The beta build went public in early May, which was an important milestone. This nudged me to look under the hood (using hxScout) and fiddle with the engineering stuff.

I managed to raise the framerate from 3 to 24 FPS for portions with a lot of mouse clicks and hero movement. There's still space for improvement (60 FPS is the gold standard) but I'm happy with the changes - and hope you'll feel the difference, too.

Do give the new build a go and let me know what you think!

For those who are interested in the technical bits, here's a list of major engineering tweaks:

• Replaced Box2D physics and all collision events with coordinate detection.

• All ambience sounds are pre-loaded on individual channels at scene initialisation.

• Replaced "always" events with one-off custom events where possible, including all hero interactions on the map and combat logic, as well as animation switches, font switches and such.

• Consolidated all mouse clicks and releases in one listener event.

• Replaced OpenFL Textfields for button labels with more primitive (but faster) Stencyl "drawing" code.

• Eliminated dynamic lookups for hashmap values.

• Character death animations are now created dynamically using an "eraser" actor and image masks, instead of pre-loaded frame-by-frame spritesheets.

• Implemented a dynamic tracker of opened windows and layers containing interactive elements.

• Implemented a version check at game start.

Happy playing!