Adding Support for macOS

It's been a while since the last blog post, but work hasn't slowed down! A lot of progress has been made on one of the boss fights, several music tracks are now complete, and a number of performance improvements have been implemented to help reach a wider audience at release. Which brings us to the topic of this post: macOS is now on the roadmap!

A build was tested on a MacBook Air some time ago, but the performance was terrible. While working on optimisations for the Steam Deck, macOS was revisited and the source of the issue became clear.

As you can see in the video below, before optimisations were applied the frame rate hovered around 30 FPS, sometimes dropping as low as 28 😬. In contrast, after the adjustments, it now holds a consistent 60 FPS:

The primary cause of this (which a regular macOS user might have spotted more quickly) was the HiDPI screen. Although it's only a 15" screen, the resolution sits at 2880x1864 - that's a lot of pixels to push!

The solution was to find a sweet spot with in-game resolution scaling; lowering the internal render resolution just enough to maintain visual quality while hitting a steady 60 FPS ☺️.

Rather than limiting this optimisation to MacBook Airs, however, a new dynamic resolution setting has been added for all platforms. This will help lower-end devices maintain smoother frame rates without sacrificing too much on the visuals.

For fellow developers - check back soon. A follow-up post will cover how to implement this yourself (assuming you’re using Godot).