There's been one really big thing holding back the demo launch of Ako and it has been performance. Even on my fairly strong PC it was running just above 60fps (in-game) and occasionally dipping well below. I didn't want to launch something a lot of people couldn't play and considering Ako is a 2D game it shouldn't have been that hard to fix. So I started working on optimizations and it's going as smooth as it probably can, not sure how much of it can be contributed to my new hardware (Ryzen 5 2600) compared to my old one (FX 8320, but considering GMS2 code is only running on a single thread by default I don't think it's that much of a difference.

DO NOT USE FastNoise! Fast is in the name, so why shouldn't I? You might ask... but the truth is FastNoise is only fast considering it generates that noise real time. So I opted to replace all of it with pre-rendered noise and fps count in the menu where I was calling it 160 times per frame rose from 120fps to around 300 - 400fps (after doing some render batching on the menu elements as well)!

All in all development is finally back to what it should be since the performance isn't looming over every single new thing I implement.

See you next time hopefully when I'm almost ready to click the LAUNCH button!