More time was spent on improving the performance of the game this week. The largest gains were made with a new text rendering system. This pools text objects globally and makes text objects more flexible. For example, the same pipeline is used to render the HUD elements and text for damage. Both use the same underlying font, but damage has a text effect applied to it that makes the numbers fly off like being shot out of a fountain.

Kathryn has been working on her own game, Turntris. She wanted to leverage some of the functionality I already built, so I began updating the SPX project. It has been renamed to sps-gamelib. It will serve as a collection of useful utilities on top of libgdx. The repo is back up and active, but is nowhere near a 1.0 release state.

By separating the library more cleanly, a number of code smells were removed. There were enums in the sps.bridge package which really didn’t belong in sps-gamelib. These have been replaced with systems that load enum-like entries through config files.

I have also been investing time each day improving my artwork. I sit in front of GIMP for exactly ten minutes, and then post whatever I draw to an imgur album. Progress is already visible. Discovering new techniques to improve Aigilas’ graphics is the main goal of these exercises.

Want to chat? Throw a comment on this Reddit post or shoot me a tweet @XBigTK13X.