2020 Was a pretty crazy year to say the least. It’s been a long time since I wrote anything. I’ve been busy with my day job as a Developer. Anytime I have left over is really just burned on working on games. I thought I’d start the year with some posts on what’s happened over the last 2 years or so with Hurricane Outbreak. I have another post that deals with what’s going on right now and in the future in regards to a new game.
Around summer 2019 I did do a major overhaul of the game. The original felt like a demo so I added a quest line that allowed the game to have some form of progression. It was my crude attempt at making the game feel like you were upgrading your hurricane. For the most part I think it turned out good. Alot of people liked the new game and some hated it. I also added the 2nd scenario as most people know as Global Warming. Along with the content I did optimize the game significantly and expanded the play area by almost 2x.
Profiler before optimization.
Profiler after optimization. I split up the code into 4 threads.
1. HurricanePathFinder - This thread does a simulation by stepping the hurricane into the future n times to determine it’s future path. I tried several ways to do this but this was the only reliable way to really predict the path. The player can change the hurricane speed with abilities and the hurricane can speed up or slow down over land with abilities so it was basically impossible to do it any other way. The hurricane path data is used by AreaWorker and CityWarnWorker to reduce the dataset down.
2. AreaWorker - This thread uses the simulated hurricane path and determines which countries/provinces/states the path is overlapping and generates an active area list to be used by CityWarnWorker.
3. CityWarnWorker - This thread takes the active areas and a list of cities is generated that over lap the simulated path of the hurricane. This creates a new reduced list of cities used by ActiveAreaWorker.
4. ActiveAreaWorker - This thread takes all the processing the threads above have done and runs the entire damage simulation on the active cities. Warned cities do preparation simulations depending on a lot of factors like GDP and the strength of the hurricane that is inbound.
The expanded map with all the countries/provinces with a quad. In the original version of Hurricane Outbreak I used one separate thread to loop through all the cities on the map (12,000+) to do damage calculations. That thread was a total hog, but still ran smooth because it wasn’t on the main thread.
The generated hurricane path polygon that’s used for intersecting with area quads. Only cities intersecting within the quad and then within the hurricane path are marked to be simulated with damage. The simulation continues to run on cities as long as there is damage applied. The hurricane can leave the area and there’s still flood damage occurring.
Nothing really happened for almost a year after I released that update. I was actually halfway in the process of getting an iPhone version of the game out. I spent alot of time already fixing issues with the large 4k textures the map uses which the iPhone 6S didn’t like. I was also working through issues with the json serialization and save game encryption I was using. Then GrayStillPlays did a video of my game in February 2020 right before covid pandemic started breaking the news.
When the video hit I scrambled to finish the iPhone version and somehow got it live on the apple store within 3 days of the video getting released. The rest of 2020 was a wild ride. I survived a wave of layoffs and furloughs at the company I work for, but the game started making some money finally. I slaved on the game for about 6 months in total spread between October 2017 to April 2020 before I saw any real return on investment.
lifetime users of Hurricane Outbreak on Google Play a couple days after GayStillPlays video hit.
Total revenue a month later
The game made about 40k in total in 2020. I don’t really have any further plans with expanding Hurricane Outbreak. It’s been a real nightmare to work on the game. It seems like a simple concept but it ended up being a ton of work to make a hurricane game that felt convincing enough. I may eventually do another expansion on it at some point but it’s going to be some time. There’s a new game I am currently working on that’s now consumed me.