I haven’t had a chance to work on the game much in the past week since car shopping took up most of my free time. In fact, I’m not even sure if I’m really on day 16 or not (I don’t count days I don’t touch the game). Whatever, I’ll continue counting from there in the future.

Last weekend and yesterday I’ve been making some major tweaks to things that go on behind the scenes. First I’ve optimized the frequency of garbage collection, which has reduced random noticeable slowdown, dare I say, completely. Another fix was making the game sleep when the phone sleeps. Previously if you were to turn off the phone with the game running, it would continue to idle and drain the battery. After that was fixed, I decided to tweak the application lifecycle calls a little bit better. Basically I moved some things around so they happen in the proper order, and don’t happen when they don’t need to – like I don’t need to save the game when the phone goes to sleep, just pause the game thread.

On the visible side of things, I’ve started planning and designing an inventory system for the player. I’m concentrating on weapons and armor for now, and the idea of damage types. Like a flame sword would do fire damage, and fire armor might reduce fire damage but make you more vulnerable to ice damage. These immunities and weaknesses also apply to monsters, of course. I’ve also moved the magic (fireball) charges into the specific weapons, so you can find a wand with 7 fireball charges, but when you use them up you have to find a new wand. Unfortunately, this system is very rudimentary right now. I’d like to polish the system to distinguish between [bow/arrows which can be found in the wild] vs [magic charges which cannot be recharged] vs [throwing weapon which can be retrieved].

Current demo:

Game doesn’t suffer from noticeable random slowdown anymore. Context menu pops up when you tap on Red with Inventory, Status, and Zap. Only Zap works for now.