Optimizations..!

Moving right along. Many heroes for my idle game have been animated and fully programmed, along with the main systems for particle effects and such. With some more art and features underway, it should be playable quite soon.

Unlike Zombie Guard, I'll be releasing this sooner rather than later, followed by more regular updates to features and bugs. Eventually it will make its way to some of the bigger portals like Kongregate, then, as a standalone app for Apple and Google Play.

This is an HTML5 game that plays well on a PC/Mac browser with superb performance. I played it on my phone as well, both in the Chrome browser app, and, as a standalone app by packaging it with CocoonJS.

The good

Everything just frickin' works so I do not have to waste time porting my game to a different library for a different platform. HTML5 is proving to be very useful and I hold a lot of trust in its future. The design of this game allows me to introduce additional features over time. Google Chrome has incredible features to debug and benchmark performance so it will help tremendously. I would much rather debug on my PC, rather than fire up some esoteric software packages to extract debug information off my phone, for bugs that only appear on the device and not the simulator *cringe*.

The bad

The game can run quite slow on mobile devices like my Android phone. I can work with this, by sprinkling critical optimizations here and there. Particle effects will have to be reduced as that seems heavily expensive, likely due to the code compared to the actual rendering. Compressing all the code with Minifier helps a tiny, but it is better than nothing.

The game has excellent performance on PC, despite many art assets and animations.

Eventually I will be able to compile all LiveScript files to Javascript, reduce and obfuscate the Javascript with a service like Minifier, and then upload to a private domain along with recent changes. All this will be done automatically with a build tool like TeamCity which came recommended to me.

So, enough tech talk...

I recognize I have been going even further into a casual gaming direction. My previous work already was fairly casual, and now this idle game even more-so. The market for these kinds of games is strong and reliable despite the competition. My plan however is to create something far more artistic, stylized, and meaningful, following this idle game.