After silently complaining to myself about how my flowers were being rendered, yesterday I decided I’d had enough. I was previously generating a rather complicated mesh for each flower PETAL, and then compositing them all together into a flower draw call. Thousands of vertices for a flower that is at most a quarter of an inch on a retina screen. Should be easy to change it to just render a few textures instead. Eeeeeeasy peasy!

Of course I then had to change how every single texture in my game is rendered to get the layers to order correctly, but each time I jump through hoops with my renderer it gets both a little bit leaner and more general. That combo is not how coding usually goes, so that’s satisfying in its own right, but it did take significantly longer than the actual change that kicked it off.

So I’m now using hand drawn petal textures (my awful programmer art Inkscape skills are getting better!). My plan is still for them to be procedurally generated, but currently things look a bit fancier and I added a little nectar indicator which makes gathering more satisfying. A delicious slurping noise would really help though… seems easy peasy enough…