You can download the Android .APK file from my Itch.io page here: Endless Freeride
*The private repository containing all project files and commit messages may be available upon request.
Drop in and shred down the mountain while getting some air and performing tricks all while trying to line up for a perfect landing in this snowboarding version of a casual infinite-runner.
There is also a built-in average FPS counter that you can toggle off/on for your convenience.
This project was my first step into mobile game development, while simultaneously providing me with an opportunity to experiment more with Rigidbodies. My prior projects were all based around using Unity's built-in Character Controller. I had used some Rigidbodies before for some enemies and collision checks, but I felt like a game based around motion would be a fun way to experience building a Rigidbody character controller, and applying physics to move the player.
Making a mobile game taught me a lot about optimization. Upon my first test of the game on an old 2013 Android phone, I was shocked to see my game only getting around 12-15fps; there was hardly anything in the scene! I then blindly started cutting everything out: post processing, lighting, shadows, etc. Although this brute-force/blind approach got me up to ~25fps, it also tanked the quality of the game. I then slowed down to try and actually understand what the Unity Profiler is showing me, along with analyzing the "Stats" window. With a few more lighting changes, removing extraneous quality settings, and cleaning up some code I was able to get the game around ~45fps. It was better, but I really had 60fps in mind; which for a brand new Android phone, it probably wouldn't have been too difficult, but I wanted this game to run at 60fps no matter how old the Android device was.
I spent some time reading documentation and tutorials surrounding the Profiler and the Stats window. I needed to look into whether I was GPU-bound or CPU-bound, what was happening in terms of garbage collection, and why I was seeing some pretty huge spikes being displayed.
Going back to the stats window, I noticed that I had an absurdly large polygon count. I hardly had anything in the scene, so I was really confused where this was coming from. After turning a few objects off and on, I quickly narrowed it down to my character model, and the fences that I made in Blender. I fixed the fence by using a transparent chain-link texture on a plane instead of a .fbx model, and for the character I imported it into Blender and used the decimate tool to bring down the polygon count to about 4.5k.
While this had brought the frame rate up, my 2013 Android test phone was still struggling to maintain a 60fps, especially as the game was played for longer periods of time. After spending some more time reviewing Unity's Profiler and documentation, I knew I had a few performance upgrades that I could now make through code. One of those optimizations were removing all of my instantiate/destroy calls. I was originally instantiating and destroying the infinite grounds, each time placing one ahead of the other. However, I realized this was a great time to implement an object pooler for all the ground platforms. Using a pooler would prevent any garbage issues that may have arose by instead of creating/destroying the platforms, being able to simply active/deactivate them; to further this, for respawning the player I ended up just moving the position, rather than the (horrible) decision I first had of destroying and instantiating which also relied on several FindWithTag() calls. These changes increased performance while simultaneously reducing the size of the spikes I was seeing in the Profiler, which appeared to come from the instantiating platform calls.
I was able to increase performance by over 400%. This is referring to my initial test of the game running at around ~12fps, to my final test with all optimizations in place running at an average of ~60fps (which is the target cap). With all of these optimization changes I now actually had extra room for performance and I could tweak the settings a bit that made the game look better and provide the player with some visual feedback (things like shadows as the player is coming down from a jump).
- Made with: Unity 2020.3.11f1
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