Warhammer 40.000: Tacticus (2021-today)
Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus ™ is a turn-based tactical strategy game set in the eternal conflict of Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 Universe. Experience the intense battles of the Space Marine, Imperial, Chaos, and Xenos on the go!
Tacticus is the biggest project I worked in so far. To get right to the details of it, here is what we/I did:
For nearly two years, Tacticus was a fork of Rivengard, keeping it as upstream, since we were still building new features that we wanted Tacticus to have as well (e.g. guilds). The first year contained a lot of adapting the graphics and style to the new game, as well as adding a few new rules to the battle system, e.g. the concept of "weapon hits" and "cover", the latter being what I implemented, since it was possible to do this on the pathfinder level without touching abilities.
Eventually, however, we severed the link between Rivengard and Tacticus, since the merges became more and more complicated, taking multiple days, since we missed a good workflow to improve things on the Tacticus side without having to do the effort twice (if it affected prefabs).
Since the game grew a lot, we also started to run into loading time issues, leading us to improve our asset bundle and in general async loading system and integrate the (at the time "new") C# async commands into our workflow.
In the past months I shifted my work from feature development to performance tasks, since the game became very large in player's RAMs, approaching 2GB after 200 minutes of play time (on average). While doing so I got accustomed to native Xcode memory debugging tools, the Unity memory profiler, debugging asset bundle life cycles, tracking and unloading UI when necessary, and reporting memory usage data to our own tracking databases. It's still a lot to do, but we are slowly getting there!
To leave on a high note, however, we are still impressed by how well our battle system holds up. At this point we have over 200 unique abilities, we've added a ton of special cases, automatic, random 24/7 battle testing on devices, test suites, error reporting and much more, but the foundation of the battle system is still unchanged from what it was in Rivengard, holding up incredibly well.