Devlog #5 — Performance Boosts, Smart Missiles, and the itch.io Demo

The last few weeks have been an absolute whirlwind of development. I've been deep in the trenches focusing on performance optimization, crushing bugs discovered during local playtests, and preparing the very first public demo for itch.io.

🚀 Building Big Without the Lag In Solar Drift, you can cover entire planets with buildings and iron walls. However, the more you built, the worse the framerate dropped. I tackled this data-first using the Godot 4.6 profiler. By switching to MultiMesh, a single node now draws every wall on the planet, dropping the performance cost to zero. I also added a frame cache to the foot-collision logic and fixed a sneaky subpixel jitter on static sprites. Now, the game holds a buttery smooth 60 FPS even on fully colonized worlds.

🎯 Smart Missiles & Power Grid Fixes Playtesters noticed that ship missiles sometimes locked onto innocent wildlife instead of actual threats. I rewrote the targeting logic with a strict priority system: missiles now always prioritize UFOs and space pirates, and only fall back to splitting large asteroids if the area is clear. Back at the base, I also fixed a hilarious loophole where buildings like the smelter and factory kept working through the night without any energy storage. Everything is now properly wired into the main power grid.

✨ Quality of Life & The Public Demo Thanks to recent playtests, I've added a ton of QoL polish. You can now Shift-click to insert 100 ore into the smelter, fishing auto-switches to a free hand so you don't accidentally fire your multitool, and factory upgrades have clear hover tooltips. Most importantly, the first playable beta demo is officially ready for itch.io! I've even added full Hungarian localization for my local playtesters. The solar system is waiting for you.