Thursday 18 June 2015

The 7 days game

Decided to jar the little red dragon game for now, reason being: while I was fiddling with the gameplay for that game I realized that I still had a month's work ahead of me to make that game and I still wasn't comfortable with the gameplay.

The next thing I planned was to spend 7 days to make a game from head to toes and publish it, I really needed to know how the whole process goes, and so Cuboid Arcade was born.

It's a simple colour match arcade game where you get assaulted by invading colours and you need to destroy them, with the added bonus of powerups.

Can Play the game for free if you have an android device right here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ZeeGames.CuboidArcadeFree

The concept was simple enough, and I got to toy around with 2D Sprites for the first time, and also learned a few bits about mip mapping and shader optimization for mobile phones, it's still only 30 FPS on my cheap phone, while on my quad core tablet it's 60 capped, but happy with the result.

An interesting problem that I ran into that not many people talk about was when Unity instantiated prefabs for the first time. On the PC that process was unnoticeable, while on the phone the game hicked up, a few times even at the start of the game when they were instantiated on demand. Turn out that it wasn't the instantiating prefabs that was causing the hickup, but rather drawing the shader for the first time. The solution was very simple, at the start of the game scene, just run the command Shader.WarmupAllShaders();  "Calling this function will perform dummy one-invisible-triangle rendering with all variants of all currently loaded shaders. This can take some time but helps to avoid hiccups in the future." 

That's my update for now, I'll be posting some concept art next I believe.

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