the new beginning

So, it's amost 2 years since my last post. I'll try to make this blog more up-to-date.

We decided that the game we're doing is too complex for us and we should start doing more simple game. The game is whac-a-mole type. Something pops from whole and player taks is to kill it.

We're doing this game more than a year. It should be done in 6 months, but you know. Work, freelance and many other obsctacles caused that if we won't finish first level till New Year 12/13 we're quiting game development.

We're still using Corona. Now, this framework is a little outdated. Many thing changed since we started developing. Unity is quite developed but cost of buying it is too big for a startup company. Adobe Air improved perfromance but we did too much in Corona to start using something different.

So, we have something that we can call engine. We have done our own animation classes. Now we're working on configuration of rounds. I bought iPhone 5 and the performance is amazing. The game looks perfect.

So, stay tuned for next update.

graphic desingner and programmer cooperation

We decided that our game will be based on physics. To make things go faster and to ease cooperation between me and graphics designer I decided to build game editor. Game editor will be based on Adobe Flash and Box2d library for that platform. When it's ready, graphic designer will set elements in editor (placement and physics properties), then he will click save button and xml will be generated. Xml will describe all elements on one level, so each level will have its own xml file.

game engine

We want to make universal engine for all levels of our game. It's not so simple. First, we were trying to base our engine on Bezier curves. We draw curve and then character moves along it. Now we know that it wasn't the best idea. The better solution is to use physics engine provided by Corona SDK. So, our project starts as if from the beginning, but I think that now it should go faster.

character movement

We have character. Little girl. We exported sprites with a couple of movements like: stand, walk left, walk right, break, blink, wave. Now question is: how to move it?

We have 3 options:

1) move along bezier path.

2) give it physical properties and move among other physical objects

3) combine previous options

At this moment we have first option implemented. I found Java applet implementing drawing bezier path along n-points. I rewrote it into lua class. Our character moves along path getting cooridinates of points drawing path.

Next, I'll try to add second option and next step is to implement parallax scrolling.

memory

Our first problem was memory. My friend, who is a great graphic designer and team member responsible for visual aspects of our game, created a set of images (frames) representing our main game character. We wanted to use spritesheets to animate character. There were about 160 frames for almost every character's move. Each frame was about 80x60 pixels. We prepared sprites in Texturepacker.


When we loaded files into program it turned out that it doesn't work on 3G device. We could see only black screen. 3GS device had no problem with launching.


We added a piece of code showing texture memory. 12MB. With a little help of Google we found blog post describing memory difference between 3G and 3GS. The guy wrote that after launching basic apps on 3G developer has no more than 13MB of free memory. Our 3G was stopping at 8MB.


At the first moment we decided that we'll focus on 3GS and 4 devices. The second thought was that we have no idea about minimal memory in Android devices. We can't loose few millions of potential customers.


The solution of problem was optimization of graphics: reduction of size and number of frames. Now animation works also on 3G device.

let's start

Me and my friend decided to create a game. Game for iPhone/Android platforms. It took us three years to move from talking about game to making game.

We decided that creating game in pure Objective C is too hard for us. Because we both have strong background in Adobe Flash development we thought that Corona SDK would be the right tool to help us build our first mobile game.

I will try post every day and describe problems we face.