Developer Diary 23 [Bubblegum Sunday] (Patreon)

Finally this week I got the rough framework for jobs in the game.

Right now there is a single location with 2 possible jobs, but this is simply the beginning of an expanding system. Not everything is currently in place, but the basic system works: Energy is taken away and money is added. This is the simplest part of the loop, as later on there will be other modifiers which will give each job a unique feeling.

Other than that I’ve also managed to finally nail down a big issue I had in my game for a while. On mobile, it didn’t really run so smooth and went digging in and was able to raise the fps on my phone (One Plus 3T) from around 20 to over 150. This is a really great improvement and makes me feel a lot more confident about the mobile release on older devices in general. I went through the entire project so far and looked for areas where I could improve performance so I am very happy with this improvement. I think in the end the only big issue will be the file size for this game.

500~MB certainly doesn’t feel like a stretch, considering I have yet to put in any kind of proper audio/music.

One final thing I was able to figure out that had been bugging me for a long time was that on mobile certain sprites were just blurry. Turns out, if any of my sprites go above 1024 pixels in size, they will be immediately sized down by half, so they will fit on the textures pages that GameMaker uses to generate the sprite maps. That’s a lot of technical jazz, but the takeaway is that I can get around the issue by slicing up the bigger sprites (think: NPC’s, backgrounds, the map, …) It’s a slightly annoying workaround but in the end I care mostly about the quality of the game I am making, so this will be a sacrifice I can make to make everything look good.

The coming week I will be refining the job system even more so it feels a bit better and start planning how to tackle buying stuff. This will require another major reworking (and removing) of my code, so it will be a large undertaking. Once that big hurdle is done, we can look forward to another release!

Thank you very much for the support and see you next week!

~Albatross