Making an Advanced Shmup #02 – Performance – Pico-8 Hero

So excited about this 🙂

Great to see more stuff from you guys!

In my testing I found that screen-wide rectfill and cls seem to be about the same cost since it's all about how many pixels that are being set,
My question for you is for your game to squeeze out preformance will you use rectfill or cls behind the scrolling map to save cpu time either by storing it with the map data somehow or just having a solid color you can swap out (like for the ocean or grass depending on what's on screen..)
Or is it too much of a bother for your game and nah? In my game I'm running out of sprites fast so I saved a ton of sprite space and tokens using a 2dsplit rectfill() feed instead of a cls call to draw a handle full of rectangles in the bg and then minimal needed sprites dedicated to the rest of the background drawn on top.
I feel like in some ways I plan more plan less than you do but it's interesting to watch. Going to enjoy watching this of course! <3

One question I have: do you have handy rules or is it just instinct as to what sort of processes take up a lot of tokens? I guess is the rule just you want procedural rather than hand-scripted/crafted stuff?

If it's going to be just 1 stage, then it would be cool if there was something extra-special for really skilled players. Maybe a skill-trigger that caused you to scroll backwards through to same stage once the boss had been beaten, but it was now significantly more challenging with different enemy / bullet formations? It's OK though, I am sure you have plenty of your own ideas, and getting them all into pico8 is unfeasible.

Like even before the ADs finish! I already know it’s good =D

I'm honestly shocked to learn that smalle sprites are less expensive. Intuitively I would think that doing arbitrary clipping on the sprite sheet would be more expensive rather than less. I suppose it makes sense that drawing less pixels takes less juice but I still assumed that using the "sprite" function would always be cheaper than the "fancy sprite" function.

THANK YOU for the Fandom-less version of the Pico-8 Wiki!

I assume you know this but if you were to draw the bullets with circ statements rather than spr you can draw many more bullets per frame. Even using two circ statements (one for the outline) I was able to draw 1700 bullets at 60fps without dropping frames.