Hello everybody!

By request from fellow user cleversons, we would gladly share some tips on how to make the fullscreen effects found in our game, Pest Fest.

If you want to know what the heck we are talking about, here are some promo codes! First come first serve!

NYYYLR7FYJ33
MN4JKN34AAAK
WTKXLKY7W3NK
LHYNEP3XFEMA

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The first method, used for the super moves, is nothing out of the ordinary for Corona users: they are normal sprite sheets, but we have taken advantage of the fact that they are swift, blurry movements.

Since the effects happen so fast, we made the sprite sheets at 256x256 per frame, on 16 frames, for a total of 1024x1024px per sprite sheet, which is something even the iPhone 3GS can handle without too much of a problem. Then we stretched them to take up the whole screen.

The texture has to be preloaded of course, if you need an instantaneous response.

Of course this is not true for all cases, but in general, the faster the movement, the lower you can set your individual sprite resolution without appreciable differences in quality.

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For the in game video tutorials, there are some differences with how you handle that on iPhone or on Android (in our case a Samsung Galaxy S).

But before that... the movies are a sequence of REALLY LOW RES jpgs. If I remember correctly they are 160x120px and set at 35% quality. They are streteched at 2x. We put the "old projector" filter on them in Premiere to hide the low quality, and put the old mosquito as the one who presents the video to drive home the "old theme" even further.

For iPhone 3GS and 4, it is best to create a "texture stream": make it so the first jpg loads, unloads, and then the next one loads, unloads, etc etc. This is a very CPU intensive task - the iPhone can handle it well but the Android (Samsung Galaxy S) not so much.

For Android, particularly the Samsung Galaxy S, it is better to load all the little textures first and then play the sequence, since the GPU in that handset is better than the one in the iPhone 4, and it can handle the load.

Hi again!

Thank you very much for your contribution!

Smart move. I couldn't notice you are loading a 256x256 sprite and scaling it up to full screen. As you said, it's happening so fast that we can't tell the difference. That is a nice way to overcome Corona's lack of texture compression. Very clever :)

Any other tips on performance? What about transitions and timers, have you avoided them?

br,
Cleverson

Thanks for the code and the game looks great!
WTKXLKY7W3NK used.

All the codes are now used. I tried all of them and the first code ended up being free lol.

@ aaaron: Hahaha great! We don't want to seem stingy with our codes; we'll release a few more down the line!

@cleversons: We have avoided most transitions, using them sparingly for some effects, but yeah, we handle most everything with enter frame animation. For example, the title of the game in the menu is tweened, since it is a very simple motion.

As for timers, we use them, but we REALLY have to keep tight control over them.