Thursday, October 24, 2013

Update #1

Just because the core game is finished, that doesn't mean we are done.

Its onward to Update #1!

And as I said yesterday I wanted to focus on optimizing for Retina Display. So what is Retina?

Retina is basically a fancy way of saying that a device has a very high resolution. In particular, Retina display iPads (anything above the iPad 2) have a resolution of 2048x2048. When we built Pathogen, all of our assets were optimized for 1024x1024, so that we knew it would function without a problem on lower quality devices like the iPad 2 & iPhones. On HD devices, those assets were simply scaling those assets up to fit on the screen. If you look hard, you can tell that they are a little fuzzy on HD devices.

So how are we going to get assets that look good on an HD screen. If we had not created the assets in Flash, we would actually have to go back to drawing board & recreate them from scratch. But, because the assets were made in Vector all I had to do is go back to the original, scale it up & export it back out. Within 6 hours, all of our animations had been converted. Yay Flash.

All I have to do is code in a check at the very beginning of the application to see if the device its on is HD or not. If so, it will load in the HD sprites instead of the standard sprites.

------

Matt has also been working on some quality of life fixes for more advanced players. You can now change the animation speed in the game, doubling it, or even opting to remove the animations all together for even faster play.

One of the things you might first notice as well is the inclusion of a boarder surrounding the whole game board. This boarder display is something I added so that anyone can easily identify whose turn it currently is, even at a glance.


No comments:

Post a Comment