No need to open if you're an old player — no gameplay changes.
I've refactored part of the bunny code and merged their meshes to improve performance.

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I reduced the number of skinned meshes, and the game runs faster now.
It was a painful and tedious process, but I did learn some new things.
Maybe the next game will be better because of it.
I’m honestly afraid all three of my games will get the same kind of comments — that would make it seem like I haven’t improved at all over the years.

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Performance Stats
Before (initial version):
• Visible skinned meshes: 298
• Animator components playing: 250

After converting flower animation from bone-based to shader vertex animation:
• Visible skinned meshes: 152
• Animator components playing: 208

After today's bunny mesh merge:
• Visible skinned meshes: 91
• Animator components playing: 43

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I finally merged the bunny meshes. And then I remembered why I didn’t do it before.

Having a bunch of scattered small mesh parts is terrible for runtime efficiency,
but it’s great for development — quick to iterate.
Once the mesh is merged, every small adjustment (weighting issues, modeling errors, export problems, adding a new accessory, etc.) requires re-assigning all 25+ materials from scratch.
After doing that a few times, I nearly lost my mind — groundhog screaming noises included.
But screaming doesn’t help, so I kept dragging materials.

Eventually, I thought of numbering the materials to make reassigning them in order easier.

Also, exporting directly from Blender to Unity sometimes just... fails.
Now I export the FBX manually, then drag it into Unity.
Even with numbered materials, doing this over and over is frustrating.
Then I discovered something: if I delete the old FBX but keep its `.meta` file, and reimport a new FBX with the same filename, Unity keeps the material assignments.

No idea why I hadn’t thought of that earlier.
It reminded me of how, as a kid, Chinese homework, when I had to copy homework twice, I’d hold two pens and write both at the same time.
Turns out lots of classmates did that too — or used carbon paper.
Experienced devs are just better at skipping unnecessary steps.

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Development is Pain

Some bugs are systemic — they only stop biting you once you’ve been bitten a few times.
Even if I switched engines or 3D software, I’d just run into different bugs.
You just get better at dodging them with time.

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I still remember waiting forever for my game’s first ever review.
The player was nice and gave it a positive rating,
but also mentioned the game was poorly optimized.
(Later they deleted the review — maybe they were worried it would hurt my feelings?)

Back then, I had no idea what "optimization" meant.
None of the “anyone can make a game” tutorials talked about it.

3 years later, I think I finally understand what that comment meant.

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For example:

• I modeled the bunny and exported it as-is. If it worked, great.
• I didn’t think ahead — now that there are tons of bunny outfits, I can’t even tell which file was the original.
• I threw materials into the scene however I liked.
Now there are hundreds of them scattered around.
Trying to optimize textures and reduce draw calls now is a huge task.

I hope I can avoid all this next time.

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What’s Next
I want to rewrite the bunny system with a more efficient architecture…
but I don’t know how yet.
I’ve started watching some video tutorials — hopefully I’ll get there.

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That'all for chatting. Thanks for being my playper.

Lately, I’ve been working on improving performance. The game had too many bone animations, which really slowed things down. One of the biggest culprits was the large blooming tree.

I rewrote the flower animation using shaders and vertex animation instead of bones—each petal now rotates around its axis via math, not rigging. It runs much faster now and even has fewer vertices!

But then came the pain:
After spending forever on the math, I imported it from Blender to Unity… and everything broke.
Blender uses Z-up, Unity uses Y-up. Local axes flipped. My flower animation exploded. Petals stretched wildly due to bad vertex data. I almost cried 😭

I thought I had finally fixed it… until I ticked “Static” and all the flowers exploded again. Turns out, when you mark something as Static and check "Batching Static", Unity changes the local coordinate system to optimize draw calls—which ruins vertex animation.
Nobody warned me about that! Everyone says "game dev is easy to get into"—but no one mentions this stuff.

Anyway, I unchecked “Batching Static” and the flower animation finally works. Phew.

This small change improved performance a bit. If I can optimize bunny animations and models too, the game could run even better—but for now, I have no idea how. Maybe someday.