The Battle Cats type game
motorcycle boy
Member Posts: 429
I'm wanting to make a game similar to the Battle Cats but I'm hearing that GS prob can't handle all the animations required. Thoughts? Each bad guy character would require four types of animations while each good guy character would require 8 types of animations. And of course each animation would require multiple png's. This could easily be 200 separate png files for the characters and then you have all the other graphics. Can I get some advice on this?
Comments
Animation is the area of GS that I like to break. Then again, I have become very good at retaining decent animations without insane frame rates. Think of it as forced perspective. There are times when you need to exaggerate the frame durations etc. etc. Some one once said timers are for chumps, I say they are an animators best friend, well at least in recent builds.
Where have you heard this ? I don't think any of my own projects over the last few years has had less than a few hundred actors, I always use lots of image sequences, my current game has 2,392 images, and there will likely be at least four or five hundred more, GameSalad has zero problems handling hundreds or thousands of images, the project runs at 60fps on an iPad3 (which has the same power as an iPad2).
200 separate png files is nothing for a whole game, my custom score count alone uses 1,000 pngs !
I think people can often be overly cautious with GameSalad when it comes to animations, choosing low frame rates for their animations and limited sequence lengths, but shuffling images around is something GameSalad excels at, I run all my animations (where needed) at 60fps, GameSalad handles it all just fine.
Yeah, even after all the cool stuff like better resolution, pixel density, increased system memory, new graphic processor etc., the iPad 3 seems to perform very closely to it's older brother.
Oddly, the PS Vita shares a lot in common with the iPad 3.
@Socks I sent you a pm but thought I'd post here too. I actually heard it from the animator I'm hiring who has also made some decently complex games. With battle cats it's possible to have dozens of characters on the screen at once all firing off their animation behaviors. @RP have you played this game? So you think GS can handle it no problem? I'm using tables for as much as I can in regards to the coding so that it will run smooth as possible. If you guys don't see it as an issue then I'll go ahead and make it how I intended with about 20 characters. Animation png files would be somewhere between 700-1000.
@RP I'm curious what you meant by timers being an animators best friend. Can you explain that for me?
@Socks I'm also curious as to how you keep your project file down with so many images. I came across a thread that mentioned this website: https://tinypng.com/
Do you do something similar to keep the file size down? After all most people prob wouldn't be willing to download an app that's over a certain size correct?
I've not mentioned anything about dozens of actors all firing off their animation behaviours (presumably at the same time) not being a problem, I am saying that GameSalad has no issue with handling hundreds or even thousands of images. The two statements are not the same at all.
I haven't got a clue whether dozens of characters all firing their animation behaviours (presumably at once) would be an issue as it's an arbitrary measure. You could have a project with 2 animated actors that is way too much for GameSalad to handle, and you could also have a project with 50 animated actors that GameSalad handles just fine, without knowing the specifics of the project, without knowing what each actor is doing, what rules and behaviours and conditions and interactions (and so on) each actor is using, you can't really say.
You only need to include one poorly thought through constrain behaviour in each character to reduce the number you can have on screen, moving smoothly, from 50 to 10 . . . and by the same rule a simple piece of streamlining of your code might up the number of characters you can have on screen from 10 to 100 !!
Example, jettisoning the Animate behaviour and using floor(game.time *framerate)%loop improves performance (in some situations), removing 'floor' (so just (game.time *framerate)%loop) worsens performance by 100%, so a 60fps game becomes a 30fps game.
Example 2, I had a single calculation (vector to angle) in an actor that turned a smooth 60fps project into a glitchy sub-20fps stuttery mess.
Example 3, having an actor cycle through the colour spectrum by constraining its R, G and B channels to a sine wave will allow you to run 200 or so actors on screen at the same time at 60fps, any more than this and the frame rate starts to drop, replace the constrains with a pre-rendered colour cycle and the number of actors on screen (while still maintaining 60fps) jumps up to 400-500.
Etc etc etc . . . . .
Furthermore, person A could get 50 actors all fighting away on screen at once, person B might only be able to get 5 . . . because person A has made clever use of tables or pre-animated sequences instead of using 4 constrains to do the same thing or they have done XXX or YYY or ZZZ or a million other tricks or techniques or efficiency improvements (etc).
So could dozens of characters firing off their animation behaviours at once be an issue ? I have't got a clue ! But having more than 200 images in your project is not an issue at all.
@Socks I see now thank you for the detailed explanation. So then what I need to do is hire you or someone else to go through my coding once all is said and done on my end to make sure it's coded as good as it can be like a project help gig.
Well not me ! I take too long to do anything
but yes you could do that I guess, or you could post various questions on the forums during the development and do it all as you go a along.
@Socks "Well not me ! I take too long to do anything"
I dunno about that
... you always seem to be pretty fast at knocking up demos, template files or videos to show the community how to do things, or just to dazzle us with your tinkerings...
Like many, I'm in awe at what your first published game is going to be like, based on what you produce and show off on the forums!!
I hope it involves Tony The Spider!
My GameSalad Academy Courses! ◦ Check out my quality templates! ◦ Add me on Skype: braydon_sfx
Oh yeah, I'll throw together demos quite quickly, I mean doing proper projects, they just take so long, I'm always jealous when I see someone turn a project around in just a few weeks or days even !
