My game is a 3D arcade/puzzle game aimed for mobile.
In my game, I have 75 platforms in each level. Each platform can have one of 16 different icons on it, as well as a colored ring around the icon. The ring can be just one of 2 colors.
Early on, my initial thought was: Give the platform a base diffuse material, and layer 2 transparent textures on top of it. Well, after I finished writing my script to generate the 75 platforms, I realized it was really taxing on mobile and came to the conclusion the transparent textures are just too much (150 of them total in the scene).
I got about 10-13 FPS doing this, on a fairly high performance android tablet.
This is what a typical platform can look like:
This is how I made them:
What is the best way to approach this. Should I just go and make all 32 possible combinations and store them each as its own texture?
Icon1+RingColor1
Icon1+RingColor2
Icon2+RingColor1
Icon2+RingColor2
…
…
Icon16+RingColor2
Of is there a more clever method to achieve this. In the future, it may be possible I might want to add more icons, more ring colors for different purposes.
This totally changed the game logic on how these platforms are created, and I don’t want to have to re-create this for a third time if I make another mistake.
Any tips appreciated. Thanks