is corona suited to making this game?

Games
#1

Hello everyone!

I have been making games as a hobby for nearly 10 years on pc, and a few years ago i developed a game idea based around games workshop’s board game space hulk.
Unfortunately using their IP was a bad idea and I had to stop development. Although unfinished, the game I had created was well received by fans of the board game.

I have decided to remake this game on android as it is suited much more to the platform than on pc. I have replaced the IP with my own slant, still sticking true to the core of the original.

The game is a combination of top down action, in the vein of alien breed, and large scale tactical strategy. The player is tasked with boarding and destroying a large “alien” derelict space craft, and I mean LARGE. The interior of the craft is built up of a few hundred sections. Each section is a randomly generated map of corridors and rooms that joins together, creating a huge maze. the players tasked to place entry points around the craft and distribute units over those points. Once the units are on board, randomly generated and placed objectives will become available to complete. units can be assigned objectives for them to try and complete or they will chose their own.
at any point the player can take control of a single unit and manually control it to complete objectives. at this level the player can interact with objects on the ship, and combat the enemy on board.
to complete the game, the player must destroy the craft by completing the required objectives, while keeping the units alive long enough to do so. the craft is invested with an enemy numbering in the thousands, who will try and prevent the completion of objectives and kill the player’s units.

in order to create this game on mobiles without writing a base engine requires an SDK that is suited to certain functions, hopefully someone can tell me from experience if corona can do these things at a decent speed. I know its possible, but as I found out the last time, not all SDK’s do what is required quickly!

generate textures at runtime, and perform pixel manipulation on those textures while drawing them on screen. ie copy/paste all/portons of textures.
read pixel information very quickly. like getting the colour of a pixel on screen, or in a texture.
alpha blending of vector shapes on textures.
a* path finding
rapid read write to file

this isn’t a “is my game idea cool” thread, I am looking to find put if corona is my best choice for this game, however I am obviously happy to discuss the game with anyone as feedback is key to a successful game.

thankyou for the help

James [import]uid: 137386 topic_id: 24025 reply_id: 324025[/import]

#2

Hi James,
Although it was not the intention of the post, the game idea DOES sound cool :slight_smile:
There are quite a bit of features that are not supported by Corona, unfortunately, most notably any sort of pixel-level manipulation on textures, blending, or well… we can only do very basic things with textures, so far…
Neither we’ll have the luck to work with applying vector masks on textures. Copy/paste from textures can in a way be done through sprite sheets using them as texture atlas.

For anything the rest, I think it’s only the question of performance in relation to the scale of your game.

If you can have a workaround around missing features (texture-related stuff), then I think it might pay off giving Corona a try to develop a quick prototype to see if the engine can handle the size and scale of your game. [import]uid: 80100 topic_id: 24025 reply_id: 96860[/import]

#3

Thanks for the quick reply! It’s disconcerting to hear that, however i will give carona a play anyway as I like the idea of compiling to both ios and android.

Hopefully there are fast work arounds that can be developed!
Not only does it sound like a good idea nosheet, it is a good idea! I spent 4 months designing the game and gameplay before coding the last one, and as a game it works. The thing that makes it different, and suited to mobiles is the combination of a complex overhead campaign with drop/drop-out action that has simple controls. Freely switching between units not only allows you to stay where the action is, but allows quick entry into the core game when coming back, while still having the large campaign in the background. Ai takes care of a lot, allowing the player to focus on the action without micro management, but still having that option when needed.

A picture speaks a thousand words, while converting the idea into a Mobil game I created a few mock screens using caps of the original version, here is the main action screen, and the control layout, subject to change obviously
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v142/templargfx/screenmockup.png

A key component to the gameplay is the lighting, as units have lights on them to see infront, this give an oppressive tight and confusing feeling to the maps, and allows close combat enemies to sneak and hide. to achieve dynamic lighting manipulation of textures is how I did it before. This is a key component to gameplay, and also the most computationally expensive when work arounds are required. Texture manipulation also allows permanent decals which adds to interactivity of the maps without needing to constantly track hundreds of individual decals.
[import]uid: 137386 topic_id: 24025 reply_id: 96870[/import]

#4

There are several examples of doing A* in Lua, the language of Corona, so you’re good there. File IO speeds are limited to how fast you can read/write from flash memory, which should still be pretty quick.

However Corona does not support any pixel level graphics support. So no coping a region from another graphic (unless you want to use masks which it does well) [import]uid: 19626 topic_id: 24025 reply_id: 96874[/import]

#5

robmiracle, that is not a good sign at all. The maps needs to be able to be generated randomly, which either means a rediculous number of individual sprites and masks, or building maps in textures (how I did it last time).

Anyone know how many sprites Corona can draw simultaneously? [import]uid: 137386 topic_id: 24025 reply_id: 96966[/import]

#6

re: sprites - see http://blog.anscamobile.com/2012/02/blazing-sprite-and-tile-performance/

c [import]uid: 24 topic_id: 24025 reply_id: 96984[/import]

#7

That looks very promising for map generation, providing it can handle sprites in that fashion including collision with sprite masks I think creating the maps will not be an issue, which is one of the biggest parts that uses texture manipulation in my game. Dynamic Lighting will be the other big challenge.

Any idea on the number of sprites there? [import]uid: 137386 topic_id: 24025 reply_id: 96996[/import]

#8

2048px x 2048px image with 16*16 (128px x 128px) sprites. [import]uid: 24 topic_id: 24025 reply_id: 97004[/import]

#9

Sorry for all the questions.

How do you think this new version would handle 50x50 tiles with a seperate 50x50 overlayed mask? non animated/single frame only

tiles would be approximately 64x64px [import]uid: 137386 topic_id: 24025 reply_id: 97007[/import]