Hey guys, there’s not been a lot of development news from me, as I’ve been working on super boring stuff. I made some changes to the battle animation system in EBF5 mobile so it would use less memory and stutter a bit less. Does it run better? A little bit. Was it worth the trouble? Probably not – I spent like two whole weeks on it.

At least I now know what kind of optimizations are worth doing when I eventually port my other Flash games to mobile. Getting rid of all filters and unnecessary animations, and using cacheAsBitmap as much as possible, are the main changes that make a huge difference and aren’t very hard to do. But trying to improve memory management to reduce garbage collector stutters is nightmare if a game was not designed with that in mind from the beginning. Hopefully my other games won’t suffer much from this anyway, since they’re not as big as EBF5.

I’m currently playing through EBF5 again and making sure all of the changes work correctly. I’m still changing puzzles and secrets to make them a bit easier for touch controls. Since the player doesn’t have a cursor, there needs to be other visual hints. I’ve ended up putting a lot more effort into this port than I originally planned, so I hope it pays off.

Anyway, I’m almost done and I should have a new beta out in a couple of days. Jump into the EBF Discord if you want to be notified and maybe get an invite.