Show HN: A deterministic update to my tough-as-nails 2D unity mobile game
breakstepstudios.com
I don't often see a lot of game dev content on hacker news, so I thought it would be fun to add some!
I just spent the last 5 months updating my mobile game Command Center Earth to version 2.0.0. The trailer on the website posted is a culmination of all that work!
The funny part is that while the "Fully Deterministic" refactor made to the game only gets a small callout in the trailer, it's what took the majority of the time! I could have never possibly imagined how much time, energy and testing it would take to get the game reproducibly deterministic with Unity! And even with all that work, I can't 100% guarantee that it is deterministic across all devices (although my testing shows things hold together on all devices I've tested). All things considered though, I'm very happy with how things came together!
In addition to the deterministic refactor, I added 3 new levels to the game, 2 of which were only possible as a result of the refactor! Without it, all the bumping of those meteors (on Haxer & Frank) would have produced a different level scenario on each retry! Additionally, having things deterministic means that my leaderboard is now accurate to 0.01 seconds!
There were some big visual overhauls as well, but I thought the HN community might be the most intrigued by the determinism updates!
Thanks for checking out my game!
P.S. I plan on writing a blog post on all that I've learned, in the hopes that the next developer to come along has a better go of it than I did btw.