Friday Blog Post
We got T-shirts, business cards, stamps and stickers - we are ready for Game City! Do we have a game? erm…
We had a massive breakthrough this week, those of you testing the game would have noticed the long loading times. We noted a loading time of 20 seconds for some devices! Well after much scrimping, programming trickery and me saying goodbye to all my favourite audio samples, we have got the average loading time down to 0.75 seconds! And that’s without any pre-loading in the main menu. So the game is feeling proper quick now, and to restart a level is instantaneous.
We've also changed the mechanic of the flower, it now spawns randomly instead of predetermined.
One main way we got the loading time down is quite simple, but once we found out we will never go back to the old ways:
We used to use the ‘NSBundle pathForResource’ static method to load our many music samples. This is very slow, instead, we switched to calling the same method (pathForResource) from the mainBundle instance of the NSBundle class. If you haven't tried this yet, give it a go and watch your app fly.
We are super excited for Game City, if anyone is going please come along and say hello, abduct some animals and take a sticker.
If you want to test the game, the more the merrier, shoot an email to simon@outofthebit.com and we can hook you up (:
