Dirty Little Secrets by winniehell

Note: complete playthrough takes roughly 20-30min!
| Link | https://ldjam-57-13573d.gitlab.io/ |
| Link | https://gitlab.com/ldjam-57/ldjam-57 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/dirty-little-secrets |
Ratings
| Overall | 149th | 3.923⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 99th | 3.962⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 404th | 3.288⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 52th | 4.327⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 240th | 4.058⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 258th | 3.615⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 143th | 3.635⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 307th | 3.78⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 31🗳️ | 33🗨️ |
Great game, you can be proud!
I discovered some audio stuttering artefacts while playing. Holding down the movement keys makes it worse, and the deeper down I go (longest contract), the worse the stuttering gets. It seems that the stuttering happens when the browser complains about how long the frame took to draw. It could be performance/memory related assuming you are continuously spawning the brown circles that make up the path. If that’s the case, you could probably work around the issue with object pooling and/or with instanced rendering (since the circles are the same exact sprite).
Two minor gripes: you can't see the price of the stuff at the store, and even with the special superpower, getting all the hidden artifacts is a bit tedious. I mean, I hear the dead moan but I run out of time to find them all! ^^
Congrats, I had a lot of fun with this one!
It’s a bit of a rabbit hole, but instanced rendering is probably the way to go to fix your performance issue. It essentially leverages hardware acceleration (magic) in a graphics card to draw many copies of the same sprite in one pass, instead of doing many individual draws for each unique sprite copy to the graphics card every frame (what happens by default).
I found this video that does a great job of explaining the technique at a high level, and show how to get that working in Godot (I'm not familiar with Godot, but the infromation in the video looks good): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwMoEdAhtYQ
A few things I didn't like: not having prices on the shop and also the late game got pretty tedious, just grinding for that last artifact over and over again.