Our ludum dare entry this time around has had quite some overwhelming feedback! For this reason, we’ve decided to continue development of our game. This means that we’re bringing Ten Second Sketch to mobile devices! The game is going to be free of charge, aswell as free of adds!
In order to enhance the experiance for our users, we’ve taken multiple actions:
1. We’ve optimized the game rendering and collision detection.
Optimized rendering was achieved by batching all obstacles. We also added scaling of blocks, allowing us to use just one scaled block with repeating texture coordinates instead of multiple small. A huge performance boost compared to our old naive approach! On some levels we managed to cut down the amount of floats needed for our vertices from ~200k to ~5k! Adding this scaling of blocks also had a huge impact on collision detection. We’ve always been using first a broad phase where the obstacles at a nearby Z coordinate are found, and a narrow check where these objects are checked for collision. Now everytime you’re close to a wall, you’ll be checking collision against one block instead of the previous 100!
2. We’ve fixed bugs with the collision detection from our previous entry. It should, for example, no longer be possible to fall through the ground at level 8.
3. Garbage Collection removal
All unnecessary garbage collecting has been removed. This means that the game runs much more fluently on mobile devices. Pooling all obstacles before removing them from the current level was one of the major improvements that we did. We also had a lot of lazy additions of ”new Vector3”:s in our code. All of these have been replaced with static references to computation vectors.
4. Level polishing and additions.We’ve removed levels that we considered too boring, and replaced them (it) with multiple new and exciting levels! We’re still making new levels on a daily basis, and the game is going to contain some very difficult levels for the most dedicated!
5. New features!
We’ve added some new features to the game! Examples: Bouncy blocks and boost blocks! A bouncy block will cause you to bounce in the opposite direction of the one you’re heading – landing or driving on top of one will cause you to jump, rotating into it will cause you to rotate in the opposite direction for a moment. Boost blocks will cause you to travel at increased speed for a while after colliding with them (very similar to how the user controlled boost works). These two new block types allow us to create some very interesting and smooth levels – prepare to feel like a god while racing the pipe of Ten Second Sketch!
If you would like to look at our entry for LD27, visit Ludum Dare
If you would like to stay updated and be notified of the release of our game, please follow us on twitter: https://twitter.com/daggergamedev
Ten Second Sketch was made with the help of the amazing game framework libGDX.