As a One man developer, What's a decent way to get the games system requirements?

Development World Creation
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1

I’m in the process of developing a game that I intend to try and sell in a couple of months.

As I’m only a one man developer, With my computer, What’s the best way to get the general system requirements for my game?

My first idea was to use the minimum / recommended UE4 engine specs as a rule of thumb. Is this a good idea? Since I’m using the ue4 engine.

  • Some info about my game, It is stylistically designed with low poly minimalism, So the materials and meshes are both cheaper to render performance wise. The idea being that it could be played on different levels of PC hardware.

I don’t have a focus group or testers to find the specs, But I have family and friends that have PCs I could use.

Any help with this would be brilliant, Thanks!

2

Hey!

Well, there are a lot of things you can do to get a better perfomance, but it also depends of your game.

If your meshes, foliages etc are already low poly it helps a lot.

  • You can change the scalability settings in the editor, customize them to get the better graphic/perfomance you want.

  • Using the World Composition to your landscapes levels.

  • Study about level streaming, see tutorial here: UE4 Level Streaming | A Blueprint Tutorial by Devin Sherry - YouTube

  • Uses culling to all your meshes and folliages (You can find it under LOD settings of the actor in your lvl, change the Max distance, you can see this feature working under play or “GameView”

  • Reduces the textures resolution.

  • Try to use static shadows, it takes a while to build, but it has better perfomance than movable shadows. If you need to use movable shadows, than take a look at cascaded shadows to improve perfomance.

  • Try not to use too much post processing features, like DephOfField.

  • Always has a LightmassImportanceVolume and PrecomputedVisibilityVolume

Keep trying and trying. Good luck!

Regards,
Filipe

3

Thank you for all the information!

My game has a minimalist low poly art style to it anyway and the levels are smaller individual maps. I plan to implement a fully functional options menu with tweakable settings for the end user too, so I guess that removes some of the headache too.

4

I used two different approaches in the past:

  1. Go to Steam Hardware & Software Survey and collect hardware data for e.g. 80% of all steam users. Then go to a used hardware re-seller and buy the low-end configuration hardware and make your game run acceptable on that hardware.

  2. Use your colleagues, friends, families machines and find the lowest spec where it runs acceptable and use that machine’s spec for your low-end.

Marc