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No, the Frozen Fractal blog is not dead. It’s just been, well, frozen. A lot happened since the last post: I got a job at Google, moved to London, and made a little game for Ludum Dare that I’ll post about later. But a lot also didn’t happen: I didn’t finish Cart Frenzy. It turned out to be too much work to get it done before my contract at Google started, and after that, I didn’t have the time and energy to work on it any longer.
Back to work after a much-needed break, I have gained a better perspective on the current state of the game. I concluded that, if I am to finish this game on time, I’ll have to reduce it in scope significantly.
Game development can be a pain sometimes. Remember my writings on threading last week? This week has been more of the same kind of stuff: engine improvements, code cleanups, bugfixes, and only some small new features that are actually visible.
More work on performance this week. Things were getting a bit too slow for my tastes, meaning that they would likely be unplayable on medium-end phones. This work involved quite a bit of refactoring (which is jargon for “creating new problems to replace your old ones”), so I now have a bunch of screenshots of things… not working the way they should. Because this is a long and technical post, I will intersperse them for comic relief.
As announced, I made a large sprint this week to bring the artwork closer to completion. I think it’s about halfway done now, but I’m getting more and more experience with this, so the second half should go a lot faster.
Like I announced, lots of work on graphics. In-game graphics are beginning to come together, but are only halfway done, so the overall result still doesn’t look too good.
I’ve been looking at my crappy placeholder graphics for too long. Every time I launch the game, a tiny voice at the back of my mind tells me how shitty it still looks. Every time I show it to someone else, they comment how they initially only saw the red handle, not noticing that a shopping cart was attached. Clearly, it’s time to add some artwork.
I more or less finished one of the first powerups that you’ll encounter in the game: the toaster. When you pick it up, it appears in the item box at the top right. You can then tap a point on the screen, and your cart will fire two rapidly spinning slices of crispy brown toast in that direction. If a slice hits an opponent, they’ll drop $1 worth of items (currently, one orange). But if both slices hit the same opponent, the second one will do triple damage, for a total of $4. Therefore, good aim and timing are beneficial (though not essential).
Although games vary wildly in appearance and mechanics, the structure of the underlying classes and objects is often similar. There is a “world” object, which contains everything else; there are multiple “entities” representing stuff in the world, there’s a “renderer” which tells each object to draw itself, etcetera. My game is no different, but still contains some interesting aspects that I would like to highlight.
After a week partly filled with lots of food and other Christmas celebrations, I’m back on track. I’ve done some polishing to make the game more game-like.