Boring or fun is quite subjective while talking about gaming. However, by applying proper design principles, we can put most players in an intended experience even for a very simple game. This article will demonstrate some tricks to achieve that. Video tutorial is at the end of the post. What is the game 🤔 It is the number guessing game (guessing genre). Its mechanic is simple. A player will keep...
Game Frame rate and character animations (part 2)
In part 1, we covered the principle of game frame rate and a useful game programming pattern for performance. This part shows the detailed implementation of a game scene with hundreds of moving characters using Android Studio and Kotlin. Image asset This game uses a free image from wild-refuge.net. Xmas girl 3 (URL) You can download any similar image (4 x 4 frames) and place it in the...
Game frame rate & Character animations (part 1)
A simple game does not always come with simple implementation w.r.t character animations. This articles will introduce a practical design pattern in game development to deal with this. How many animations in this game scene Let have a look at the famous game scene of flappy bird and try to identify how many animations. Fig 1. Flappy bird Visually, you may say there are two animations: the pipes...
Smooth nature snake – game redev with Kotlin (part 3)
In part 2, I introduced how to make the serpentine movement. We continue this article by covering the turning mechanism for the snake. Challenges in turning animation Fig 2: Classic snake game design with blocks and grids As we want our snake looks as smooth as possible, the two challenges are: Firstly, the head should slowly change to the target direction rather than a sudden turn. As the head...
Smooth nature snake – game re-dev with Kotlin (part 2)
This is the second part of creating a smooth nature snake game. You can read the first part here. In this part, we will cover the challenges in simulating the snake’s movement pattern. How snakes move Snakes move in zigzag patterns as demonstrated in the following figure. Smooth nature snake movement patterns We can see that the whole body of the snake forms a shape that is similar to the...