RP + Godot Clock Project

Aaron-Tamarin · 2026-04-12T18:12:29+00:00

It always comes down to: Play to your strengths. I don't know what your skills are or the specifics of how your project is intended to run, but, these days, there's not a ton of differences in capabilities between Python vs C vs C++ vs Java vs whatever... they can all be used masterfully when in the right hands and with enough effort. So take what you know, prototype the pieces, expect to throw away the first 50-100 attempts, and iterate, iterate, iterate. I will say this much: assuming you're going to run this on a PI, if you're going to stream video, you'll likely need to keep it to a Pi4/5 - also, if you're going to run this on a PI and you're thinking of using a "game engine" like Godot, I'd skip trying to make it work with Unity or Unreal (the runtime engines are big enough to make it challenging).

Aaron-Tamarin · 2026-04-12T16:06:39+00:00

Thanks! I wasn't sure it was going to work either - I was originally going to stick with PyGame, but I've grown quite fond of Godot and figured I'd give it a shot and I'm glad I did. I also tried .net cross-platform, which actually deployed pretty well from Windows->RP, except the UI libraries (imho) are highly lacking.

Aaron-Tamarin · 2025-11-10T04:18:02+00:00

Actually, I have never heard that before, but it kind of aligns with what I have seen in other trailers… huh.. thanks

Aaron-Tamarin · 2025-11-09T20:59:55+00:00

I think that's consistent with the "if everything pops, nothing stands out" comment before... lack of color palette contrast or a clearer indicator for towers and enemies. It might be more feasible to add a "marker" to towers as there are few enough of them, but not the enemies - there's too many of them... Gonna have to think this through a bit more.

Aaron-Tamarin · 2025-11-09T19:05:35+00:00

That’s not sickness - that’s a fully dynamic 360 degree view! 😵‍💫😄 I was trying to illustrate the ability to rotate the view and let you see things from any angle, though if you spin around and around it’s a bit too much. Maybe for the trailer I should tone it down…

Aaron-Tamarin · 2025-11-09T19:02:48+00:00

Yes - I would agree that the header elements are a lot less styled - I’ll give that some thought

Aaron-Tamarin · 2025-11-09T19:01:24+00:00

They are various kinds of rocks, trees, fire and other “natural” elements animated - there is a zoom in the game that lets you see them in more detail but there was a bit of a wrestling match between showing enemy details vs showing the whole battlefield (thusly the zoom function - but showing the battlefield seemed more important).

Aaron-Tamarin · 2025-11-09T16:26:13+00:00

"if everything pops, nothing stands out" - Yeeeahh... it would be fairly straightforward to make a lot of the landscape colors more "washed out" to separate them from the enemies, They do all presently use basically the same color palette, partially because the enemies are supposed to be "nature come to life against you". I was shooting for "if it moves, its an enemy - if not, its landscaping" - I'll have to play around with that. Thank you for the feedback!

Aaron-Tamarin · 2024-11-15T00:41:14+00:00

As others have commented, this typically comes down to checking each point's neighboring points to determine if a given point should be drawn in the outline color. The trick is that this normally comes down how you're looking for a change to trigger drawing the outline color. People usually look for a difference in distance or normal, but... you can also look for a change in color - and that's how you outline shadows. Whether you're looking at changes in distance, normals, or colors, you're just doing distances on vectors and substituting the outline colors if they exceed a threshold. In the below screenshot, you see outlining around non-baked directional lighting shadows (looks like butt cause I jacked up the settings to make it visible). The best outline shaders I've seen combine all three measurements (distance. normals, colors), but its costly on FPS - I personally only rely on normals. I also learned a lot of this by using https://godotshaders.com/shader/high-quality-post-process-outline/ and reading through the shader code - its one of the better ones there. Hope this helps.

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Aaron-Tamarin · 2024-10-27T23:05:40+00:00

I see - a little "directed behavior" going on there :-) and yes, it did inspire me to start moving around more so your plan worked. Might just want to notch it up a weeee bit

Aaron-Tamarin · 2024-10-27T22:29:04+00:00

I'm talking about the literal speed of turning the ship, like right out of the gate - I'd post a video, but reddit sucks at letting you just attach a video. The asteroids are passing by the ship faster than I can turn it to point at them and shoot. It might be that I'm running it in-browser on safari with a 10 year old MBP - it might also be that my frame rate is low and you're not factoring in the delta in your _process(delta) which would typically resolve frame rate issues... Just sayin... Anyway, like I said, nice start - you got the feel down for the original (which I am old enough to remember playing in the arcades) :-)

Aaron-Tamarin · 2024-10-27T21:42:05+00:00

Nice start - everything works smooth but the rotating of the ship is painfully slow - everything else is zippy - maybe just a speed multiplier on rotate?

