I’m a young student from Germany, Dresden. After my first game written in Java, I decided to do another game! I was looking on different game engines and i bumped into Defold. So I started with the engine and I love it! I also invited a collegue, who studies on the same university. But let’s get to the game.
It’s a simple get as far as you can game in space. The working title was Space Steroids and it will probably stay this way It’s done it in pixel art style, so far it was quite a challenge to build a united universe. So far you can play the actual game, but gameplay is still poor. We intend to ship it on Android in the new year.
Devs:
Me, Vojta - Design, Programming
2nd Dev Tom - Programming, Project managment
Challenges:
So far, it was a challenge for me to create all graphic assets which works well together.
Also, I have a lot of experience from Java, but Lua was quite different and I needed quite some time to get used to it.
Last thing was getting well on with collection proxies and it’s lifecycle.
Next:
Optimize Gameplay
Finish all the menu
Save highscores
Adjust to different densities
Parallax background
Sounds
It’s still quite a lot to do, but it’s slowly coming together.
I want to thank to Defold community, which helps a lot!
What is left to be done:
There are few things, like polish the gameplay, do some menu, optimize code. It should come out soon
Size bundle
As I wanted to show the game to collegues, I bundled the apk and I was amazed by the size. In release mode it was just 7,4 MB. I inspected the build report and found out, that half of the size is made by sounds. Without sounds, size would be around 4MB.
How is this achieved?
Since I have pixelart, i can set default_texture_min_filter: linear in game.project, import my images in really small size and let the engine scale them. This is a huge resource saver.
Lets have a look at one example:
Bg image asset large: 1080x3840, 296kB
Bg image asset small: 90x320, 36kB
Bg image asset small PNG-8: 90x320, 18,9kB
% saved: 100 - (18,9/296)*100 = 93,7% saved
Nice thing about this approach is low memory footprint.
One last thing, thanks a lot to community for help they provide. Also special thanks to @britzl, who made a lot of different demos available public.
I’m already using custom render script for rendering materials. I just went ahead and used example from @britzl to lock the aspect ratio. I modified it for my own needs. Just search for ‘aspect ratio’ on the forum, there few topics about that.
I didn’t have much time in the past 2 weeks, but I managed to fix last few bugs, and most important, implement new spawning algorithm for the steroids. Sometimes it was quite funny, when its just full of asteroids and you can’t do nothing about it.
It’s done it in pixel art style, so far it was quite a challenge to build a united universe. So far you can play the actual game, but gameplay is still poor. We intend to ship it on Android in the new year.
when its just full of asteroids and you can’t do nothing about it.