Fishy Hell

So much has happened in the development of the the scrolling ocean shooter game. I still have no real working title, although I'm starting to use SOS in a few places. I felt it was prudent to test my progress on mobile. It was frustrating to set up to say the least. The results were also quite frustrating.

Using the CocoonJS Launcher App I attempted to unzip and play the exported game. The problem was that the app was not acknowledging the .zip file I transferred over to the phone. It took some time and research but I eventually discovered that my phone hides the real root directory of my SD Card. Once accessing that location was sorted I was able to move the .zip files to the phone and launch them form the CocoonJS Launcher. During this process I had no luck launching from a web host location. It would successfully download the .zip but would not open it.

First launch of the game as it was terrible. It ran at 1 fps...

Looking into performance issues I learned that all the work I had done to make the game look cool was for naught. The number of sprites and the effects I was applying to them was too much for my mobile device.

Since then I have removed all "effects" from the sprites, eliminated the large particle emitters, and deleted the parallax background objects. I will replace the background with a scrolling tiled background which is supposed to be easier on the mobile system. I will need to find a better way to produce a large number of sprites on screen. Possibly reduce the sprite image sizes and be more aware of how many are being produced.

It was mentioned that text objects are hard to render at the moment. This will present a challenge when trying to display the score. A few other settings were mentioned to improve performance. These shouldn't detract form the final product. Things like turning off clear background and point sampling set to ON.

No effects and limited sprite count may make for a rather dull game. Hopefully I can turn this around as an exercise in minimalism.