The prototype of Gunnihilation was designed and programmed by myself with art provided by Robo Pixel Games. With this prototype we successfully bid for a small investment loan from Rivers Capital, with which we developed the complete Unity3D version of Gunnihilation.
The prototype of Gunnihilation featured:
- Optimised Box2D physics engine usage. Collision masks were extensively used to cut down on unnecessary collision events, projectiles were points or rays rather than rigidbodies.
- A custom blitting engine. The default Flash renderer was far too slow to support the amount of detail I wished to throw around the screen. The blitter was based on previous work I had done with personal projects. The rotation of the player’s torso sprite was performed when the game started up via Flash’s in-built bitmap manipulation features. This was used to construct a large sprite sheet of every angle required. Some extra effects were also used, such as bitmap distortion around the player when activating their “Frenzy” ability.
- Extensive use of the ‘Adobe Scout’ profiler tool in order to reach the performance level required of it (the primary issue was memory leaks in Flash port of Box2D and a large number of unnecessary and expensive cast operations I had previously not realised were taking place on a regular basis).
The prototype was uploaded to the Flash Games website Newgrounds to gather public feedback, and is still available there: