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Hi Folks.
Dungeoneer is finished! I finished it two days ago, implementing the end of the game, the instructions, and the credits. The game is now going through some bug hunting and refinement. Recent Facebook Memories posts that appear privately in my timeline have confirmed that Dungeoneer has been three years in the making, work starting on it in 2014.
I am extremely proud of this game! It’s been a major, long term project, which has consumed my life almost every waking hour of every day for those past three years. And I think the finished game is a wonderful adventure, telling a great story. But the reason for this post is to give you some insight into what it is like to create a huge game in Fusion.
I remember many years ago I was working on Shooting Stars 2. As the game file grew in size, I got concerned that perhaps Fusion couldn’t handle such large MFA files. When I hit 400Mb in size, and still very much at the early stages of the game, I decided to cancel it as I could see the game file size growing to insane levels and I wasn’t sure Fusion could do it.
When I started Dungeoneer, I did indeed know that the game file size was going to grow big, and yes, Shooting Stars 2 was not far from my mind in that area. But I’m happy to say that Fusion is a lot more robust than I gave it credit for. Dungeoneer is finished and Fusion managed to keep the game file together, but it did start to groan as the file size got very large.
Dungeoneer contains a movie folder. This folder is external from the game file and it comes in at 4.24Gb!
The actual MFA Dungeoneer game file is a whopping 1.03Gb!
When I hit around the 600Mb mark for that file, I started to get worried. I still had a lot of the game to do and now it was even larger than the Shooting Stars 2 game file when I canned it. Would Fusion handle all that was to come for Dungeoneer?
It did! But it did groan about it…
The first issue I encountered did indeed scare the hell out of me, and it continued to scare the hell out of me EVERY time it happened… Loading the game took about one minute. And I do mean one minute, roughly sixty seconds. It also took that long to save it. And sure enough, every time I added more to the game and clicked the save icon, I held my breath in hope it would save without any issues.
Then one day, a few months back, I clicked save and the hard disk light started flashing as Fusion saved the game. Time passed… Ten seconds… Twenty… Thirty… Forty… Fifty… Sixty… … … … And the hard disk light kept chugging!! After about another sixty seconds, and with the hard disk light still chugging, I got worried! That was over two minutes now saving the game, and all I had was the spinning Windows cursor… What was going on???
Another minute passed, and another!! That’s four minutes!!! I sat on my chair waiting and I literally did indeed think the game file was gone, it was corrupted!! This was not right!! About a minute more later, that’s five minutes total, the chugging stopped and the windows mouse pointer reappeared!!
Checking the file in Explorer, the file size seemed ok. But I was worried. I closed down Fusion and instantly launched it again and loaded up Dungeoneer again. That one minute load time was scary because I really did think I was going to get prompted by an error message saying it couldn’t open the file. But it loaded, it opened, and all was fine.
And so began what I came to know as the “Five Minute Saves!” These didn’t happen all the time, most times I got a one minute save. But as the Dungeoneer game grew, and the MFA file size grew, the five minute saves became more frequent! Suffice to say, a one minute save is scary enough, but to see the hard disk light chugging for five minutes can really break you out in a sweat!
And just so you know, this happened on multiple computers, not just one. So I don’t know what Fusion was doing during these five minute saves, but it did indeed save my game just fine, while scaring the hell out of me in the process! LOL!!
The second issue I encountered was very slow launching of the game. Again, this didn’t happen all the time, most times I would launch the game, or the frame, to play it, and it would launch within a few seconds. But there were times when I would launch the game or a frame, and it would take up to twenty or thirty seconds to launch. These, too, were scary moments but again, they always worked fine.
The third issue I hit was when Dungeoneer’s frame count exceeded 500 frames. It was after this was I found Fusion itself started to act erratically. Sometimes menus, such as the Jump To Frame menu, would display erratic frame numbers, jumping all over the place. And twice, and twice only, Fusion wouldn’t allow me to copy a frame when needed. First time that happened I really did think Fusion had given up but once I closed down and restarted Fusion, it worked fine.
So in the end, Fusion did it! It is robust enough to allow you to build BIG games. It will groan about it as your file size, and frame count, grow, but it’s a sturdy piece of software that’s very capable of achieving your big gaming idea goals.
As for me, will I ever do such a huge project again? While I have no immediate plans to jump on another huge project like Dungeoneer, I do have plenty of gaming ideas that I want to make that would be just as big. For now, I’m preparing Dungeoneer for release and then I’ll take a short break and then I’ll start looking at my next project.
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