The game finally has a face. Out of several rounds of logo designs I picked one I call R01: a big white GUNS INC. in Oswald Bold, where the I is being printed, yellow layer by yellow layer, under a white nozzle. The game icon follows it: a white G being printed on a dark tile. You can see both on the title screen now, and on this website.
The first trailer is cut too. I built it the way I like gameplay trailers: short cards on black, mostly the game itself, the name standing at the end, and PRE-ALPHA FOOTAGE on every frame. Every take was recorded in 4K inside the game, including a real roadblock filmed from the front and four real players standing in front of the Comet.
Then I looked at the frame counter on my own PC and saw about 40 FPS in places, on a machine that should laugh at a low-poly game. So I measured. The game was held back by the main thread, not the graphics card, and two culprits stood out.
The waypoint display was asking every passer-by in town, every frame, whether they could become a customer, in a way that grew with the square of the town's population. And 12,702 grass tufts were each their own object with shadows. Now the display checks the people near you and in view first, and the tufts are merged into 73 pieces when the game is built. In my test runs at 1080p, downtown went from 106 to 292 FPS, and the little stutters from garbage collection are gone.
Next up is something lighter: a kart circuit. Out at Mirador there is a track with eight karts, a starting gantry, and room for four friends plus bots. More on that soon.
