An email about a card game.[/highlight]
Yesterday I got an email with an idea for a game.
A "simple" card game that could work fairly well.
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To say that I was definitely not enjoying my iOS/Metal experience is an understatement, so instead my head was happily plodding along with the concept of the card game.
"What if it wasn't ONE card game?" suggested my crazy brain.
"And what if you added other sorts of games into the engine, to make a collection of games, not entirely unlike how Foldapuz works.."
By the end of the day, I was starting to draw cards, and that's when the biggest issue struck.
Using my current framework to draw cards is going to be extremely difficult.
My framework has been optimised to either work with a few HUGE images, or a ton of tiny ones, as long as the tiny sprites are all on a single spritesheet.
Every time I switch between different spritesheets, the engine gets a teensy bit slower.
If, say, I want to draw a lot of pre-drawn square tiles, each with a pre-drawn letter on, I have to draw all the rectangles first, and then all the letters afterwards.
If I instead draw each square then letter, then square, then letter, then square, then letter, etc, then the engine has to constantly keep toggling between those spritesheets and everything gets a little bit slower as the workload increases.
The framework is optimised to do things in batches, and for the majority of my games, that's absolutely ideal.
But playing cards.. Eeek!
If I could load one huge spritesheet full of cards, then I could draw those willy-nilly. But the 3DS can't cope with such large images.
If I could draw tiles "better" then that might also work out.
But right now, it's looking like my Framework might not actually be able to handle all of this.
And that leaves me with Javascript as the other option, and wondering exactly how that might turn out..
A series of Javascript card/board games on a webpage?
Is that a good idea?!
Hmmm...
