Thursday, October 7, 2010

iPhone 4 sucks, in a developers perspective

And why is this? Let me explain. As you know we are currently developing a game for iOS here at VisualDreams. And for sure we thought that our game would have the best performance on iPhone 4. But thats not the case. iPhone 3gs runs with about 20 more frames per second, 60 fps against about 40 fps on the iPhone 4.

All this because iPhone 4 has a higher screen resolution. The problem is that iPhone 3gs and iPhone 4 have the same GPU, and this means that when rendering 2D textures, iPhone 4 has to render 4 times as many pixels to the screen and thus have a much higher fillrate.

So now I'm working hard to optimize the rendering on iPhone 4. The thing is that there isnt that much to do when you are fillrate bound except from optimizing all the textures. As for now we dont use sprite atlases, maybe we could gain a few fps by lowering number of drawcalls.

In a worse case scenario we would have to go with the same resolution as iPhone 3gs. But hopefully this problem will be solved in a near future. I will let you know how it goes..


/Kristofer, Coder

Homepage in progress!

Yesterday Bohman and I decided that a match of Rock-Paper-Scissors will decide who's fate it will be to make our homepage, and of course I lost. David have finished the design and all I have to do now is to get the homepage to work as intended.

The homepage will probably be done next week if everything goes well. On our homepage all the lates news, videos, screenshots and games will be posted.

Here is a small preview of what the page will look like..



/Harald, Coder

Art Complete!

All the games art is now completed! Surely there will be things that will have to be added, tweaked or polished (as always with game development) but as of now everything needed is done. The coders are currently working on menues and optimisation/bugfixing while I am tweaking some gameplay.

Hopefully Kristofer will be able to post something about a problem we ran into this week as soon as possible..

Anyway, to celebrate this joyous occasion I put together a picture displaying a little bit more of the environment and also showing of our characters amazing skills..



/David, Artist

Company presentation..

First post, guess I will present the company and myself for starters. I am VisualDreams one and only artist and my name is David, and well since the coders are eagerly programming at the moment I guess I should go first..

VisualDreams is a newly started company that will specialise in mobile games and applications. We are three guys. Two coders and one artist. After finishing our 2 year education at The Game Assembly, we decided to put our skills together and throw ourselves into the wild mobile app market. Starting with the iPhone/iPad's AppStore with intention to go multiplattform and include development for Android Market and Windows Marketplace.

We started up on the 1st of September and began development of our first game around the 10th of September. Now, almost 4 weeks into development we have a playable game that are now going through the first stages of polish and gameplay tweaking.

Since we aren't really ready to announce or show off that much of the game yet we decided to present our main character. We are still fighting about what to name him so if you have any good suggestions, shoot!


To show your support and keep updated while we construct our homepage join our Facebook and Twitter feed..

Stay tuned for more!

/David, Artist