Day Seven... It's all over!

The last day of Game Jam...

Today was mostly finishing touches to improve the overall user experience.

If you score zero, it will now bypass your name entry and there is a tips page telling you how to play the game in more detail:

Scoring will now be quicker, and instantly remove any non-reds - this was a highly requested feature by people who tested the game and wanted to get back in asap!

I added some new graphical effects, when a lot of one colour get created quickly, there's now an electricity bolt and sparks of that colour to signify it's doing well:

I also tried to improve performance some more. If you do really well then you can end up with an ever multiplying number of organisms on screen, which is somewhat of a performance issue!

After going through various methods of tracking and optimising the paths of the organisms, I couldn't find a good way to make it work with thousands of organisms.

The best thing I could come up with, is once it reaches a certain level, no extra organisms will be made. Normally every one that eats another one, spawns 2 new organisms. Once the limit of 3000 total organisms is reached, they will only replace each other, giving me a hard cap so that the game doesn't just grind to a complete halt! You will likely still see some slowdown at that number, though it has been said that it adds to the charm, and is certainly in keeping with the chaos theme!

So, it's all over bar the rating everyones games now! I have to say its been a great experience, though really helped by the fact I had a week off work... I don't think it would have been possible to finish had I also been working my normal job too!