Bliz Studio - Trixel Rocket Devlog 06

Here is the 6th devlog for my indie game Trixel Rocket. Wrapping up the game and preparing for Pre-Order. Website: http://bliz.studio Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blizstudio/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blizstudioga... Twitter: https://twitter.com/BlizStudio Please Subscribe and Sha

Devlog six is the cautionary tale of the Trixel Rocket development cycle: a month of level building capped by the discovery that the game lagged badly on real devices - and the painful rebuild that followed. The game came out the other side close to launch, but the lesson is the story.

Thirty levels, built

The month since the last devlog went into a single goal: get 30 levels done. That goal was hit, and the levels are in the game. The time went to more than layout - a lot of level design questions and game mechanics had to be worked out along the way to make the levels function as intended.

The mistake: testing on devices too late

With the levels finished, testing moved to actual hardware - an old iPhone 5s and a 4th generation iPad from 2012. The game lagged on both. The cause: the levels simply had too much going on, and the volume of objects and actions happening on screen at one time was overwhelming the phone and iPad. Testing on devices should have been happening all along; leaving it to the end turned a small course correction into a crisis.

The painful fix

The remedy was to go back and start stripping out everything - rebuilding all of the objects in the game to reduce the number of actions and objects live on screen at once. For a designer and developer, tearing apart a month of your own effort is genuinely demoralizing, and this devlog does not pretend otherwise. But the rebuild worked: the game came through it in a great place.

Where the game stands

Beta testers are now on the build, and the work has shifted to marketing materials - the game trailer, screenshots, and the App Store copy. The plan is a pre-order fairly soon, targeting a potential mid-September launch, with a call to pre-order and share widely once it goes live.

The lesson for other devs

Put your game on your lowest-end target device early and keep it there through development. Performance problems compound silently: every level built on a fast dev machine is a level you may rebuild later. A 2012-era iPad in the testing loop from day one would have caught this before there were 30 levels to fix.