July brought a wave of significant updates to the Pulado engine, focusing on making your games run smoother, look better, and play exactly as intended. We've tackled everything from core performance to intricate gameplay mechanics, ensuring a more robust and creative experience for everyone.
Core Stability & Blazing Fast Performance
Critical Game Loading Fix: We identified and fixed a critical issue where all games were incorrectly loading as 'Space Attack'. Now, every game loads its unique content correctly, ensuring your creations are always presented as you intended.
Faster Level Starts: Say goodbye to annoying freezes at the start of a level! We've dramatically optimized the level-start blur effect, reducing load times by over 90% (from 4.5 seconds to under half a second). Your games will now jump straight into the action.
Smarter Asset Loading: Levels now load much faster thanks to a complete overhaul of our asset preloader. Assets are fetched and parsed only once per level, eliminating duplicate downloads and reducing network traffic, which means quicker load times and a smoother experience for players.
Reliable UI Elements: Your game's progress bar and heads-up display (HUD) will now always appear correctly, ensuring players have the right information from the moment they start playing.
Unleash Your Creativity with Enhanced Visuals
Animated Image Art Support: Bring your characters and props to life with animated GIF, APNG, and WebP images, as well as sprite sheets! The engine now understands frame labels, allowing these image formats to support complex jump, move, and wait poses just like traditional SWF art, without needing a separate JSON file.
Dynamic Menu Art: Your main menu background images now fit perfectly within the game area. No more cropped art! We've added options to stretch your art to fill the screen or uniformly scale it to fit, giving you more control over your game's first impression. Menu layers will also now always stack in the correct order, ensuring your backdrop is always behind your foreground elements.
Animated Backgrounds & Terrain: Extend the new animated image support to your game's background layers and ground terrain! You can now use WebP and APNG files for dynamic backgrounds and ensure they correctly contribute to ground collision detection. These layers will also now scale to their declared width and height, preventing unexpected natural sizing.
Precision Gameplay & Controls
Refined "Freemouse" Controls: Players using 'freemouse' movement types (where the mouse can teleport the player) will now experience more precise control. If your character is restricted to moving only left/right or up/down, the mouse will no longer inadvertently slide them on the restricted axis, honoring your game's intended movement mechanics.
Robust Ground Collision: We've implemented several fixes to make ground collision more reliable and predictable:
- Players on terrain levels will no longer float off the top of the screen after jumping.
- Collision detection now covers the full extent of your ground art, even for long or scrolling levels, ensuring consistent gameplay.
- Flash filters like glows will no longer inflate terrain hitboxes, preventing players from dying on spawn due to invisible collision areas.
Accurate Scrolling Maps & Avatars: Scrolling map layers are now more consistent and visually accurate. Single-panel maps will no longer scroll past their own edges into blank space, and parallax layers will stay perfectly aligned. Additionally, your avatar's left/right mirroring will now correctly reflect its actual rotation, preventing characters from appearing upside down when moving.
Empower Your Workflow with the New Asset Previewer
- Integrated Asset Previewer: We've introduced a powerful new asset previewer, replacing the legacy loader. Now, any element carrying
data-pulado-urlwill automatically mount a live preview of that asset (SWF, images, audio) directly on your page, without needing custom JavaScript. Previews are rendered using the engine's own AssetLoader, ensuring they match how assets appear in your live game, including support for animated GIF/APNG/WebP!
These updates represent our continuous commitment to providing you with the best tools to create amazing AI arcade games. Dive in and experience the improvements firsthand!
Ready to build something incredible? Check out the full feature list and start making a game.