I've gotten on to my second game using cocos creator and the experience has been pretty good so far. The UI is intutive, and the best part is that the engine is modular. you can literally strip away the pieces that you don't want and build a lean build that is perfect for the mobile web.
The first game i created was an endless runner with a car in it to put mildly :)
One major issue we have been facing was figuring out the particle system. There is a 2D particle system that can render as a flat plane in the 3D world. Fortunately it rotates in 3D and can be positioned in 3D. We had to tinker around but were able to get it to look the way we wanted it to.
The second game is a rolling cube game, with some puzzle elements in it. I've been toying around with the idea of creating these "scenarios" for each section of the game and the user goes through them in a random order and it creates a good feel of randomness. This will eventually be used for creating a scenario based FPS game for the web (my next target). Have to see how this pans out.
The second game required me to create animations in blender and import it to the game engine.
I ran into some roadblocks, not because of the engine or the exporter but the way these things seem to work. A big note to self though is that
Check for Missing bones:
"If there are key frames inserted for deleted bones in an NLA animation, blender doesn't delete them when you export the animation. It is marked as error and skipped" This got me pretty bad and i lost a lot of time debugging it.
Ensure draw calls are minimal:
This is a no-brainer to anybody who has done any level of unity dev and looked into optimizing their solution. I was using assets from keeny they are amazing but they have multiple materials in one single object. i had to setup a common texture for all the env blocks to ensure that the draw calls reduced.
Test Often:
I was pretty focused on getting the game done, so didn't really put too much effort into testing the performance on the phone till very late. I would recommend that you start doing it right away to ensure you dont' run into roadblocks close to the end of the project.
Setup Templates:
In just the two games i made i was able to see that i can create template node structures for the menus in game. Will reduce the time spent re-doing the same things again unless your game is very different from the previous one, the menus will probably be very similar, try to re-use .. it saves a bunch of time.
The first game i created was an endless runner with a car in it to put mildly :)
One major issue we have been facing was figuring out the particle system. There is a 2D particle system that can render as a flat plane in the 3D world. Fortunately it rotates in 3D and can be positioned in 3D. We had to tinker around but were able to get it to look the way we wanted it to.
The second game is a rolling cube game, with some puzzle elements in it. I've been toying around with the idea of creating these "scenarios" for each section of the game and the user goes through them in a random order and it creates a good feel of randomness. This will eventually be used for creating a scenario based FPS game for the web (my next target). Have to see how this pans out.
The second game required me to create animations in blender and import it to the game engine.
I ran into some roadblocks, not because of the engine or the exporter but the way these things seem to work. A big note to self though is that
Check for Missing bones:
"If there are key frames inserted for deleted bones in an NLA animation, blender doesn't delete them when you export the animation. It is marked as error and skipped" This got me pretty bad and i lost a lot of time debugging it.
Ensure draw calls are minimal:
This is a no-brainer to anybody who has done any level of unity dev and looked into optimizing their solution. I was using assets from keeny they are amazing but they have multiple materials in one single object. i had to setup a common texture for all the env blocks to ensure that the draw calls reduced.
Test Often:
I was pretty focused on getting the game done, so didn't really put too much effort into testing the performance on the phone till very late. I would recommend that you start doing it right away to ensure you dont' run into roadblocks close to the end of the project.
Setup Templates:
In just the two games i made i was able to see that i can create template node structures for the menus in game. Will reduce the time spent re-doing the same things again unless your game is very different from the previous one, the menus will probably be very similar, try to re-use .. it saves a bunch of time.
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