Twinworld Game Reviews

Posts Tagged ‘Hex Heroes’

It’s no surprise that the Wii U is less powerful than a PC. We build Hex Heroes on a computer using the Unity engine which lets the game play on both PC and Wii U. However, the size of the game and all of its components determines how much memory is required on a device to allow it to play. The sheer number of hexagon tiles, trees, and other objects in the game continually made Hex Heroes unplayable on the Wii U, at least in the way that we originally built the game. In order to get it running, we had to revisit the very foundation of how the game is built.

Without getting too technical, our first job was building the map tiles automatically with efficiency. Originally, each hex tile was its own model. Now, the game creates only the visible portions of hexes, so that any sides of the tiles that would have been underground or obstructed by another hex aren’t created in the game at all. This is known as culling, and by not rendering what isn’t seen, we can really free up space.

With the map being built dynamically, we also changed the way objects (like resources, enemies, etc.) relate to the map. Each hex now knows if it has a resource, or if a Hero is standing on it, or if an enemy can move to it. It’s a much more deliberate method of keeping track of all objects in the game, and it offers us some interesting ways to use this feature in the future.

Although we finally got the map to run on the Wii U, there were still some problems with the way it looked. Unfortunately, what’s seen on our computers isn’t always what we’ll get when we run it on the Wii U. Here’s an example of how our hexes first looked when we ran the Wii U build. They’ve since been fixed 😉

Source: Hex Heroes Kickstarter Page