I first made this. The easiest way to get a model-accurate collider is to use “Trimesh Collision” which basically means every triangle that makes up the model is translated into a physical triangle for the physics. This is pretty neat, especially for models that have gaps in them. But since most of the models:

1. Don’t have gaps (or at least gaps that are meaningful for the gameplay)
2. Are roughly 2k triangles
3. Are present at least two times in the game space

This became a lot of triangles for the physics system to process. This was especially present in the last stage of the game where Teardrop follows the player around. I actually have a blend of navigation mesh pathing combined with raycast based avoidance steering to make a slightly more organic movement system (which argueably is wasted since the player never sees her move all that often. But hey, YOLO)

I converted most of the game’s models to using a simplified collision mesh and it drastically increased performance. There’s likely even more tuneables that could push performance further, but unless anyone complains about it directly, I’ll assume that there’s nothing wrong.

Sensitive Content

Another factor of being “mega-dumb” when I first made this game was not recognizing that the sexual themes and imagery in the game is enough that it could make people uncomfortable. It’s still contained in my original vision for the game, and the narrative that I made (mainly in my head, it’s not really there in the gameplay).

Anyway, I tried to resolve these past mistakes by adding two key features. Now there is an Itch IO “sensitive content” popup for users looking at the page. And at the top of the description I list the specific variety of sensitive content. (Since sensitive could mean any number of things.)

I do wish I could add that specificity to the Itch IO categorization, since AFAIK that sensitive content is primarily used for pornographic games, and I don’t imagine this game fits in there. (I actually originally imagined Teardrop as an “Anti-Monster-Fucker” type monster, again due to narrative I didn’t really include in the game lol)