Friday is here, and I still have work to do on the demo. I gave myself plenty of time to have the demo update ready before now, but due to my procrastination and nagging belief that “I’ve got plenty of time to relax and still be ready”, making the deadline for the 19th is going to require some hard work (and several cups of coffee).

It will be ready by tomorrow.

Before I sign off and get back to work, I’d like to mention an improvement that you may not notice when you go through the demo update, but is incredibly important for the game’s future.

I’ve drastically optimized the game’s performance.

Since very early on in this game’s life I’ve known that eventually I would port it to mobile devices. And as last week came to a close I decided to spend an afternoon trying to get the game to run on my Android tablet. Due to Gamemaker Studio’s incredible cross-platform setup, I was able to get the game running very quickly. Everything worked very smoothly… except the overworld. While the game was running at 60fps inside the cave and houses, outside in the overworld, it slowed down to ~20fps.

After some investigation using Gamemaker’s debugger, I discovered that a lot of my code was poorly optimized and the size of the overworld was multiplying the effects of the sluggish code.

So after some rewrites and adjustments, I was able to get every area of the game running at 60fps on my Android tablet.

While I doubt you’ll notice any major differences in the performance on your PC, just know that the game is running in a much more efficient way and your computer isn’t working quite as hard as it had to in the first demo.

I look forward to posting again and finally getting the demo update in your hands.

Thanks for reading,
God bless