It’s time for the second of my graphics optimisation tips. This time I’ll be talking about animation frames.
Animation Frames
Bitmap animation can quickly consume memory. It’s often a good idea to remove every second frame and simply half the frame rate of the animation.
Every second frame of animation has been removed.
You can see this in the image above where I successfully reduced the vulture’s 15 frame animation down to just 8 frames. You’d be surprised at how effective this is especially in a fast moving arcade game where the user is mostly focussed on their game character rather than the other sprites within the game world.
When looking to optimise, it’s important not to be precious with your work. It can often be hard to drop animation frames that you’ve spent hours producing but believe me, players won’t even notice. After all, they will never have seen the original version of the animation anyway.
I love your blog dude! Looking forward to playing the game when its finished, good to see how much effort and attention to detail you have put in. I would like to know your plans on monetisation, would be a sweet blog post 😀
Thanks Dave! Yeah I plan to do a few posts at some point regarding monetisation.