Due to how flat the game over screen still worked after remixing the pieces, sizes and so on, I decided to scribble out a sprite font over the span of 3+ hours. There is a big downside to this font and that’s performance. It’s the fact that when the game draws text in combination with excessive particles from the rocket ship, my phone will slow down. So instead of drawing the font each frame, it is only drawn once to a surface and that surface is then drawn.

I spent yesterday’s programming sessions to enhance the performance on Android. The particles previously created a burden on the system as there were 500+ particles. While I had gone through lengths to make them run smoother in the past for lower end systems, it still was not enough with the giant new font. So now the particles are more basic, so they take up far less processing power to avoid dips in the frame rate. The particles happened between puzzles for the most part, so this was never a problem to the gameplay. Instead it was a problem getting the star between puzzle. Each puzzle completed has a short jingle. Once the jingle is complete, the player is taken to the next puzzle. So if the game’s framerate is low, it takes more time to do less, turning into a gamble to collect the star on low end systems like phones.

If the game detects dips in frame rates, it will abandon its screen transitions from puzzle to puzzle. This helps turn the game from an average of 55 fps to 60 fps.