08-29-2012, 04:07 AM
764B46774141434148240 wrote: Huh.. well, I'll take your word for it, and I'll be very interested to try it out then. I have both iPhone and iPad, so I look forward to comparing and contrasting the versions. You're actually playing it on the iPhone and not the simulator? I don't think we ever talked about this before, but I did wonder how someone might approach a game for the iPhone and iPad. I mean, in some respects they're different platforms. It's almost as though you'd have to tailor an experience to each. Kind of a bummer to the independent developer who is trying to get as much mileage from portability as he can.
Yes, I'm testing it on the actual iPhone, not the simulator. The simulator is pretty limited when it comes to many things, such as testing true OpenGL-based game performance, texture memory limitations, etc.
764B46774141434148240 wrote:
As for the iPhone, I was thinking you'd have to go one of two ways with it: shrink the rooms down, losing many details and making it hard to avoid some obstacles, or keep the viewable area large, but limit the viewport. This would turn the handheld version into a sort of scrolling game where you might only view the part of the room that Jack happens to be standing in. I can see how that might actually ramp up the difficulty of some mansions, and make them seem even larger than they are.
I tried both approaches. I did a lot of work to put scrolling support into Midnight Mansion, so you could scroll around a single room. Part of it was nice... seeing everything nice and big. But the BIG drawback was that there would be things you'd need to do in the same room that you couldn't see until you got close. Like a lever in the upper-left corner, that you wouldn't see when you were in the lower or right side of the room.
If I remember correctly I took this out and went with
you see almost the whole room at once, but it scrolls slightly.The very minor scrolling that is done is used to keep the gameplay that is under your thumbs visible. If it didn't scroll, and Jack went down a ladder that led to the room below on the left side of the screen, you'd not be able to see him while he climbed this ladder, as it'd be under your left thumb (where the left/right controls are). My current system has almost unnoticeable scrolling -- it feels very natural and you barely notice it. It's quite subtle, but keeps it so the gameplay is always in view. It's pretty slick, and I'm much happier with it than the
you can't see stuff in other parts of the roomsolution.
I also spent a lot of time re-optimizing the in-game map for iPhone. Initially it was slow as molasses. But by reworking some things to be optimize on iOS, it's now pretty smooth.
-Vern