One major thing most developers do – myself included – is to fail to target the right platform. And by that I don’t mean the whole android or iPhone or windows debate, I mean those all-important system specs. Do you focus on your end user’s system specs to start? Or is it better to tweak later?
You have a shiny new super powerful computer that you do all your coding, your graphic design, your entire game on this amazing machine, and it performs beautifully. But then you realize it must run on ‘normal’ systems. All those amazing glows and animations, are they going to look good, much less perform decently on a lower end device?
That’s the big question!
I know I am guilty of doing the same thing and I have a bad habit of developing almost the entire game to completion before I upload it to my target device to test, and then it bombs. Ok, so most of the time it doesn’t bomb, but I have to go back and make numerous performance tweaks and adjustments to get it to run acceptably.
Same thing with the latest project, Scratch’n Score. It’s a pretty simple 2D game though using some 3D dice that use physics to roll. It runs great on my system and in the editor with everything on screen at around 6-800 fps. Amazing! Then you remember the device you develop for is a much lower end device, think entry to barely mid-level android devices, and bam, now you’re struggling to hit 60fps during some of the ‘cool’ stuff.
I just did exactly that. In fact, I spent hours on one animation, slicing and aligning the images, designing the animation, all to play when the player scratches and loses all their points that round. Does it look great? Yep! Does it play on the device? Well, barely. By the time the device catches up, the whole animation is over halfway done and then bam, it’s gone… Not to mention, now that I see it playing on the device, I really don’t like how it looks.
But that’s a developer’s dilemma. It takes time to save and compile everything and deploy it to the device in question to test, depending on the project it can take anywhere from 3 minutes to an hour. Is it worth it to do this on a regular basis or is it better to develop and then tweak it later after testing. That’s up to you and how valuable your time is.
On the bright side, deciding out of the blue to test it on the device today (mostly because I wanted to show off a bit), I realized I don’t like that animation anymore and thought of a much better solution, AND saved myself some time since I was thinking about doing some other animations the same way. Overall, testing it on the device probably saved me several hours of designing more animations like that that I would have ultimately tossed out anyways.
Well, since the wife is out of state for the weekend, I am going to take advantage of her absense get back to some coding!
This project is wrapping up nicely and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The gameplay is essentially done, it’s all the polish and animations that I need to work on now, along with a couple game variations just to add some spice and keep replayability up there! Then all the boring stuff, settings menus, etc.. Ugh..
