Battletoads Tech Talk: The challenge of 11 game modes
summary
Battletoads development explains concrete fixes: implements Depth of Field via a second background camera and render texture so sprites write depth, builds a CPU-saving CullingGroup with an iCullable interface to sleep rigidbodies and disable offscreen SpriteSkin/PlayableDirector work, and ships a pooled visual-effects manager plus a bespoke manual-emission system that reduces one shmup impact effect from 68 Particle Systems to 5, enabling per-impact effects at 60 FPS with no runtime instantiation.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (30)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:19Agenda
- 0:44What is Battletoads?
- 1:30Depth of Field
- 2:02Depth buffer
- 2:43Setting up the cameras
- 3:41Setting up the Render Texture
- 4:09Adding and removing the command buffer
- 4:44Composition in action
- 5:20Summary
- 7:10How can we make the Culling Group API work for us?
- 7:55Culling system design
- 8:43ICullable interface
- 9:28Example ICullable implementation
- 10:09Creating the Group
- 10:45Notifying the ICullable instances
- 11:11Some examples
- 13:42Culling: What did we end up with?
- 14:23Visual effect system
- 15:38Referencing a VFX
- 16:23Populating the required pools
- 17:16Visual effects management
- 17:51Editor tools and debugging
- 19:21Shmup impact effects
- 19:54Anatomy of a visual effect
- 20:09One-shot effects
- 20:54Simple example: Emitter
- 21:18Simple example: Effect
- 22:13What does this mean?
- 22:44Lessons from 11 game modes
related talks
59mPlaying Video Games One Frame at a Time
01h 00mCritical Path Coding
01h 00mThe Story of Oddworld: Soulstorm.
45mAnother World, a Beautiful Lesson in Software Architecture
47mStorytelling Beyond Words
01h 00mThe Story of Beatbuddy
23mDOOM Postmortem: 30 Years of DOOM
49mVisual and audio alternatives in video games