The GAMES DAY Podcast celebrated their 100th episode last night with a party at APK Live. A number of local developers came out for the evening and I was fortunate to be able to chat with a number of nice people from Digital Extremes, Game Production Studios, Antic Entertainment, and the QA firm The Ant Firm. Also met the Editor-in-Chief of GamerPops and the coordinator of the game development course at Fanshawe College. Big Blue Bubble was also apparently there, though I didn’t get a chance to meet them. Previously I hadn’t realised there was such a strong development community in lil-London. Great to see we have such an active community. Wish we had a London gamedev pub.

Was a really good evening, and hopefully the GAMES DAY Podcast won’t wait until their 200th episode to have another fun evening.

Tagged: Awesome, Parties

Recently I’ve found my sprite classes had serious speed issues, and were becoming cumbersome to work with. They were some of the first classes I wrote when learning Unity and JavaScript. So this weekend I replaced them with a new optimised sprite class. One class just over a page long. Much less code, much faster routines, easier to work with and now I have support for texture atlases with cropped sprites. Which results in using less textures, less materials and less draw calls. It also means I can now take data direct from Zwoptex which means my workflow is faster. All that is left is to create a lovely interface to open the Zwoptex XML data and input that directly onto my objects. That’ll likely wait, though.

The above image is the result of my new sprite class on the Night Monster, but without the settings quite correct.

Tagged: Screen Shots, ScreenShotSaturday, WIP Images, Texture Atlas, Zwoptex