Mediocre game technology

In my last post I mentioned briefly how all graphical objects in Granny Smith are made out of 2D polygons which are transformed into 3D at load time. It was never initially designed for the sometimes complex environments in the game, but we decided to stick to this method instead of involving a separate 3D modelling software. I think, at times real 3D objects could have come in handy, but overall the current workflow is preferable since it's much more efficient. There is no need to track separate files or assets - every level is totally self-contained. Because the 2D data is so small, we don't even use instancing, so there is no risk of trashing another level when altering objects.



The most fundamental transform is a simple extrude, but we can also apply a chamfer or fillet in the process. This is used extensively, especially for round hills and other natural shapes in the game. This beveling is done by gradually shrinking the polygon while extruding it, in one or more iterat…

It's been almost two months since we released our second title - Granny Smith (available on App Store and Google Play). It's a platform racer starring an old lady chasing an apple thief through different environments. Our ambition was to make a smaller game than Sprinkle, but it turned out to be a lot more ambitious. I think mostly due to graphics. It started off as a 2D platformer with 3D-ish graphics - a few layers of parallaxed polygons, but the editor got gradually more advanced, and even though all graphics are still drawn as 2D polygons or splines, they can be extruded, beveled, rotated, textured, etc in heaps of different ways. In fact, all level data is still stored as 2D polygons and then transformed into 3D object at load time, making the level data extremely small. Even a complex level in the city environment is typically less than 30 kb in compressed form (not including textures).



I will talk about the physics in this blog post and save the graphics details for la…