Win8 on Dave Voyles

Creating the random enemy spawner, improving performance

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When building my Win8 port of Super Rawr-Type, I ran into all sorts of performance issues, due to lack of optimization. This was to be expected, as I on gave myself 1 month to complete the base game, then I would take the second and final month to port it to different platforms and worry about optimization.

The design of my levels is where most of my issues came from. I explain it pretty well in this post here. The gist of it is this: When the map loads, it is filled with ~150 enemies, which are constantly being updated. Obviously this comes with quite a bit of overhead. The browser version played well, but on a dedicated OS it chugs.

[Tutorial] Design Time Data + Passing Data Across Pages (WP8)

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The most difficult part of this project thus far has been understanding the idea behind MVVM, or Model-View-View Model. Wikipedia defines it as:

“MVVM facilitates a clear separation of the development of the graphical user interface (either as markup language or GUI code) from the development of the business logic or back end logic known as the model (also known as the data model to distinguish it from the view model). The view model of MVVM is a value converter, meaning that the view model is responsible for exposing the data objects from the model in such a way that those objects are easily managed and consumed”