Nice voice acting! Love the music progression and the dynamic gameplay, it reminds me a bit of old arcade games! I think the lag might be caused by shaders or particle materials loading for the first time. I usually prewarm shaders during the loading screen to avoid those FPS drops when certain materials appear for the first time. Maybe that could help!
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Thanks! I had way too much fun recording the voice lines and eventually had to stop myself from adding more after my third time sitting in front of the mic and shouting insane made-up frog themed words hahahaha.
I thought that's what was causing it, but I also realized that my expensive shaders are mostly already running before the game starts, and I'm thinking now that it was my use of lights for the glowing frogs and glow of the reward chests that may be causing it. I'm glad you specifically commented though, I was actually already thinking of asking you about your shader prebaking. Your game still had a small amount of lag in the browser, but unlike mine, yours was running stuff that in my head is just impossible to do in a browser game, so I would love to know more about your process getting there; it felt like absolute sorcery to me. Are you using a system you built, or a template that includes strong preloading sequences? I'm not sure if you have much to gain from it but I'd love to learn about your process and do a jam with you in the future if you'd be open to it; your stuff looks VERY fun to score and/or sound design.
I have a template with a bunch of systems and subsystems I usually reuse, built around my own code architecture and custom methods, like:
- Event bus
- Material preloading
- Input manager (the one that tells the navigation hints which button icons to show)
- Save system
- Menus
- Etc.
I've been building and improving it with every jam I participate in. A lot of things tend to repeat, so that let me focus in the game.
There's also another template on the Wild Jam page where I found some interesting ideas, like input mapping.
But getting to the point!
For web builds, shader compilation and resource loading can cause some nasty stutters, especially since threading is more limited in the browser.
What I do is keep a list of all the objects, materials, resources, and particles I need. During the loading screen, I instantiate them in front of a camera on a layer that isn't visible to the player, but is still rendered internally. This forces the renderer to prepare the materials and shaders ahead of time.
That way, when those objects actually appear in the game, most of the expensive work has already been done, and they're ready to go!
On desktop, you have more flexibility to load resources on the fly, but on the web, I prefer to prepare everything before gameplay starts to avoid stuttering.
GPU particles are still a bit tricky, though. I haven't fully figured out how to prewarm those reliably yet!
But feel free to ask me anything :D
Oh that seems like it should be such an obvious solution but it's very clever! Dang, I'll have to keep that in mind next time! Thanks for sharing. I still need to rebuild my event bus system in gdscript; I have some of those systems built for myself in C# but I've been using gdscript for jams to have functional web builds. Anyway, I really appreciate the info!