WHERE WE LEFT OFF
Cake Baws is over, the fourth and final jam is done. We can sit on our laurels and consider the game done. Its playable and it has a boss. Its arcade, its fun and you can play by shooting or get rewarded for not shooting.
AFTERMATH
Game jams are a good way to learn and we learned Windows 8 struggles with the game. Perhaps its because the level generates a .png of levels and then reads it when it should probably create a grid and then read it. Jams are learning experiences and this will help the engine in the long run to offer Windows 8 compatibility.
With the jam over, production halted for a bit. There were other projects to get back to and other games to get updated (outside of itch.io).
Traffic for Cake Kills Candy died almost after three days even with exposure of four jams. As time went on, I noticed people seem to like and retweet Cake Kills Candy far more than my other project which is nearly done. While I am a fan of finishing long term projects before moving on, I hear you should always attack with your best weapons, so after a week of a break... production continued.
UPDATE 24: HYPNOSIS
A good way to get back into the groove is to fluff what you already have. We spent a bit of time making a controller screen. While it seems like an unsubstantial update, there are five production videos for just this simple task and the hilarious failures of programming.
UPDATE 25: NO LOAD TECHNOLOGY
There has been a question that has been in a few forums for a few games, "if your game emulates the NES, why does it need a load screen?" Cake Kills Candy has a loading screen because it generates, then assembles levels. The burden that consumes time is assembling the level. The early levels have a mere blink of a loading screen, but the later levels say level 8 and up have 4 - 5 second loading screens.
Two days were spent making different methods to load and assemble the level without a loading screen. The best method seemed to be a combination of assembling what's on the player screen and a wave that loads the level from left to right. This was the most effective method because if the wave surpassed the player's screen, it no longer needed to check the player's screen and when it was fully loaded it was done.
The burden of processing power was smoothed out to unnoticeable with even the largest rooms. The game will only generate horizontal rooms ten or more screen lengths so to test it, the system generated twenty or more to overburden the system. Then forty screen lengths. At that point the burden became noticeable, but that was four times the largest room in the game.
UPDATE 26: GUMDROPS HAVE FACES
There were always two enemies, jellybeans and gumballs. Gumdrops were added. They have random faces, which creeps me out. They are juicy and explode into the same color juice as their body.
UPDATE 27: BIGGER LEVELS
The game has always been single screen rooms, horizontal rooms that grew with the level you were on and a vertical level to fight Cake Baws. While it is designed to be an arcade game where the objective is get the key and make it to the door... its just a start.
With this update, the game generates larger levels that go right, left, up and down. The only problem is that it burdens the "no load technology." We have the luxury of having a countdown 3, 2, 1, GO so the game would slow during that process as the level loads without a loading screen.
Each level is still generated.
UPDATE 28: POLISH
There were several issues with the previous update. The rooms lead to maps becoming untraversable. The longer load times would cripple frame rates for the first 4 - 5 seconds. To cure everything it required polish. Finding the rough edges when the game generated levels and modifying certain sections.
With the "no load technology" getting in the way, a new load screen was added. Better to have a load time than grind to a halt in the first 4 seconds of playing the game. There are methods to lessen the processor burden of assembling a level, but its better to pre load. As we move away from the arcade feel of the game,the 3, 2, 1 countdown was removed.
After a day or two of polish, we continued to squeeze the load time sponge. The levels are 20 - 30 screens long and these are 16:9 wide screens rather than 4:3. It is a considerable burden because everything is generated, the backgrounds, the solids, the tiles over the backgrounds. The level assembler became more specific and less generalized. Even with larger rooms, the average load time was 3.5 seconds. Sometimes it was 2 seconds or lower, other times it was 5 seconds.
As the pre loader became more specific, the backgrounds became generalized. Rather than assembling background tiles, pre built background tiles were added. The 3.5 second load time turned into an average of 1 second with the most being 2 seconds for an entirely interior level which requires the most processing power.
It was a great trade off, levels up to three times larger than the largest it had previously been for half the waiting time.
ALL CAUGHT UP
These updates have now caught up to exactly where we are as of two days ago. Sorry its a bunch of technical things. The art has progressed, its just not in the game yet.
This blog is slowing my PC! I should use less .gifs.