21 Days Hints and Tips

[BeyondCloister]

I thought I would offer some hints and tips for anyone who wants to listen. If I manage to help just one person then it was all worth it :D Hopefully others will add to this thread in time to help others out.

One possible way to reduce the size of your game is not to include any graphic assets. Don't laugh, not as crazy as it sounds :rolleyes:

Instead what you can do is one of the following.

Use simple vector graphics for your game. Remember the idea of this contest is not such great graphical content as a uDG game. Used correctly these kinds of graphics can be very effect indeed.

Another option is that you create all the graphics at run time by drawing them to memory instead of loading them from file. A variation on this is to create them to file the first time the game is run.

These are techniques that have been successfully used on platforms where resources are limited such as PDAs.

[whogben]

I might try and cheat by making my game go online and download the necessary assets when it is first run. It might even be a feature whereby it goes to google:image-search and gets new images every time the game is played.

[Josh]

Probably being too nit-picky here, but... wouldn't having the app go online and retrieve the game assets be against the spirit of the contest?

[suhbataar]

... and the game wouldn't do very well in the (however unlikely) case that there is no internet connection available...

[BeyondCloister]

I might try and cheat by making my game go online and download the necessary assets when it is first run.
Now if some free software I downloaded started going online unexpectedly I would get concerned!

... and the game wouldn't do very well in the (however unlikely) case that there is no internet connection available...
Laptop users are not always online, and don't forget those who share a dial-up connection with a phone user.

[Nevada]

I can see it now. 'The game is only a 500kb download. But once you launch it you have to download 15MB of assets... Hey, the game download is still under 5 megs isn't it?' Plus, I think it was stated that the complete game download must not exceed 5 megs.....

[whogben]

unfortunately i don't have much choice, the runtime file with no assets is about 2.3 megs compressed!

[funkboy]

unfortunately i don't have much choice, the runtime file with no assets is about 2.3 megs compressed!
What development tool are you using? I can compress a standalone from MetaCard 2.4.3 down to about 800K - plenty of room for lots of graphics/sounds.

--

As for other hints... well, 3D polygons never take up a whole lot of disk space :)

[whogben]

OH! I have a brilliant idea, won't help me but maybe someone can do this...

For macOSX games why not let them start with the textures, I mean, rather than store the textures in the game downloadable, when the game opens for the first time have it take predefined sections out of the standard Apple desktop patterns etc! I bet you can get a lot of textures out of those...

[suhbataar]

that i think is more honest... :) & inventive too.

[whogben]

that i think is more honest... :) & inventive too.

never seen u before, can i trust you? maybe you should post in the Introductions thread friend, or foe.

[diordna]

Use simple vector graphics for your game. Remember the idea of this contest is not such great graphical content as a uDG game. Used correctly these kinds of graphics can be very effect indeed.

Retro Defender already uses this. It will be a contest entry, since I think I can fairly say that I haven't put more than 3 weeks total into it. Also, I won't really work on it during the actual contest.

Another option is that you create all the graphics at run time by drawing them to memory instead of loading them from file. A variation on this is to create them to file the first time the game is run.

This sounds like a good idea. I'd like to offer another suggestion that combines both of these ideas: create your own image file format that instructs how to draw your vector graphics, and then draw them to a buffer and use that as if you had loaded it in as a graphic.

[Sohta]

Old ( well no so old ) wisdom:

The amount of information contained in a file does not depend on the size of the file, but in the size of the algorythm required to generate the file. :sneaky:

[blobbo]

can someone point me to a set of royalty-free playing card images? i need all 52...

and yes, i know i should draw them from scratch to save space. if i have to, i will. but for now i'd rather just manage the images...

[OneSadCookie]

Hey, that's cheating!

I spent last night writing the code to draw the cards piece by piece...

http://onesadcookie.is-a-geek.net/~keith/21shot.jpg

[Chris Burkhardt]

Wow, those look nice. I like how you use people's avatars :)

[Josh]

Extra points if someone (besides the creator) can tell me who made the background image. :)

[blobbo]

is there something in the rules against using images? am i not allowed to use card graphics? i could write code to generate them, but i'd rather not. that's a lot of extra work...

[OneSadCookie]

No, I was just being cheeky, when I'd spent so long getting the cards drawing all nicely, the thought that you might just use a single image per card seemed unfair ;)

I thought I'd done a set a few years ago, but I can't even find them any more. Since it's the sort of thing it would be useful for iDG to have, are there any artists out there who'd like to take a stab? 52 cards + 2 different jokers + 2 different card backs, at a size that they can be scaled down, royalty-free with an iDev theme?

[aarku]

Just a note, if you are planning on using Python in your project, just distribute the compiled bytecode .pyc files and leave the .py files out, and your program will then be moderately difficult to disassemble. (Difficult enough)

-Jon

[GoodDoug]

No, I was just being cheeky, when I'd spent so long getting the cards drawing all nicely, the thought that you might just use a single image per card seemed unfair ;)

I thought I'd done a set a few years ago, but I can't even find them any more. Since it's the sort of thing it would be useful for iDG to have, are there any artists out there who'd like to take a stab? 52 cards + 2 different jokers + 2 different card backs, at a size that they can be scaled down, royalty-free with an iDev theme?

I have a set of playing cards I had downloaded from iDG before the cataclysm. I was going to use them in my 21 entry... but I like OSC's idea of generating them on the fly. Just as an exercise in wasted time... :p

That might be a fun contest as well... generate 52 cards

[blobbo]

argh! everyone talks about their images, but no-one posts links! i'll keep searching here...

[Steven]

I haven't been able to find any free playing card images at all... Could you post up a link to those assets, GoodDoug? Or could you make your code open source, OSC? I could really use one of them...
Thanks,
Steven

[GoodDoug]

I haven't been able to find any free playing card images at all... Could you post up a link to those assets, GoodDoug? Or could you make your code open source, OSC? I could really use one of them...
Thanks,
Steven

I zipped 'em up and put them on my web server...
try http://www.gooddoug.com/PlayingCards.zip

[OneSadCookie]

Wow, those are, uh, basic...

The source to my card-drawing routine is in Ruby, so it's probably not of significant use to anyone else... if you still want to see it, I'm sure I can put it up somewhere...

[GoodDoug]

Yep, they're not very pretty... but they were all I could find royalty free when I needed some cards.

[Steven]

Bah, Ruby... Would it be easy to port to Obj-C? I've never seen Ruby code... And, thanks, GoodDoug. I'll use those If I don't find anything prettier...

[blobbo]

i found some. check around sf.net for card games and look in their cvs trees. kde has some good card images in its games package, too. i think both of these sets are public domain.

[Steven]

i found some. check around sf.net for card games and look in their cvs trees. kde has some good card images in its games package, too. i think both of these sets are public domain.

I bzipped them after ripping them out from KPoker, so here they are. (http://steven.fgsoft.net/cards.tbz)
They were GPL'ed, so I don't think there should be any issues...

(BTW I renamed the files a bit, they make more sense now.)