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(+2)

Thanks for the interesting write-up! The part about prerendering animated tiles for an area to improve the rendering performance will definitely be used in my games as well when I run into performance issues 😊

Looking forward to trying out the game when it’s ready! ✨

(1 edit) (+3)

I'm glad you liked it! The general takeaway here is that for any process-intensive operations, always ask yourself if it's possible to pre-render or pre-compute so you don't have that in your main game loop which can affect performance!


Another good example of this was the static for my TV Tuner minigame from Mobware Minigames. At first i was rendering the static every frame, which performed horribly on device. I started pre-rendering all the frames of the random static shown on the TV, which worked, but added a noticeable load time. Finally I added a feature where the pre-rendered "static" is saved to an image on the Playdate disc, so the next time the player plays the minigame it can grab the pre-rendered static and eliminate the load time altogether!

 

(you could also pre-render the static noise and include it in the game as a png file, but i took the trade-off of the small one-off load time in exchange for not making the .pdx any larger than it needs to be. )