Quality Guidelines

Topics

Optimise Performance

Guidelines for highest quality

Quality Assurance Testing

Recommendations for final review

Asset Types & Collisions

How creative method determines collisions

Asset Scale

Recommendations for common assets

Node Efficiency

Best practices with visual examples

Pivot Point & Alignment

Making assets easy to create & place

Animation

Tips, name compatibility with behaviours

Visual Quality

Colour, shape & common issues

Asset Name & Description

Optimisation for discovery

Manage Files & Folders

Prevent conflicts

Optimise Performance

Guidelines

Minimalist Design

Efficient assets provide Experience creators greater flexibility to add more assets and logic to their creations.

As a rule, every asset should be an optimised design. Strive for minimalism and simplicity in shape and add more detail in texture.

MAXIMUM RECOMMENDATIONS

The following guidelines are the absolute maximum recommendations for special circumstances in order to prioritise play quality in The Sandbox Game.

Maximum Size: 512 x 512 x 512 voxels

Maximum Faces: 5,000

Face count tends to affect GPU usage

Maximum Nodes: 175

Node count tends to affect CPU usage

Face Count tends to affect your GPU usage. A GPU is a graphics processor built into your computer's graphics card, used to accelerate graphics rendering. It functions side by side with your CPU, or central processing unit.

Node Count tends to affect your CPU usage. A CPU is the central processor built into your computer's motherboard, which performs basic operations on your device.

CUMULATIVE EFFECTS Nodes, faces, and colliders are constantly calculated in the game engine, so it is highly recommended to strive for the most efficient design with most voxel art.

Assets that are intended to be used frequently such as trees should be simpler for a lower cumulative effect on play performance.

A compound entity rigged in the Animator with no motion keyframes added is calculated as having one node.

Resources

Quality Assurance Testing

Ask these questions when testing assets in Game Maker:

• Does the colour look like you intended, including emissive colours?

• Does it look good with all ambient lighting settings (Global Parameters menu)?

• Is colour clashing on the same layer (z-fighting), or is there clipping?

• Are all animations working correctly?

• Are all keyframes closed?