Robert Green's DIY

Light Racer 2.0 - Days 41-44 - Real-time Multiplayer Protocol Implementation

Robert Green — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:20:55 +0000

According to my 2nd revised project plan for Light Racer 2, I was to have a release done on June 5. The core game has been done for a few weeks but the complexity and difficulty of getting the multiplayer system to work well has thrown that date right out the door. The last 4 days of work have been focused specifically on getting the basic multiplayer code to work. This means connecting two phones together, starting a game and playing it. Today I had a breakthrough, after weeks of work I was finally able to play against myself using my phone and emulator. There are tons of bugs and it's not yet complete but it was good to actually see it all working.

Light Racer 2.0 - Days 35-40 - Multiplayer Host and Join

Robert Green — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:46:48 +0000

Developing a couple of screens with some networking code that can make them talk to each other sounds like a simple enough task on the surface, but when you set out to develop multiplayer menus that need to handle every kind of situation that can happen on a mobile device as well as be able to understand and respond to future protocol versions, it's a much more complicated job. I definitely underestimated this task, giving myself just two days to get it done. It ended up taking closer to six, and there are still a few problems that will need to be fixed before the final release. I believe that the design I used is sound and this code will hold up against the test of time.

Light Racer 2.0 - Day 34 - New Menus, Modes and Continue

Robert Green — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 04:43:30 +0000

After letting several people play the game, I've taken their feedback and incorporated it. I spent a lot of time debating how I was going to handle the continue screen. It was frustrating me because it was confusing to people and it wasn't going to work well to try to overlay an Android UI on top of it since it's still in-game. I also finally added in the new solo menus and added a new game mode based on the original light racer - Speed Trial mode.

Light Racer 2.0 - Days 32-33 - Getting Great Game Performance

Robert Green — Tue, 26 May 2009 05:18:53 +0000

Choppiness in game play can be an absolute make or break deal for the success of any game. I never thought that the first Light Racer would get downloaded and played as many times as it has. If I had realized that then, I probably would have invested a few more days smoothing it out. All of that is water under the bridge now though because the last 2 days of work have brought Light Racer 2 up between 45 and 60 frames per second on the G1 and no stutter in game from garbage collection or resource management. I covered all of the issues I faced and provided some solutions. This will probably apply to many other games as well.

Light Racer 2.0 - Day 31 - Anywhere Touch Swipe Control

Robert Green — Tue, 26 May 2009 05:01:42 +0000

I had previously written a little app that I was going to call "Fingerpaint" but I never released it because there already seemed to be other apps on the market that did that better. I did get it working and I'm glad I did because it made me very familiar with how to process sliding touches. I copied the code out of that sketch app and modified it to process touches for Light Racer. Now the user can touch anywhere on the screen and swipe in the direction they'd like the racer to go.

Light Racer 2.0 - Days 25-30 - More AI and Performance Tuning

Robert Green — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:37:08 +0000

Wow, so much has happened in the past 6 days. My tasks were to finalize how items and NPCs spawned and finish Easy, Medium and Hard AI. Most of the time was spent optimizing algorithms, adding collision checks, changing little bits of design here and there and testing. Testing testing testing. This is the stage where it really gets tiring to play your own game. It just starts to lose some luster after the 100th time you've tried the same level against an Easy CPU. That's ok though because I pushed through and 6 days later, I've got most of the core game done.

How To Test Android Performance Using FPS

Robert Green — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:26:09 +0000

While doing performance testing of Light Racer 2, I had to figure out how to do the fastest common operations. One problem I found was that I was drawing a static background in a 32 bit color mode with transparency when it was much faster to draw it in 16 bit with none. Another thing I wanted to check for was to see what was faster for finding half of a number: Division by two or multiplication by point-five? This matters because I do a whole lot of that in the game to place graphics and find mid-points for various physics and AI stuff. I wasn't sure which would be faster because the ARM processor in a G1 has neither a hardware divider nor a floating point unit. I wrote this little utility to tell me how many frames per second I can get with various operations. Also - Divide by two is at least twice as fast.

Light Racer 2.0 - Days 23-24 - New Graphics

Robert Green — Wed, 13 May 2009 20:34:08 +0000

My project plan called for the completion of the levels in the game and then on to do more work on the AI, but I decided instead to take a couple of days to finish up some odds and ends that I have been spending too much time thinking about, which came to be graphics improvements, zooming, player indicators and scoring. These two days have done more for the overall feel and polish of the game than anything I have done so far. The zooming got me to thinking about different ways to make 2D games interesting. I still have 6-8 weeks left of development to get Light Racer 2 and Light Racer 3D done but I'm already thinking about how I can use what I've learned on this project in my next game. Anyway, here is what was done on days 23 and 24.

Light Racer 2.0 - Days 21-22 - Portals

Robert Green — Mon, 11 May 2009 19:55:53 +0000

The final stage of the game is called "Portals." When a player goes into a portal, he comes out facing a different direction on the other side of the map. It's simple but also risky. I randomized where the player comes out of so there's no way to guarantee safe exit when there are trails blocking parts of the other portal. Overall this map feature was fairly simple to implement and it makes for yet another interesting dynamic to the game. I'm very happy to be totally finished with map features because now I can go about assembling and tweaking everything to make the game really feel complete.

Light Racer 2.0 - Days 19-20 - Laser Sweep

Robert Green — Wed, 06 May 2009 17:17:32 +0000

Implementing the laser sweep was one of the most fun parts of the development so far. I wanted the laser to feel like it was controlled by a conscious being and I believe I achieved that effect. The turret is menacing; it locks on to a player and tracks them before charging up and firing a sweeping blast of laser. I was originally planning on having the laser also decimate any trails it touched but after playing with it for a while, I decided that it was plenty effective just as a player killer. The art really worked out well for it too. I'll include what I drew in photoshop so you can see what I did to make it turn out nicely in the game.