Zoom & Boom

REVO v0.43.0 Update

This post is a little different. It has more words than usual. I think it’s worthwhile to read because I share how one week turned into three. There are highs and lows on this journey that you might appreciate if given some explanation. But I’ll attempt to keep it as short as possible. Also I have a video for you this time, finally, so it’s the best of both.

The Little REVO That Could

or How Michael Jackson Saved Videogames

Once upon a time…

No wait, that’ll take too long. Ok, grab a cozy drink, because here we go. It’s story time, kids.

REVO felt bad to play. Whenever a bunch of things had to appear on screen, or even just one complex thing, the game would drag and feel clunky. On top of that, it would effectively increase the difficulty of the game by reducing how well you could respond to enemy attacks.

This was no good. I had to do something about it. I figured I would actually sit down for a week and focus on optimization. This is intimidating because it is not a strong part of my skillset. I did not have any confidence it would pan out well. I wasn’t quite wrong about that.

Optimus prime

I began making little changes to whatever random thing seemed to put the most demand on the CPU. This pushed items down the list, but after two solid weeks of this, I saw no clear improvement in performance.

And that’s when things got much worse. I made a bold change to how it loads objects, like enemies, pickups, explosions, and bullets. Instead of loading them into their pools as they were needed, I front loaded all of them at the beginning of the game. This functioned but the performance suddenly got much, much worse, to my dismay.

One more thing

In the last moments of that second Friday, a lightbulb in my head switched on and I tried something I’d never done before. I found a quick way to shut off a bunch of unnecessary components for those preloaded objects. Suddenly… could it be? Yes! It runs quickly and smoothly. Even reloading takes only a few seconds since it doesn’t have to process a billion things again.

Finally! I just optimized the game! Lag spikes have been flattened and a lot of baseline features are streamlined. There’s always room for improvement, but this is a huge win for Team REVO.

It’s darkest before the dawn. Blah blah blah.

Believe in your dreams. Blah blah blah.

Don’t stop ‘til you get enough. Huzzah! PEW PEW!!!!

More Neon Kabooms

Perhaps in celebration of the aforementioned, but also because I didn’t like seeing such weak visual effects throughout the game, I decided to spend a day on explosion redesign. For a while, we’ve had a fiery explosion for Double Shot enemies, but Swarmers had a bit of a flat and dull looking effect while Heavy enemies had a very placeholder burst of dusty white.

I started with that fiery explosion I liked so much and created similar styled explosions for Swarmers and Heavies. The burst of particles showcase colors found within the ship’s own visual design, so they are now less generic. Even the the Hammerheads and Irongills explode slightly differently. It’s nice to see a more cohesive visual design and to inject more bright glows and neon colors into the battles. One even reminds me of a watermelon when it goes off. Summertime fun!

Results!

While the summary of the past three weeks of work could arguably sound more like “I optimized the game and redesigned a couple explosion effects,” the experience of the journey was much more interesting than that.

And I hope you’re eager to see the results in action! If you haven’t already, please consider becoming a playtester. This game needs to ship soon and I could use a lot more pre-release feedback to help me polish for beginners and experienced players alike. Not to mention, I want to know if it runs on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer, and if not, I’d like to try to improve that.

Sign up, check it out, and send me feedback, or send a friend here who likes old video arcades, classic space shooters, and retro neon glows.