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General game dev tips

A topic by TheMetalCarrotDev created Jun 13, 2024 Views: 198
Viewing posts 1 to 1
(1 edit)

I have some little tips on improving games. Keep in mind that I'm not really a solid 10/10 game designer myself, so if you disagree or want to provide more insight, feel free to chip in. Here are my tips:

Tip #1: See if your engine supports TimeDelta, and if it does, utilize it in your code.

Some game code is based off of Frames Per Second, meaning that the game will run about twice as fast in terms of timing and movement at 60 frames per second as it does at 30 frames per second. Utilizing TimeDelta and testing it can be extra work, but I feel it usually results in better games. When properly utilizing TimeDelta, a game will run just about the same at low framerates and high framerates.

Tip #2: The phantom Touch support

Some game engines, when you add Mouse controls, add automatic Touch support (I don't fully understand this myself), so if you get any head-scratching comments about your game having partial but broken Touch support when you didn't add Touch controls, that is probably why. (However, this also means that if you want to add proper Touch support to your game and this happens, you are already halfway there - as far as I can tell.)

Tip #3: The echoing sound effect

If you hear an echo on a sound effect, check your code to make sure a code event isn't being done multiple times in such a way where, it doesn't break the game, but repeats the sound effect multiple times. This may not happen super frequently, but one example of this error is when you have a block of code, then set a timer for the code to finish, but set the sound effect play event in the block of code before the timer (which granted, sometimes you have to do.) So the timer doesn't end up looping multiple times (or it does but doesn't make a difference), but there's an attempt to loop the sound effect multiple times which should be played once. The reason for this is that the code is getting updated multiple times per second, which is typically normal. The bug is that you want the sound effect to be played just once, and it isn't.

One way around this might be using something like a Trigger Once command. It's also possible this occurrence happens more in no-code engines rather than IDEs, I'm not sure.

Anyways, these are my tips. They're pretty general and may not apply to all engines. Got any tips of your own that you would like to share?

To be honest, I'm more interested in hearing other's tips than just posting my own. But if I'm going to ask others to share, I feel I probably should too.