After a long hard day of work on Saturday, I know many of us at Demergo are ready to take a break, but with the looming deadline just about 9 weeks away, we don't have the luxury.
Over the course of this week there's a lot we accomplished.
For Art, a lot of the enemies in the game entered the illustration phase, and one of the enemies was nearly completed as far as animation goes. The base environmental tileset was completed so now our currently very ugly levels will start to look a little less ugly. I was reading a blog a while back about one way to motive artist to get art done, and that was simply to use really ugly programmer art (actually, programmer art is always really ugly) throughout the game and then give the game to the artist to play. After about a few seconds of play, the artists can't stand it anymore because of the ugliness and soon afterwards really nice art starts appearing in the game!
On the Design side of things, Zak is tired of remaking the same levels over and over in the editor again! The editor and how it works is changing somewhat frequently due to new features being added, so those new features on occasion break the old export format so the level has to be rebuilt. We just enjoy torturing Zak!
On the programming side of things, this has been quite a week! We did not add to many new features, in fact almost none, but this week was a polish the features we currently have and continue to optimize the performance of the engine. On Saturday we began to notice that when we would "jump" across really large levels, our player character would move so fast that the ipad1 could not keep up with the constant asynchronous loading and unloading of textures. While on small to medium size "jumps," the texture loading speed was fine, on really large jumps, the texture loading and unloading could not keep up and there was really no good way of increasing the texture loading speed, so we moved over to a 64x64 tile-based rending for the playerground. This weekend was really performance testing/fixing weekend! (I am sure there will be a big blog post about this by one of the programmers later on).
As far as QA testing, well, that was primarily all wrapped up in performance testing the various methods of rendering the playerground to get the best performance with the least amount of memory and visual artifacts.
And that concludes another crazy busy week here at Demergo and don't forget to check out some new pics we posted on our Facebook page.
Devbot Todd entering sleep mode...
Reposted from Fixbot Blog
