This month I had two hours to kill on a flight to Stockholm so I decided tentatively to upgrade Pushdown to AppGameKit V2. I resolved to back out the second I ran across any showstoppers, but the process was pretty much pain free.
The new compiler so, so much faster. Also stricter, I found a bunch of code problems that were previously hidden.
That out of the way, I tried messing around with Spine again. The result?
- Loading times are much faster.
- Memory consumption is massively reduced (no more loading in multiple spritesheets for characters)
- Graphics are massively sharper as the compromise between memory consumption and visible pixels has gone (see the edges of the Frogking compared to previous screenshots)
- More animations - again there was a limit on the number of texture sheets I could load before the min-spec device (iPod Touch 4th Gen) crashed OOM. Now the player character can play a swim animation when under water
- Animations tween between states - much smoother
- Animation workflow massively simplified - just export from spine rather than export spritesheets into a custom animation convertor to AGKs subimages format and then into game.
So AppGameKit V2 is all benefit, no downside as far as I can see.
Before the big change I also added a story system as the main piece of feedback from usertesting.com was "whats going on, and what is that green monster". My 8 year old Creative Director storyboarded it before I added a simple movie playback system using the existing level loading code.
Twitter: @itanican