After months of building Septurian Might in isolation, I handed it to 25 testers across the globe. Some of what they told me was humbling. All of it was necessary.
Our protagonist will eventually have 100+ abilities, most performable while standing, jumping, and running. That's 300 hand-drawn animations for one character. Here's how we cut that down without compromising design.
PNG file sizes lie to you. Designing for a 1440p target meant our environment art was inherently massive — but the real memory killer was transparent pixels. Here's the math, and how we fixed it.