Unmanaged Space (GameMaker) - demo on Itch and how I keep thousands of currency pickups alive at once
Hi everyone! I just uploaded demo for Unmanaged Space on Itch! It's an incremental tower defense game I'm building in GameMaker Studio 2. You deploy into sectors, defend an Operational Continuity Anchor through Anomaly Escalations, harvest cosmic surplus, retreat, then buy upgrades in Orbital Logistics. The demo is about ~20 minutes across two sectors.
https://dublinsolodev.itch.io/unmanaged-space
I'm sharing it here because late sectors flood the room with currency pickups (hundreds to thousands from one boss burst). Each currency object used to run its own Step (idle, magnet, collect, release). At high counts that meant thousands of Step events every frame, and the game choked.
Huge thanks to u/WubsGames for walking me through GameMaker's profiler. The workflow prioritized using the profiler to run your game, look at the worst bottleneck, fix whatever is at the top of the list, and repeat. Each pass showed the next bottleneck I needed to fix and ended up being so much faster by the end.
The biggest win for me was to move most of the currency logic off the currency and onto my oPlayer. The profiler showed my currency step was dominating. So I shifted most of it into a batch step on my oPlayer, which runs one per frame instead of every currency firing Step. Currency mostly holds state now, where the oPlayer now drives the heavy lifting.
I hope you have fun with the demo! Happy to answer GM questions or go deeper on any of the above. If you try it, I'd love feedback on whether you find the respec interesting enough to try different builds to hit the goals of each sector!```