March 2011
More Hamster Art!
The art for Hamster: Attack! is nearly complete. We'd like to share with you some characters and places that will be very important to our hairy little hero.
Graphics Optimization Using Texture Atlases
One of the ways I've learned to improve performance of a game is to reduce use of video memory through the use of texture atlases. A "texture" in a game, in this context, is a bit of graphics that will be drawn to the screen as part of the game.
A texture atlas is a set of textures that have been cropped to the size of the actual image I need in the game -- when image files come from the artist, they usually contain a great deal of blank space around the image, and those blank pixels take up valuable video RAM, which can slow down the frame rate during game play.
Writing an Engine
When I started to work on my first indie game under the Recharge Games banner, I wanted to start with an existing library. I’d just spent almost six years working on the Playground SDK for PlayFirst, and was sick to death of writing game engines.
After doing a survey of what was available for Android in May of 2010, though, I came to the conclusion that none of the contenders would do everything that I wanted. And so I started working on my own engine. It couldn’t take that long, right?
The Final Stretch
We're approaching the final stretch on our first original game -- close enough that I want to finally announce its official name:
We had a great response to it at GDC. Angel and I showed a pre-alpha version of the game with animations, demo levels and game art.