Recently I've been doing a lot of work on the graphics for Cherry Chaser, making them more suitable for the high resolution displays on most Android phones. I've just about completed my texture atlas ready for use in the game.
The main issue I have is that to make the animation of the reels simple I need the entire reel in a contiguous region in the atlas. This means the atlas needs to be at least 1024 pixels deep. That's not a problem on better phones but on low end phones having a texture over 512 pixels degrades performance considerably.
The other side effect is that I have quite a lot of spare texture space so I've laid out the rest of my graphics with a view to ease of mapping rather than squeezing them tightly together. I have "lights off" and "lights on" versions of the main screen and I switch lit up regions between each as necessary.
The game will also feature three currencies, pounds, dollars and euros, so I have spare parts of the texture atlas assigned to hold graphics for the alternative currencies.
The other side effect is that I have quite a lot of spare texture space so I've laid out the rest of my graphics with a view to ease of mapping rather than squeezing them tightly together. I have "lights off" and "lights on" versions of the main screen and I switch lit up regions between each as necessary.
The game will also feature three currencies, pounds, dollars and euros, so I have spare parts of the texture atlas assigned to hold graphics for the alternative currencies.
In terms of programming I have implemented two important features which will help the game to run well across the varied range of Android devices that are out there. The first is screen resolution independence. No matter what sized screen the device has the game will stretch or shrink itself to fit. The other feature is frame rate independence. The reels now spin at a fixed number of pixels per second. That can be important on low end devices where the frame rate is more prone to stuttering.
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