You're this guy, and he's kinda' lost in a magical forest and the arms have fallen off his jumper and you have to get them and you get a point for each one and then you are a winner.
Tony went missing just before Christmas, he's done this before, I usually get a call from the police sometime around mid February to come and collect him, more than likely it's a drinking binge with some minor criminal activity, but once he's back I'll talk to him about maybe doing a game.
@Socks said:
WHOA! How did you get joints, 3D rendering and magic all in that single demo?
New to GameSalad? (FAQs) | Tutorials | Templates | Greenleaf Games | Educator & Certified GameSalad User
I just used a sine wave and two change attribute behaviours (one for each arm), the rest is done by moving the camera around.
@dreichelt - sorry, I completely missed this post !
"How you keep your project file down with so many images"
Begging the question ! Deduct 10 points
I've never had any intention of keeping the size of my projects small - or at least arbitrarily small - my first (and primary) concern is a good looking, smooth playing game - if that means the game must be 180MB then that's the size it will be, I have downloaded numerous games over the years that were massive, 500, 750 and even 2,000MB !! Games of 1GB+ often top the App Store charts, so I've never seen size as an issue.
Example: Angry Birds 653MB, Minecraft 843MB, Spider-Man 1.64GB . . . etc
In the same way that I am a little puzzled as to why people try and avoid having too many image files (not you specifically, but in general) I'm also puzzled as to why people try and keep their games tiny, I've see people post about being worried that their project is over 20MB ! . . . . the only consideration is wanting your game available over a mobile network, here Apple limit the game size to 100MB, but Wi-Fi access is so common (at least here in the UK), it's free in every café and workplace and house (etc) that a game only being available on Wi-Fi is unlikely to determine what gets downloaded (to any great extent).
I'd like to see some data on this, anything at all, I've asked people quite a few times, no one has ever managed to corroborate this idea other than with anecdotal examples or expressions of personal preference. It may well be true for all I know, I'm certainly not saying I know it's not true, I've just never seen the claim supported and all the large (really really large!) games that top the App Store suggest game size is no limit to success ('success' here = downloads).
I have a 6 year old son, if I were to say to him, "sure Minecraft looks cool, but this rip-off version called MyneKraft is only 30MB, and it only uses 15 images for the whole game!! Cool yeah !!??"
He will likely say: "Just shut up and download Minecraft otherwise I am reporting you to social services".
Which comes to another point, the psychological 'weight' of a game, rather than keenly seeking ever smaller games sizes there is an argument to keeping your game sizes larger, the idea is one of perception.
It's some 12 year olds birthday, being a generous parent you let him choose any app he wants (yes, $1.99, super generous), if he were to see two competeing Spiderman games, both $1.99, but one is 1.5GB and the other is 32MB, I suspect there may well be a psychological weight to the 1.5GB option, 1.5GB says 'more', more scenes, bigger worlds, more stuff, more development . . .
Of course this psychology is not going to work on a 2048 style game, with a simple mechanic, but for adventure games, point and click games, games with multiple levels, platformers etc, I suspect a large size won't be a deterrent, and may even have a psychological advantage.
And finally, from a technical point of view asset streamlining is a mixed bag, for a start GameSalad no longer supports compressed images (https://tinypng.com/ etc) so the images may not always work (various visual/alpha glitches being the most reported issues), and secondly - and this is something that doesn't effect the app's size 'on disk', but still somewhat relevant - when an image is moved into RAM it is held in a 24 bit colour space, so that 4.75MB image that you squashed down to 960Kb will occupy exactly 4.75MB of memory when the game is running - so image compression has no effect on how smoothly a game runs or how much RAM it occupies (not that you said this was the case) - and there is in theory (I say 'in theory' because I don't have enough info) the idea that compressed images need to be decompressed, all of them, at run time, which might impact on loading times.
I think you can answer a lot of this with the same question our hypothetical 12 year old is faced with:
Which game are you going to download, the one you actually want, or one that is 112MB smaller . . . . but doesn't quite look as interesting / good ?
i was building the similar and i kinda paused the project. my Project is already 17mb. my another problem with GS is CPU usage. i cant keep the program open more than 20 minutes, Is that normal? I was told the issue was fixed and this is happening from 2 different MAC OS i had.. i'm on Yosemite now and last one was mavericks.
@Socks some very great insights and knowledge about graphics and GS I was unaware of. I'm definitely not an expert on GS so asking these types of questions and getting answers from someone who is much more familiar with it's actual abilities is awesome. Thanks for that. The main thing I would think of as a deterrent for game sizes besides the wifi issue is what percentage of people have their phones filled to the brink. I know personally I'm always out of space on my phone, so I have avoided apps that are over 100mb. However though, I do clean house a lot and will download new apps for research. Anyway, it will be interesting to see how the game does once the coding is finished. I'll keep you guys posted!
@dreichelt I saw your inquiry, I have not had time to reply. I think the tread hit a lot more than you bargained for, so you probably got a lot of information to mull over.
I'd have to long and verbose to explain what I was getting at, it would probably be better to powwow over during a meet up. It's more about designer's choice. There are various ways to execute an action/behavior etc, but it also depends upon the foundation and environment that was used to build your game up on. Depending on how you are setting up a scene especially one that has a lot going on with animation with action and reactionary triggers that depend upon timed variables, timers can serve as a non-visual linear method of "editing" what's going on, on screen.