Okay maybe it isn't just a problem with us all relying on pirated copies and emulators, even buying old games used will often leave you without that ever-helpful manual.

It's proof of great game design when a game so old does a good job of teaching mechanics through the gameplay itself, but for the many great games that still need you to read the manual, it's kind of a shame many of us forget to download it with our definitely-not-pirated copy of the game.

Tim Sweeney can suck my Peeney

Not even worth giving it the descriptor of "art". It's just images. Worthless ones at that.

Do I still want to have very large levels that take 4-8 minutes to complete? Should I instead pivot to having a bunch of smaller levels that take 2-4 minutes? Should I try to split the big levels into chunks that are loaded as needed? How would I make loading as seamless as possible?

Very heavy yet careful use of VisibleOnScreenEnabler nodes drastically lightened the CPU load, but noticing how there were yet further performance gains by deleting half my level gave me one big question about how I approach level structure in my game:

Every last physics object, even StaticBody2Ds, takes a certain amount of CPU power to account for that really adds up when you have hundreds of them all over a big level. "Pausing" them when far off-screen is very helpful, but removing them entirely when not in use is even better if you can help it.

So with that in mind, I did figure out a couple things that drastically lighten the CPU load even on my main workstation
(This is the part that's rather Godot-specific):

Now I leave Vsync turned off for testing that way I can see the utter maximum amount of frames the system could possibly churn out per second with the current load, and what I found is running at 150-200FPS isn't that terrible for the physics, but any further below makes things feel awful.

The second-biggest performance concern is CPU power. I decided very early on to have the physics tickrate set to 240hz with no interpolation instead of the default 60hz with interpolation on. This made the game feel much more precise and smooth, but it means the system has to work extra hard.

Finding this out made me extremely conscious of the resolution of every image file I put in the game, making sure they are *only* as high-res as they need to be. For example, background elements can afford to look slightly blurry, as that helps you read the foreground elements, so I downscaled em.

Now even if my game is 2D, it still uses high-res spritework designed for 1080p and 4K. As you might guess, this means VRAM is still a very big consideration for this game's performance. 1GB of VRAM is just a hair short of enough to handle this game, even at a low resolution of 1024x768.

EXHIBIT A: The Dell Optiplex 990.
I got mine for (I think) $35 used.
Out of the box it has an Intel Core i5-2400,
and I fitted it with a Radeon R7 200 series GPU as it's one of the oldest and weakest that support Vulkan.

Later I will be upgrading it to an R5 430 for reasons I'll explain later.

The section that sucks to play is inevitable in every game whether you intend it to be that way or not. Committing to your creative vision matters far more imo. Consequences of doing so be damned.

okay I had to go on my PC to read it wtf

aint no fuckin way bruh I thought that shit was just a crusty old gif

I didn't think North Star was *that* unpopular, but if I had to guess, besides bad manga scans and subpar anime adaptation like others said, it's just too old to get western mainstream status by now. It's the prehistoric megafauna ancestor of Jojo and Beserk. (Still really good tho)