This week has been all about feedback from other Playdate devs that have been testing Etad on their devices. It was, to put it mildly, a complete shitshow to begin with. After all, it had been several weeks since the last time folks had tested a build for me and a lot has been added to the game in the meantime.

First of all, the game was barely loading due to RAM usage, but that was fairly simple to sort out with some forced garbage collection, coroutine loading, and optimizing the art assets a bit more. I saved 4MB just by combining the tilesheets for the four different types of door I have into one sheet, and doing some creative drawing.

The main and ongoing issue though, is the framerate. With the help of testers running the profiler on their devices and sending me the output, I've managed to trim a lot of busy CPU time down, and I'm now left with the physical draw calls themselves - essentially, redrawing the viewport every time something changes (e.g. some combat, or simply a mob moving between tiles) is very costly. I've done quite a bit of tweaking and playing about with update/draw rates and it's helped a lot - but I may yet have to tear out the drawing code and try some other methods.

When all's said and done, I'm aiming for a consistent feel to the game - especially during combat - rather than simply looking at FPS numbers. If the game runs consistently at 25FPS, it's better than a range of draws and updates between 10 and 30FPS.

So yeah, it's been a week - but there's light at the end of the optimisation tunnel and the build is in a fairly good place now. So it's time to get on with the next couple of maps, and adding more content! In the meantime, here's some stills from the first two areas of the game.