Well today is another snow day (lousy New York weather *shakes fist at snow*) what a perfect opportunity to tackle the CoronaBlitz coding challenge.
After brainstorming for a bit I realized that I would have to streamline my ideas to the key core functionality that I want the prototype to utilize.
Trying to keep with the Energy / Energize theme I finally settled on a maze mechanic where the main character would have to search through a maze for Energy items.
I began my journey by searching through a few of my old prototype projects for any assets that I could quickly utilize. JACKPOT! I found some old textures I made, a game character I had commissioned a few years ago and some fire effects.
Next I decided to have some 3D visuals in the game, so I borrowed the 3D engine from a prototype I recently made in corona.
If you’re on the corona IRC chat room or on my testflight list you’ve probably already seen it.
(I’m treser2 on the corona IRC I highly suggest visiting. It’s a great community and resource) 
Below is the prototype that I got the 3D engine from. *not my coronablitz entry*
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frJwaTK9YoA[/media]
After about 1.5 hours I got this running in corona.
Excited I made a build to test on my iPad3
and… Ruh-Roh?!1
I’m getting bad frame rates … averaging about 15 FPS (not good).
So now I’m debugging trying to determine where the bottleneck is. As a result I made a few optimizations that increased performance a bit but I was still getting bad framerates.
Then… Eureka!
I found what was causing all my FPS woes. It appears that in G2.0 I took a performance hit for having many sprites in play with their isVisible attribute set to false. (I’ve done this before pre G2.0 with no issue).
OK. great now I’m back in business, and i’m getting full FPS. I glance over at the clock…GASP! I only have a little less than an hour left.
So I decided to code until my time ran out. Below is the progress I made after 4 hours.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElH43Mm4o8Q[/media]
Considering the outcome I think that I will further develop this project into a fully playable prototype. In the end I think CoronaBlitz challenge is a great way to jump start your productivity. Just getting started on a project is a huge milestone. I cant wait to see the other entries.
