Drastically different gameplay between Gamesalad and iPhone

MattVollet

I was wondering if anyone has had experience with the gameplay in a game being drastically different between the GS and iphone version of the game. I was working on a platform game that plays very well on the computer, but when I transfer it over it runs very laggy, the background images are blurry, and the jump distance is RIDICULOUSLY over powerful.

Any info would be helpful!!!

MattVollet

Good find, tshirt. Problem 1 of 5,000,000 fixed.

Crazybreadman

If the game spawns a lot of complex actors at once or other taxing things on the engine it probably won't run well on the iphone. Also trying to keep file sizes for pics and audio as small as possible helps.

MattVollet

Yeah this is so strange... no complex actor spawning, no huge images (nothing over 53kb). No audio at all yet... Arg! frustrating.

MattVollet

I uploaded the game in a flash version to see if you guys can see anything that could be a potential problem. There aren't any issues until the actual gameplay starts, then it lags and has all the problems listed above.

http://gamesalad.com/game/play/35792

Thanks guys

Eastbound

I have only noticed game speed being an issue between the computer and iPhone.

MattVollet

Eastbound: Sorry I'm not sure what you meant by that... care to expand?

PS: love, love, love, love Kill The King, I hope it does as well as it deserves to (which is very).

JamesZeppelin

I think since its in beta its just a matter of playing with things until they work.

Maybe reduce sizes more.

My game was pretty jerky on the iphone (even 3gs) and i was able to reduce most my images down below 10k... most around 2 or 3k even full screen loaders.

Maybe that helps.

Crazybreadman

well im not sure why it would lag from just looking at the game on here, but on iphone your jump would seem long because your jump is acceleration based and it would throw that off I think.

MattVollet

Okay so here is what we have.

1) Images are blurry because of their dimensions
2) I took the images off and it isn't laggy... guess I need to make them smaller (sigh)
3) I guess I just need to adjust the accelerate attribute for the iphone? Seems ridiculous that it doesn't translate.

Crazybreadman

yeah make sure your images are png at 72 dpi. The acceleration wont translate well if laggy, but it should if u can get it smoother

MattVollet

Thanks for your help, everyone

rebump

If all your squares for the obstacles to jump over are individual squares, you may want to add a few more of varying sizes (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 squares tall) and use them where appropriate - may help with memory usage and performance (less instances to detect collisions, etc.) as well as not allowing the character to stand halfway up a vertical stack of them (i.e. a wall).

Or have a square that has no behavior that gets nestled in the middle of the stacks of squares that the player will never touch.

Or draw them in on the background and only place the top-most layers of squares actors to create the platforms for the actor to collide against/land on.

Also, when saving your PNGs, I hear there is an online PNG optimizer to reduce their size while still retaining almost all the quality. I know the paint/photo program Paint Shop Pro (a PC product) has this feature too (it's in a button option when you "Save As" the image).

Eastbound

I simply meant that the only difference of games I've made between playing on the phone and computer is that the iPhone will be slower at times, but not that the objects behave differently (such as varying jump heights).

And thank you very much for the kind words!