StarGrid for Palm OS almost ready (and why do my side projects always explode in scope)

StarGrid started in January of this year as a tiny proof-of-concept that I would certainly finish in a month.

Eight months later and .... we're almost ready for release.

How it started

How it's going

Last year I made a minigolf game for Palm OS, and while that took me only a month or two to make, I actually thought this would be a quick and fast release since I could reuse some of the drawing routines from the minigolf game.

Turns out, strategy games are a different beast:

- It involves having a big list of complex rules that your CPU players have to follow (no cpu player in the mingolf game)

- Getting hex grids 'right' can be tricky sometimes and can be surprisingly inefficient to draw without optimizations (talking about 16mhz devices here)

- Because of the larger scope, the application needed to be segmented (code to be divided into seperate chunks)

File size

Optimizing for size on a Palm device is very important if you know that many devices were limited to 2 to 8MB of storage.

All this joy is currently sitting around 75kb (with the hi-res version adding another 25kb), this should be more or less the final file size.

Pretty happy with that result!

Before release

What needs to happen before release:

- Contrast needs some optimizations on grayscale devices

- CPU player tweaks

- A short playtest (PalmDB community)

Time is scarce so I'm not going to put up any deadline for myself here but the light is showing at the end of the tunnel!

Feedback

I would love to hear your feedback on the game, please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for improvement. You can get in touch via the PalmDB discord or by contacting me on Mastodon.

PalmDB Discord

Captain on Mastodon

Development blog

All development updates can be found here:

StarGrid development posts