Pencil Logic (TwinThumbs) made a game called I.S.U.D. (It Shoots, You Dodge), which is basically a crazy bullet hell game with lovely glowing bullets.
From their website:
I.S.U.D. (I-Sood) is a bullet hell/curtain fire shoot’em up which focus on the boss battle. The game features a challenging risk/reward system, as well as beautiful and deadly bullet patterns. With the dynamic difficulty system, the game difficulty will be changed according to the player’s performance. This make the difficulty please the shoot’em up veteran, while it allows the beginner to enjoy a quick session of bullet hell.
So I asked them how they optimized it, the answer:
As for optimization, all the bullets are rendered by one spritesheet, so that helps a lot. I also wrote myown object pool so that all the bullets are recycled and never create a new one if it isn’t necessary.
Pretty useful tip, especially when you are making a game with a lot of sprites 🙂
Be sure to buy their game, it’s out on the appstore 🙂
Michelle Chen 