We just CONFIRMED the major source of instability for our LDJam entry, BANKWAVE: Neon Networth has been resolved!

It turns out that not every library you find in the wild includes sane defaults. We missed setting up a cache for our text rendering library, resulting in massive performance penalties you can see in the graph below -- taken with pprof. As a result, 20% of our game's time was being spent on creating new images to render letters it had mostly already rendered.

Once we set things up properly and added a tiny 4 MiB cache, the bottleneck was resolved!

I would never have guessed something like this was responsible for a performance hit... definitely a mistake I won't be repeating. Super glad I'm working with Ebitengine and Go -- which comes with fantastic profiling tools (pprof) that created the graphs above and showed me exactly where the problem was.

This should be the very last update for the Jam version of our game! Stay tuned as we get rolling on a Kickstarter! Mailing list will be available soon!