yeah i just found out about the one-button-at-a-time thing on another demo i was doing...that was a bit of a shocker. I was pretty familiar with most of the art limitations, but I wanted to do a little like rhythm game where one thumb rode the 1-4-7 and the other was on the 3-6-9...yeah didn't happen
I've worked on some games where you can't even FLIP sprites OR swap their palettes without hammering memory or the framerate. It's insane!
These phones have like 50x the processing power of a GBA, and some of them have screens that are on par with them, but for whatever reason the hardware paths just aren't there, it's a real shame. Circular too - the phones are messed up so its hard to make good games for them, and since all the games suck adoption rates for mobile games are incredibly low, and since no one buys mobile games they're rarely properly funded and manufacturers don't outfit the phones with decent graphics capabilities (or at least let java have access to some of that stuff!!)...eerrggh
The trade we made on this game was sparse backgrounds. Instead of bogging java down with a bunch of tiles and stuff, we're just setting the game in deep space, and randomly populating the background with a few sprites here and there
it's cheap but it should let us keep the action at a higher pace than we would be able to otherwise. I was inspired by the NES shooters that would just kick out the background when you got to a huge boss; they did it for different technical reasons but to accomplish the same goal I think. With enough action the background tends to become just that, the background! Anyways, we'll see if it works...
Thanks to everybody by the way, and as I said before, feel free to edit - I see all kinds of problems with this stuff naturally, but I'm always curious what parts really stand out to other people as "ooo you know an extra five minutes could have really fixed that one up". Maybe I'll have to go through and get some of the crappier sprites posted here so people can really rip them up!