Battletide

Battletide was my first game made with Photon (PUN). It was a multiplayer FPS where the players competed to get monopoly of all the projectiles. I learned a lot about performance optimization in this game, due to the fact that I used a higher-quality resource pack than I had used for other projects. It didn’t initially run very well, but after some optimization I managed to get it running at a solid 60fps.

Mechanics:

• 20 projectiles are added to the game per player.
• Players start with 10 projectiles each, and the remaining 10 are placed in a ‘pool’.
• The un-claimed projectiles spawn randomly over time at different locations, players seek to pick them up.
• Players can shoot their projectiles at others, it takes 4 hits to ‘kill’ a player.
• When a player dies, they drop all their projectiles at the point of their death, and respawn at a random location.
• When a player shoots and misses, the projectile is dropped at the location where it hit.
• The first player to capture 75% of the projectiles in the game wins.

What I learned:

• How to use Photon’s networking system (PUN).
• How to use profiling tools in Unity.
• How to bake lighting, and best practices for lighting (improve visual quality and performance).
• How to make modular components (C#) and prefabs in Unity, and how to improve my workflow with them.

What I would do differently if I did it again:

• I would add a timer, so that if no player has won after a certain amount of time, the player with the most projectiles wins.
• I would add a lobby system.
• I would improve the player controller. The one used in this game comes right out of the Unity Standard Assets, and it’s not very good.
• I would improve the crosshair, make it more dynamic and add in a recoil/accuracy system.
• I would make the minimap use a pre-baked texture, instead of using a realtime top-down orthographic camera.