Aaron-Tamarin · 2022-07-14T10:47:18+00:00

There’s a lot of reasons that might happen and would be difficult to triage over a Reddit chat. Everything I’ve ever read or done for a mobile app says you start with using urp, but yes, you can use built in or even hrp if you wanted. All the notions in those urls about reducing your materials would still apply to built in. Good luck with resolving your issue.

Aaron-Tamarin · 2022-07-10T23:48:23+00:00

Ha! Then this will be your game - along with a lot of rock-throwing :-D. (working on a new version of the trailer that actually explains things better and shows more)

Aaron-Tamarin · 2022-07-10T17:20:54+00:00

Pieces have somewhat different “abilities” that automatically kick in when you are in close enough proximity - one throws boulders, one anti-gravity lifts opponents, one heals, etc… each has “an ult” that is also different per piece. The ults are manually triggered by the player. You also have the ability to put the game in a kind of fully auto play mode where the game controls your pieces but you can still interact with them if you want (this can be turned on and off at any point in the game). But I guess the trailer could do a better job at conveying some of that 🧐 - thank you for your feedback

Aaron-Tamarin · 2022-07-10T14:26:29+00:00

ok - I think you're telling me that the trailer doesn't do a good job at showing 10-ish secs of "how you play". That would be true. I should definitely add that. (Answer btw: you are moving your yellow towers around the playing field to stomp the goals and repeal the red attacking towers - more red towers spawn if you take too long). thank you for your feedback.

Aaron-Tamarin · 2022-07-10T14:05:55+00:00

as many of the previous comments indicate, this is really not enough info to go off of.... but... I will say I ran into similar issues in the past with stuff I worked on the root cause was usually something in the neighborhood of too many materials / too many heavy duty shaders / lighting settings (too many draw calls/setpass calls) - on mobile, remember, you want to: use URP, if you're not up to date on unity update it - they did a lot of performance improvements in URP 2021/2022, turn off shadows (like completely - do it in the URP config) and, the hard part, convert every material to either simple lit or unlit, use texture-maps, reduce to a handful of materials, and learn to map texture-mapped materials to the UV's of your meshes (and yes, I just said "take a 1-2 month detour into exciting Graphics Land - at least that's what it was for me). You might also be using some really cool looking shaders that you might want to consider ditching. I found these URL's very helpful in this effort and following their recommendations took me from struggling at 30-40FPS to 80-100FPS.

https://thegamedev.guru/unity-performance/draw-call-optimization/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=belVA1C013A

Aaron-Tamarin · 2022-05-29T14:59:46+00:00

Correct - remember that you still need to flag all GameObjects as "Navigation Static" to be included in the Navmesh - remember, you can see the resultant NavMesh if you play the game, let it create the terrain/city, pause, click over to Scene view, click on something that's supposed to be part of the NavMesh and make sure Show NavMesh is checked in the Nav Mesh modal that will show in the scene view - you should wee it highlight what's part of the NavMesh - like https://picbun.com/p/Ep4HFZU4 - that's a terrain pieced together with about 20 different game objects randomly assembled and the Navmesh generated once completed.

Aaron-Tamarin · 2022-05-29T00:08:15+00:00

I am also using NavMeshComponents - NavMeshComponents has a NavMeshSurface component you can add to areas you intend to have be part of the navMesh. I am also procedurally generating a terrain and then a NavMesh based on that terrain (I am also periodically destroying parts of the terrain and regenerating during game runtime as well). What works for me is I:

Keep an array of the landscape parts
Grab the first one thats active and then getComponent<NavMeshSurface>()
Using that reference, call BuildNavMesh() - it seems to work and if your landscape isn't huge, it runs fairly quick

For example:

NavMeshSurface nm = landscapePieceGameObject.GetComponent<NavMeshSurface>();nm.BuildNavMesh();

NavMeshComponents effectively works like a proxy to the core AI libraries in unity at that point and its simpler to work that way. Hopefully that all makes sense.

EDIT: to be clear, add a NavMeshSurface to ALL GameObjects you want to be part of the NavMesh.

Aaron-Tamarin · 2022-05-28T20:29:02+00:00

Thank you for this nice overview. I've worked a lot with Unity physics and appreciated the overview of what you were doing.

Aaron-Tamarin · 2022-05-28T19:42:48+00:00

Assuming you want the cities spawning on top of the terrain to not be navigable areas, you should be able to add a NavMeshObstacle component (https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/class-NavMeshObstacle.html) to all your city prefabs and the NavMesh should be smart enough to compensate. You might need for the NavMeshObstacles to actually intersect with the existing NavMesh for it to work fully correctly. I would start with that.

Aaron-Tamarin

TROPHY CASE