I had a few thousand people dogpile into my stream about this today.
1. I chose to do pixel by pixel CPU based lighting over using a shader to ensure the system was compatible with machines that could not compile shaders. This was helpful for a number of regions such as Brazil where the game has been very popular.
2. Heartbounds native functional resolution is 360p meaning the normal lighting assets are less than 100x100 on the highest end. At no time would any asset be 800px wide and as such the performance benchmark they made is meaningless. The lighting when used correctly increases cpu usage over baseline a negligible amount and runs on both a smartfridge and handhelds with zero performance issues. What they did is like driving a manual, not knowing how to use a clutch, and then blaming the car.
3. All of this was written in GMS 1.4 back in 2018. A massive number of modern features in GM did not exist then. Updating this now would give trivial benefits to performance without any gameplay improvements. The framework is functional, performant, and shipped. It does not need to change as a result.
4. The only bottleneck in development is writing. It's a choose your own adventure game. I take weeks to do the writing and implementation is roughly an hour for 3 weeks of writing or more. The framework is what it needs to be, quick, harmless, out of the way, and easy to develop for so I can focus on content.
5. Doing all of this off decompiled code and proudly displaying that is dubious at best. A number of oddities are present in their examples that are not in the source. The legality of doing this is also subject. At no time have I given permission for decompilation nor is the source code publicly available.
6. I have been releasing monthly updates for Heartbound since January. All of these can be seen in the Steam Announcements on the games page. The last one was May 28th for the June update. I released it early as I was visiting the EU for TwitchCon.
All these videos have done is mislead an audience of hundreds of thousands about the inner workings of a piece of software. They did this using biased and sometimes false information in order to push a narrative that I am incompetent in my field.
Anyway, hope they enjoy the witch hunt for views and selling more $350/hr resume review slots. LOL
So far, all of the counts are about sex trafficing though, I wonder if they are also going after hin for ordering the hit on 2PAC #SeanCombs#DiddyArrested
@FwoiblesWoW It is quite funny to me that a large number of the tech problems are mostly the same everywhere. I don't work in games, but I'm way to familiar with this type of problem...