Boat Sim (2D Top down)

piXelicidio · May 6, 2019, 7:13pm

Hi,

This is my first project with Defold. Wanting to make a relaxing boat simulator game on top view.
I’m making the first steps after studying Defold tutorials:

boatsim_01

There is viscosity friction affected by the orientation of the boat. It should slide better moving forward, while having more resistance opposition from water when having lateral motion.

I used Linear Damping and Angular Damping to simulate the general friction of the movement in any direction, but calculated and applied the additional viscosity friction on every frame of the simulation.

You can play with the demo, compare behavior of the standard dynamic objects vs the green boat and read about the easy math behind, here on my blog.

piXelicidio · May 8, 2019, 2:44pm

One small step for a little boat, one giant leap for my app!

Oar simulation implemented!
(Hope is ok to upload small <1mb videos here )

piXelicidio · May 10, 2019, 11:39pm

Main basic game mechanics done!
Paddles are controlled using the thumbs. Multi-touch is a must.

Vik · May 14, 2019, 6:02pm

you are doing fantastic things in 8 days with the engine

piXelicidio · May 14, 2019, 7:49pm

Thank you! I

piXelicidio · May 15, 2019, 3:22am

boatsim_camfollow
For today I made the camera follow the boat.
Using particles for the water sparkles that helps to see the motion.

piXelicidio · May 16, 2019, 10:11pm

With this first quick test level I could feel how is to rowing the boat for longer distances… and is actually fun!

Imagine that you can’t do collision with solid obstacles or your boat will crack, after 3 times you sink… that’s will add lot of tension to the game, and focus on precision and anticipation instead of high-peed.

Had a little dalay today of few ours because a little issue with float point precision…

Pkeod · May 16, 2019, 11:16pm

Instant death would probably be better for ads if you are making the game to be f2p!

piXelicidio · May 16, 2019, 11:34pm

Oh! that’s the reason on mobile most games are instat-death! Thanks for the tip, that proof my lack of experience with mobile games.

Pkeod · May 17, 2019, 12:36am

Yes, then the usual thing is “watch an ad to get one extra life where you left off one time only”.

piXelicidio · May 18, 2019, 12:49pm

Sprites Scaling down 0.5x performance:

I was a bit worried about high definition displays on devices. (Since people are buying whatever companies want them to buy, like this 806ppi phone) Maybe because I grow up with CGA, I still like to see my pixels… well:

Documentation suggest to use graphics content of the game as double size, then scall down 0.5x. Then my worries were that the modest innocent low resolution phones will suffer lower performance to please the big expensive ones…

Good news: There is almost not performance lost

Tested with @britzl bunnymark project on standard resolution phone.
With sprites at %100 I get 8,000 bunnies at 29.8 FPS.
Scaled all bunnies on photoshop, to %200, added then tested like this and I got 18.3 FPS for the same 8,000 bunnies.
Finally scaled by code at runtime the bunnies game objects to 0.5x, and I got 28.6 FPS.

For me is conclusive, no more worries, everything would be scaled down. Maybe you all now that but this is news for me

Now we just need a setting on atlases to scale down all sprites images at once.

piXelicidio · May 18, 2019, 1:34pm

And then scaling in editor game objects with collisionobject problems are starting to hurt me… -_-

Pkeod · May 18, 2019, 7:42pm

How are your collision objects setup? / What are the problems?

You can use https://www.defold.com/community/projects/58981/ to make custom shapes.

Remember that you can have multiple collision objects of different sizes and enable/disable them as needed.

piXelicidio · May 18, 2019, 7:49pm

Great! thank you, That is my next need, custom shapes to make a kayak an other types of boats… currently using basic shapes only.

I was scaling the game objects only on X and Y axes, collision objects ignored the transformation, now I know that need to scale uniform and always include Z axis too. Problem solved.