Thunder Hop Games Blog

In this first blog post, I introduce the development blog and what you can expect from it, including technical deep dives, feature spotlights, and development stories from my journey creating Defenders of Hexalis.

Today, I'm excited to share the first-ever screenshots of Defenders of Hexalis, the 3D hexagonal tower defense game I've been working on. Keep in mind, this is still a work in progress, but I wanted to give you a peek at how the world is shaping up.

In today's post, I want to dive into one of the most satisfying aspects of game development: squeezing performance gains out of your engine through clever (and sometimes obsessive) optimization. Recently, I released a YouTube video “How I (Over) Doubled My Game Engine's Performance by Reducing Heap Allocations.”

One of the recent graphical upgrades I tackled was implementing proper tone mapping into the rendering pipeline. This might sound like a subtle change, but the visual difference it makes is substantial. It transforms bright and flat visuals into something that feels rich, balanced, and more cinematic.

After noticing grainy textures appearing on distant surfaces, I decided to implement mip-mapping and anisotropic filtering in my C#/DirectX engine. The result was a surprisingly big visual improvement, making textures smoother, cleaner, and far more stable when the camera moves.