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Author Topic: Freakin' Flies: iOS game - Playmaker ROCKs!!  (Read 4071 times)

courtneyrocks

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Freakin' Flies: iOS game - Playmaker ROCKs!!
« on: October 07, 2014, 01:53:59 AM »
Hello people,

I published a game on the itunes app store earlier this year and now I have a gameplay trailer to show it off:

Swat flies - Collect coins - Unlock weapons - Go CRAZY!!

App store link:
https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/freakin-flies/id860492731?mt=8

This game is almost 100% Playmaker. I wanted to make something simple in order to learn Unity. After hitting obstacles due to my lack of scripting knowledge I purchased Playmaker and began a journey of game creation.

I am an illustrator and a visual person so the flow chart style of Playmaker really helped me understand what was happening in the game at runtime - the bug checking is AWESOME!!

I used iTween at the start but ended up replacing most of it with animations due to garbage collection issues. Arraymaker was used extensively. 2D Toolkit for the art and text. MasterAudio for sound. I love how all of the plugins worked so well with Playmaker.

It was an epic journey getting my head around variables, events and how to control game elements but I am happy with the game and I am looking forward to getting into the next one.

Thanks you so much to the Playmaker team for making it possible to create games without scripting.

I would love to hear any questions or comments/feedback - positive or negative.

Keep creating!
Courtney

escpodgames

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Re: Freakin' Flies: iOS game - Playmaker ROCKs!!
« Reply #1 on: October 07, 2014, 02:38:37 AM »
Looks cool! Nice trailer too - will download and rate ya! :)

courtneyrocks

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Re: Freakin' Flies: iOS game - Playmaker ROCKs!!
« Reply #2 on: October 07, 2014, 04:31:50 AM »
Thanks LampRabbit - that would be awesome! Cheers, C

jess84

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Re: Freakin' Flies: iOS game - Playmaker ROCKs!!
« Reply #3 on: October 08, 2014, 12:17:00 AM »
Looks great :)

Did you have any trouble with frame rate during development? It looks pretty smooth there, despite having a fuckload of enemies and other stuff onscreen!

courtneyrocks

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Re: Freakin' Flies: iOS game - Playmaker ROCKs!!
« Reply #4 on: October 08, 2014, 07:15:30 PM »
Thanks for the props jess84!

I did have a number of issues with frame rates and lagging throughout development.
The biggest breakthrough was when I moved to pooling the enemy prefabs rather than instantiating/creating the prefabs when needed. This got rid of lags when spawning objects and minimized garbage collection.
I start the game with around 10 of the most basic enemies already in the scene. When the player selects a level the level cycles through the enemy types and check it has all the enemies it needs for the level and spawns any enemies that are missing, all out of view. The enemy prefabs reset themselves and await an event from the level controller as to when to come screen.
Another speed up was achieved by moving from itween movement to imported cinema 4D animations and then eventually converting as much as possible to native Unity animation. Itween was great at the start of development as I was getting my head around things and for getting ideas out fast, but once I upgraded to unity pro I could see in the profiler how much garbage was being created by itween movements which would cause lagging when being cleaned out.

There are very few colliders. I noticed in the profiler that colliders attached to the animated enemies seemed to be taking a lot of computing as they collided with one another and then worked out if they should react to each other(I think this was what was happening but I could easily be wrong). So I changed the swat to a global  event. There is a collider on the window pane. When the window pane feels a touch event happen it stores the touch point as x and y global float variables and sends a global event HIT. All enemies currently in play then compare their position to the touch position and react accordingly. I only recently learnt that you can attach data to events which could be another way to do it.
There are colliders on buttons but these don't move much and so don't create collisions and are for touch/mouse events only.

The sprites are all in 2D toolkit which is very optimised also. There are no lights or shadows and physics are disabled.

Sometimes now when the player launches a bomb, which kills everything on screen, this causes a lot of events to fire at once and there will be a noticeable small lag on my ipad 2 and iphone 5 but it seems to run very smoothly most of the time.

Peace,
C

KellyRay

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Re: Freakin' Flies: iOS game - Playmaker ROCKs!!
« Reply #5 on: October 09, 2014, 05:36:01 PM »
Rockin! Nice job!

courtneyrocks

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Re: Freakin' Flies: iOS game - Playmaker ROCKs!!
« Reply #6 on: October 09, 2014, 06:21:10 PM »
Thanks KellyRay!
C