Boat Sim (2D Top down)

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

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

8 Likes

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

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you are doing fantastic things in 8 days with the engine :open_mouth:

1 Like

Thank you! I :smiley:

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

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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…

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

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

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

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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 :stuck_out_tongue:

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

2 Likes

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

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.

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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.

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The idea was to make progress on gameplay first… but…, I spent all day drawing rocks :smiley:

drawingRocks

tile_rock2_corner_lt

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We have coins:
boatsim_may24

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Looks like you do not have enough contrast at the moment.


Changing water color

Then testing adjusting brightness / contrast for everything after

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Yes! Totally agree!
It’s like every day I think to change the ocean color to the like it’s close to the beach, and I never do it :smiley:

Thanks for the images to show me the contrast problem!

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Is the ocean waves randomly factored game objects or particlefx or shader? The same question about cirvular waves from boat? :wink:

Particles everywhere!, I guess it has better performance this way. Don’t know how much I can abuse of them :slight_smile:

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So did you create another material with different tag for them so they could be rendered in render script below other sprites (tiles tag) or are the sprites rendered in gui actually? :smiley: Just asking, I’m curious :wink:

1 Like