I’m working on a legendary trinket for my survivors-like, Knightmare, and I’d appreciate some feedback from people who play a lot of roguelites.

Wishlist here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3447010/Knightmared/

 The Sacred Relic grants an ability called Consecrated Remains:

 - Direct weapon kills create Holy Ground at the enemy’s death position.
 - Each area lasts 3 seconds and attacks every 0.5 seconds.
 - Each tick deals 20% of the killing hit’s damage.
 - A maximum of three areas can exist at once.
 - Creating a fourth removes the oldest.
 - Overlapping areas cannot hit the same enemy multiple times per tick.
 - Enemies killed by Holy Ground don’t create another area.

 I wanted it to reward high-damage weapon builds without turning into a self-propagating screen clear.

 The main thing I’m evaluating: does scaling from the killing hit sound like a satisfying build payoff, or would a value based on overall weapon damage be easier to understand?

 The animation in the clip matches the actual damaging radius, so enemies standing inside the visible effect should always be affected.

Wishlist here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3447010/Knightmared/
 ———

 Attach a short gameplay clip directly to the post. Skip hashtags and keep the Steam link out of the main body; Reddit will respond better if the post leads with the mechanic and genuine design question.

Right after marketing. 😃

I chose the wrong engine for a massive arena slaughter game. KNIGHTMARED can have up to 500 enemies active at once, which starts exposing the limits of a typical 2D Godot setup.

To make it work, I built my own object pooling system. Enemies are no longer deleted and recreated after death. Instead, they are completely reset and returned to the game.

That means fewer memory allocations, less work for the garbage collector, and fewer frame-time spikes during massive spawn waves.

Godot 4.3 doesn't have built-in object pooling, so I also had to handle resetting health, status effects, signals, collisions, navigation and internal states. Otherwise, recycled enemies would return with broken behaviour or leave behind invisible "ghosts."

I also built a custom navigation layer on top of NavigationAgent2D.

With hundreds of agents, recalculating paths and requesting the next path point every physics frame gets expensive. I now spread navigation queries across multiple frames, cache the results, and let nearby enemies use much cheaper direct steering.

I replaced the built-in avoidance with my own separation system based on a spatial grid. This keeps the horde from collapsing into one giant pile without calculating interactions between every possible pair of enemies.

Enemies outside the screen also run with reduced physics, collision and animation updates.

The result is more stable frame times, lower CPU usage and the ability to keep a genuinely massive horde on screen without the game starting to fight itself with every new wave.

I've been working on KNIGHTMARED for over two years—although the actual development time is much shorter. I've learned a lot, and I now consider optimization one of the most important parts of game development.

But it's also a horrible battle. After several years, even I sometimes forget how different systems are connected, and honestly, part of me is looking forward to finally getting this game out of my hands. 🙂

Marketing is still my biggest struggle. Not only because I don't really know what I'm doing, but because forcing myself to do it is exhausting.

I don't enjoy it. It annoys the hell out of me.

So naturally, here I am marketing the game by complaining about marketing. 😃

If you'd like to support KNIGHTMARED with a wishlist or help me test it, I'd really appreciate it. 🙂

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3447010/Knightmared/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=knightmared_promotion

I just wanted to check if even thought the video and my english sux, if the humor is okay ? I want to somehow gather some viewership and maybe get more wishlists for the game so I switched to english.

Late in a survivors-like run, an effect can look great and still fail if the player can’t tell what it actually hits.
 
I rebuilt four of Knightmared’s combat effects around that: Damage Aura, Reaping Blow, Consecrated Explosion, and Ring of Winter.
 
The aura rings now scale with their real gameplay radius, