I finally found the source of the performance problem that has been bothering me for months. It was the rendering of the game cabinet in closeup view.



It's actually composed of 6 images: the back panel, side "walls", 3 rounded borders, and the monitor casing. All of them are nearly 800x600 and I was drawing them every cycle for a whopping 7 milliseconds. Now I combine them into one image for each cabinet and it runs like a champ on my crappy laptop.

Also, since most of them are symmetrical, I can probably reduce memory by cropping them down to one quadrant and drawing them at different rotations.

Here is probably the first public screen of the full arcade view, which includes the HUD. This design is pretty much final and took about a hundred iterations to get right. There will be a bit more signage in the back, and the game marquees need improvement, but that's about it.




I've also done a lot of work preparing for an open Beta. (soon, soon...)

A Forum. More on that in an upcoming post.

Crash handling. Creates a nice bug submission form with a lot of debug info prefilled in.

Help system. There are about four popups that will appear during the first game. I added these based on previous usability tests. A lot of time went into getting this right, since it's really easy to annoy or confuse the player with these things.

Scoreboard stats. When someone submits a score, I can now see (and eventually display) all of the minigames they played and how they did on each one. This will let me tweak the difficulty and also let players compete on things other than score, like time, bonuses collected, perfect games, etc.

Sounds. I recorded a bunch of files already, for the Virus and Johnny's girlfriend, but will probably throw it away and try again.

Performance. Still sucks on low-end machines. I still can't figure this one out.

Ending. This is a lot better now, with plenty of exciting cutscene action and a nicer stats display. Each of the five bosses will have its own surprise ending.

Still sick. Still high on drugs.

So I did the idle animations today instead of "work."

I've been fighting a cold and have been high on cold medicine the past couple of days, so rather than working on the game, I've been working on a mockup of the Joystick Johnny web site.

In my opinion, most developers give too much information on their website. To most players, there's no difference between a game with 55 levels or 155 levels. My goal is to entice visitors to download the demo by creating curiosity, so the main page is almost entirely made of select images. Other than the copyright, there are no numbers on the page.