At this point, I can't see any further optimisations in the rendering part of the workflow.
So my attention will turn to the post-processing (resizing, stitching, recolouring) where I already have some ideas for optimisations. But writing imagemagick commands is my least favourite thing in the world, so I may never get around to it. We'll see!
I remember wanting to play Daily Driver after the first Playdate Update. As a racing game fan, I can totes vibe with this. Looking forward to more things from you!
I know this is an old post but… Did you ever make headway on making this Paper Plane demo into a full game? I started making a similar game à la the WarioWare minigame of the same name but yours definitely has more of a Playdate feel!
The Paper Plane is one of the vehicles/scenarios in my game Daily Driver. You can try it out in the demo, there's a link at the bottom of the first post.
I really enjoyed the Nintendo plane game (on DSi Ware and in Wario Ware) so you should carry on with your version!
Nintendo Paper Plane and Macintosh Glider were my inspirations for adding one to my game.
After optimisations my gradient lines are drawing at 40fps on device, but I don't think they should be that expensive. So I'll be proceeding with solid lines and will come back to these gradient lines at a later time. It's important not to loose momentum!
New gradient line drawing technique is super fast and shows that it's polygon drawing the ends where I'm losing speed. I plan to convert them into pre-rendered sprites and aim to do most polygon math only once on init.
just wanted to stop in and say thanks for all the useful info you've contributed to the forum, recently your benchmark thread helped me confirm I wasn't losing my mind when I ran into some surprising results (if you're curious, I was slightly surprised how much slower drawing to an image via pushContext/etc vs direct :draw() calls are; I had been curious if one could effectively batch by writing to a blank image and only send to screen once as an optimization)
This looks awesome!! I've been thinking about what a good fit Tempest would be for Playdate's crank. I definitely look forward to seeing more of this project.
Yesterday evening I learned of a new indie game for X68000, called Ball und Panzer Golf. In it you control a little tank and blast balls around a single screen golf course. There is more to it than that, including unique controls and rules, and high scoring mechanisms that can be discovered.
Anyway, this afternoon I played it and it was great fun! A really nice arcade high score chaser.
It seemed doable on Playdate so I set myself a goal of making it quickly. So far it's going well.
All game graphics are drawn using shapes and dither patterns, well, except the font.
This is from 4pm to midnight with a break for dinner.
"Just" collision, scoring and some additional animation remaining to be done.