Heya Fuzzies.

It’s pudding here again. I may be on my short game development break but I’ve been considering making this post since the original FuzzBoob’s release.

How did Five Nights at FuzzBoob’s begin?

Fast forward a year and a bit, I hear news from Proteins (link in credits) that there was someone making a game.

I was put in the team as a co-developer. I was excited to work on my first non-university proj-

It was a fucking mess.

Every. Single. Asset. And. Variation. Was. It’s. Own. Image. At. Absurd. Resolutions.

The assets were around 8K resolution each, which had immense Ram and Filesize cost.

And by ‘It’s Own Image’ I mean the office itself had far too many large images:

1. Office with BlackOut
2. Office with lights Out
3. Office with Left light on and Right light off
4. Office with Left light on, Left door shut, Right light off 
5. Office with Left light off, Left door shut, Right light off 
6. Office with Left light on, Bonnie at door, Right light off
7. Office with Left light on, Bonnie at door, Left door shut, Right light off.
8. Office with Left light off, Right light on
9. Office with Left light on, Right light on
10. Office with Left light on, Right light on, Right door shut.
11. Office with Left light on, Left door shut, Right light off, Right door shut.
12. Etc etc. Hope this proves the point as there’s a lot more.

1. Stage with Freddy, Bonnie, Chica
2. Stage with Freddy, Chica
3. Stage with Freddy
4. Stage Empty
5. Stage with Freddy, Bonnie
6. Stage with Bonnie, Chica
7. Stage with Bonnie
8. Stage with Chica

And this carried on for all the other cams, the worst one being Foxy’s Cove with how many Bonnie Sign Variations there are.

But if they were images, how do they animate now?

1. Office Main
2. Left door
3. Right door 
4. Outer office Left Light
5. Outer office Left Light Bonnie
6. Outer office Right Light
7. Outer office Right Light Chica
8. Office buttons, etc.

1. Freddy
2. Bonnie
3. Chica
4. Stage

And this was a drastic change. The original source files went from 16gb to about 1gb.

But what about the Absurd resolutions?

In the Godot Definitive edition release, I didn’t have the luxury of resizing on import. So I went through and resized as many assets I could to fit in 1440p resolution. Not every thing got fully resized as there are a lot of frames in here. If I went any lower, it would have looked bad.

However, there was complaints of the game being poorly optimised. This is because I hadn’t found out you can create sprite atlases on Godot, as it is not in the documentation. But, since the assets are a lot bigger, these atlases are huge, some stretching up to 16k resolution. However, it reduced the draw calls for each individual image and majorly reduced crashing as overall it is technically less.

For the majority, this minor change adjusted the opinion to “It works great”.

But now we’re in the position of not *every* hardware can load these images. I believe this is why some people see Black or nothing instead of the images.

Can anything be done to improve?

• The ability to reduce Asynchronous loading. I created a system that allows me to begin loading scenes early. For example, when you click the buttons in the menu, the game immediately begins loading the next scene as it fades to black. However, for some computers two scenes are too much. Reduce Asynchronous Loading helps by waiting until the scene fades out, fully unloading the previous scene, and then loading the next scene. It’s why the load times are longer, but reduces crashes for others.
• Light compression. The assets now have a compression technique similar to Jpeg on their main atlas. This is almost indistinguishable but also reduces the ram usage heavily.

I’m going to look into seeing what can be resized more without hurting the quality too hard when I get back into developing this game.

However, I will not let this situation occur for future games I create. There was not much that could be done for FuzzBoob’s as I had joined late in terms of asset creation.

For those who want to make a game: Do research into assets before creating them. And use sprite sheets / sprite atlases whenever you can to reduce draw calls.

Finally,

and I hope you guys stick around for my other projects. This problem has been troubling me, and I wanted to be transparent about it.

If you have a question about this, feel free to leave a comment here or @twistcumet Glazed’s discord. I read each comment here.