Had a great time celebrating the end of 2022. Looking forward to an exciting 2023! Post Views: 755
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Optimizing for Memory
Memory frequently gets the least attention when optimizing video games, especially when it comes to indie games, which are usually smaller in scope. Saleblazers, however, is a very big game. Long load times, lag spikes when spawning, blue screens, and bloat can become major memory issues. Light games that can run on lower end machines […]
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Interning at Airstrafe
We really enjoyed hosting Rocco Wu and Michael Ford from the University of Southern California and Jacob Roberts-Baca from Stanford University this past summer. At Airstrafe, interns dive deep, get their hands dirty, and do really impactful work. We structure our internship program to provide students with meaningful opportunities for experiential learning and professional development. […]
The free Saleblazers demo is now live during Steam Survival Fest from August 1-8! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1419850/Saleblazers/. Saleblazers is a premium systems-based open-world multiplayer shopkeeping survival game featuring stylized graphics and a complex combat system. Build a fully simulated shop while surviving a perilous island environment with up to 7 friends. Please keep in mind that Saleblazers […]
After 2 years and 10 months, we finally have a Steam page! Check it out here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1419850/ We’ve also got a cool little gameplay trailer to go along with it. It’s been very exciting for all of us here at Airstrafe Interactive! Some of us haven’t launched a Steam page before, so it’s doubly exciting. […]
One of the most challenging things I have encountered on Saleblazers is creating seamless tiling textures that simultaneously use baked maps. Neither task is simple on its own and they’re inherently contradictory to each other. On top of that, we also need a material offset for readability and variance; for example, wooden planks that are […]
Mirror‘s a great tool for networking in Unity. Here are 2 things that we did to speed things up a little that I wouldn’t want to push to the official repo, but we did in our project with no repurcussions. Removing ClearAllComponentsDirtyBits We just straight up commented out this section in NetworkIdentity.ServerUpdate(). It was costing […]
We’re using Unity and Mirror for Saleblazers. At the time, there wasn’t a networking solution I felt comfortable with committing to. Photon’s great, but it has a high CCU cost over time. UNET was deprecated. I’m too dumb for custom solutions like RakNet. MLAPI was okay at the time, but seemed highly experimental. I think […]
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Pivoting Towards Fun
I’ve had to pivot quite a few times because I’m relatively inexperienced. Sometimes I just don’t know if an idea is good or not until it’s in my hands. I’ve always wondered if I should stick to an idea and commit to it until the end no matter what. Oh well. Too late! That’s only […]
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Hello!
Hi. I’m Michael Duan, founder and programmer at Airstrafe Interactive. In case you’re wondering—yes, it did take quite a bit of self-control to not write “Hello World” as the title of this initial post. We’ll be making blog posts here about our progress on Saleblazers, an open-world multiplayer survival game where you play as a […]