Devlog 18
Integrated all animations into the game. Everything works, and it went quite quickly despite the massive amount of work slicing, preparing, and assembling everything.
I also learned about sprite atlases and image compression, so now I can finally create proper builds. A build won't weigh 500 MB unpacked and won't consume 600 MB of RAM when playing in a browser anymore.
Turns out, in Unity you have to manually select the compression algorithm for images — otherwise, it stores them uncompressed and performs all loading/unloading operations on uncompressed data as well. Simply put: if a single image (2000x2000) isn't set up correctly, it can take up about 50 MB in the build and 50 MB in RAM during gameplay. But if configured properly, it can be reduced to around 4 MB.
Additionally, different compression algorithms are required for different platforms — one for the web version, another for the PC version.
I even had to create a separate test project for this — basically, an image viewer. There's nothing particularly interesting in it, but I'll attach it to the post anyway. Shift, Ctrl — zoom, Arrow keys — pan image.
Now I need to fine-tune everything properly: animation timings, playback speed. Many players complained that scenes end too quickly — I'll check that too.