Zombigotchi released with 100 animations and sounds

Our new game/digital toy Zombigotchi is now in the app store. Pet or punish your very own pet zombie! Developing this new iPhone app, other users on the forum were a great source of optimization advice, and sometimes we also devised our own strategies. I thought it might be helpful to some of you to list some of the things that let Zombigotchi run steadily and remain fun, even on an iPod touch (described below). By the end of the project Zombigotchi contained:

* A pet zombie character with 100 animations
* an alternative to Unity GUI
* A different recorded sound for each animation clip
* Extra textured objects (e.g. a baseball bat, a laser sight, and a cheesegrater), instantiated from Resources.

Here’s a link to the previews of the game/digital toy: http://www.zombigotchi.com

I’d like to share some Promo codes with the forum. Have a look at the app, We’d be eager to hear any comments or suggestions from other Unity developers.

6M67HAEW9L9A
RRKMLEJYRF9M
HTYRK7W9K934
9MMKHXL9N9TE

Just reply to let others know which codes have been used. We would be grateful for any reviews on iTunes. That would be a big help.

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/zombigotchi/id398199454?mt=8

As we were trying to complete Zombigotchi without taking anything away from the impact and originality of the game, it was always a welcome boost to find tips from the community that helped it be more efficient. These are some of the techniques we used:

* The importance of optimizing animations is often overlooked. If animations are baked, you can save memory by exporting only those bones that actually move, ignoring other bones and all controls.
* The Unity docs say repeatedly that Mipmaps are helpful and should remain on for most textures, as they take extra memory (a third) but reduce CPU cost. We left mipmaps off for the majority of textures. The framerate still remained near maximum, and we saved on texture memory while improving their appearance.
* Our sounds were loaded from “Resources/Audio”. This did not produce a lag or any other problems, and saved a lot of memory over pre-loading sounds on a GameObject.
* Extra GameObjects were also loaded this way. They were stored as a variable so we could be sure only 1 was present at a time.
* Parts of the character that were obscured were deactivated when possible, for example, to prevent the phone from trying to render his square brain through his head.
* Our Menu System was almost as versatile as UnityGUI, but implemented with GUITextures and text. At the beginning of the game, the GameMenu creates all the text and texture objects it will need, then turns them off. To display a menu page, a function is called, e.g SetMainPage() which arranges the GUIElements into buttons in the desired layout. On a touch, Update will now call ShowMainPage(), which provides functionality for the buttons.

 

Yay, some competition for MiniPets Zombie! That is, if I can ever find the time to finish the bloody thing

Congrats, Zombiegotchi looks great.

 

I love the style of this, it's very cool. Made me chuckle. Really great work on the animations too!

Regarding your notes about optimisations and the design process, it looks to me like you have a mostly static camera for this game and that opens up a lot of texture and culling optimisations that might not be possible in other styles of game. You wouldn't need mipmapping when you have a static camera, almost by definition, but you're right about them not being something you should just enable for everything as some kind of automatic improvement.

Nice of you to provide these hints and promo codes, and good luck with the game!