Optimising Etad on the Playdate hardware is going great - I've clawed back 10fps in some spots so that I'm now hitting my target of staying above 25fps in most combat situations. Hooray!

Now I'm building out the hub map that links the three dungeons of Chapter One - a large area with lots of unique features - and I've just started hitting the 16MB RAM limit on hardware to the point where the last few tiles I've added now make the map crash. Sadface. As I still need to add one more enemy, a large door animation and some further decoration tiles, I've decided that I will have to split the map in two and put a load screen between - something I was trying to avoid!

I could probably optimise my tilesheets further to make it all fit in one map, but that will leave no more room for more sfx and collectable items, both of which are loaded persistently (meaning if the player came back to an area later with more items in their inventory, that will require extra overhead!)

And such is the life of RAM juggling on small devices. To be fair, 16MB is a lot to work with, you just can't get complacent :)