Limitations of porting
So here I am naive little dev thinking, “hey I’ll port a game. How hard can it be?”.......I wish I could go back in time to slap myself with a candy cane. It was tough, but only because I had no clue what I was doing. A monkey banging a wrench on its food dish was more productive.
I did learn a lot about porting. Just because your engine allows you to port doesn’t mean that everything is going to transfer over like a flash drive that can sync with Mac and Windows.....No it will never be that easy. So here were some little hiccups that I learned from:
1.) Cut scenes. I need to say that I worked hard on making my cut scenes last for the perfect amount of seconds. Well throw that cupcake out the window because I couldn’t port over my little gifts of happiness. Instead I opted for what I call the comic version. I took the most important images and used one sentence text to show the story. I used my splash screen script to bring this to life. (i.e. Invoke)
2.) Controls. This was another one of my babies. My partner has a thing for perfection in controls; to the point where I get frustrated. I obviously can’t use PC controls to work on a new platform. So trying to figure out based on my current script what implementation would best suit the game for touch inputs. (I ended up using the very space heavy Event Trigger)
3.) Camera. Though not as bothersome as the first two, having the camera a different size and aspect ratio made a huge difference. My levels went from bam! to WHABAM! just from changing what the player will see on the new platform.
4.) Why did I update? Yes, the life long question I keep asking myself. Why the helabit do I update my game engine?! Do I like punishment? Do I enjoy delaying my progress? Each time that I do, I have to relearn what the engine will allow or not.....I still haven’t learned my lesson....So I still have to learn how to use this darn thing.
5.) Back up and test. I actually learned this from programming on PC, but I best implemented this practice while porting. I was so worried to lose something when I made a break through. So I would back up on the engine’s cloud, in my dropbox, on my computer, and on my thumb drive.....I wish the tech gods would test me now!! Muahahahaha (Tech gods please don’t test me! I am but a humble servant.)
Hopefully, my naivety will help someone else or myself in the future.