Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Faster Startup Times

Last time, I reported that I showed an indicator when a friend had something to say to you and started creating a new trigger criteria based on item acquisition for The Dungeon Under My House, my non-violent, first-person role-playing game and my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project.

I finished the item acquisition trigger work, then worked on improving startup times.

Sprint 2024-27: What to do with the pickles?

Planned and complete:

• Trigger intro script when pickle jar acquired

Unplanned and complete:

• Defect: Game startup takes too long

Unplanned and incomplete:

• Give items to entity

I basically needed to draw a pickle jar and get it into the game, so I did so:

Next, I realized that starting up the game was needlessly slow. A lot of media assets getting loaded upfront means the game runs quickly when you finally get to it, but there was no reason to load everything if you didn’t need everything. Plus, I don’t remember what the load time should be on mobile devices, but I think you get dinged by the app store reviewers if the game doesn’t start up quickly.

And on the main menu, you need hardly anything at all. I wrote a few hundred lines of code and spent time trying to get the various parts coordinated to avoid crashes, which mainly involved not trying to draw the dungeon before the dungeon assets were loaded.

But now the main menu is almost immediately available. When you start a new game, only the media related to the house and the customizable characters are loaded.

And when you enter the dungeon the first time, the dungeon-related media is loaded.

The main tricky part was handling two scenarios: loading the game when the player is in the house, and loading the game when the player was in the dungeon. The latter required all of the art assets to be loaded at once.

Actually that is strictly not true. I could always load the house-related media the first time you return to the house if you loaded while in the dungeon. I might revisit this issue in the future.

But for now, the main thing I’ve accomplished is deferring media loading until needed. While the load time hasn’t changed, what has changed is perception. The game starts up and you are immediately on the main menu, ready to start, and even if the game begins loading when you actually start a new game from the main menu, by this point you as the player are invested enough to tolerate a bit of loading.

And of course once the media has been loaded, you don’t have to load it again for the rest of your play session.

Finally, by the end of the week, I was working on the ability to give an item to another entity, and I am reminded that game design is hard.

I have created a Give Item button by combining two images from https://game-icons.net/. I hope it reads well.

So I envisioned you would click on the middle button, which would open up something similar to the Furniture inventory screen to allow you to give an item to another character.

Currently inventory management only occurs with furniture, and the way it works is that the furniture inventory is centered, and the party’s inventory is at the bottom of the screen.

Originally I thought I would let you select a party member’s item and say “Give” but then I have to worry about whether or not the receiver has open slots of inventory, how to respond, etc.

And then I thought, “What if the receiver’s inventory is on screen like the furniture inventory?” but then it would be possible to take things from the other person, right? That seems strange when you just said you were going to give something to them instead.

Also, what if they don’t want to give it away? Do things need to be “locked” so you can’t take but can give?

So I’ll figure it out this week and let you know next time what I decided.

Thanks for reading!

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