Landon Voss

Day 23 — Resource Drop Animations, Project Cleanup & Texture Budgeting

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Landon

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Context

Today centered on two major efforts: improving the clarity and satisfaction of resource gathering and beginning the long-term optimization pass needed to keep the project within Fortnite’s memory constraints. With more assets being added, this kind of cleanup and budgeting work becomes increasingly important.

Resource Drop Animations

I added custom animations and behaviors for Stone and Wood resources. Now, when the player strikes a rock or tree:

  • The resource visually drops from the object
  • It lands on the tile beneath it
  • Pickup behavior aligns with the existing resource loop

This small addition goes a long way toward making harvesting feel grounded. Rather than resources abruptly appearing in the inventory, they now have a physical presence in the world before being collected.

Project Cleanup & Organization

I spent a significant portion of the day cleaning and organizing the project. This included:

  • Removing unused assets
  • Standardizing folder structure
  • Consolidating material instances
  • Reviewing mesh imports for consistency

As the project grows, this kind of maintenance work prevents chaos later and ensures assets remain easy to track and modify.

Texture Compression & New Asset Imports

With the recent wave of purchased assets, I began the process of:

  • Importing each mesh into the project
  • Compressing all textures to appropriate formats
  • Evaluating texture resolutions vs. quality
  • Assessing how much each asset set contributes to project size

The project is currently sitting around 12% memory usage. With all incoming assets, I’m aiming to stay under 15%, which should preserve plenty of headroom for future features, VFX, UI, audio, and polish.

This might require additional optimization passes, but the early numbers seem workable.

Summary

What I accomplished:

  • Added falling resource animations for Stone and Wood.
  • Cleaned and reorganized major portions of the project.
  • Began importing and compressing newly purchased assets.
  • Assessed early memory budget with a goal of staying under 15%.

What I learned:

  • Visualizing resource drops adds clarity and weight to gathering mechanics.
  • Regular cleanup prevents technical debt from accumulating.
  • Texture compression plays a huge role in keeping memory budgets healthy.
  • Handling asset optimization early reduces surprises later in development.

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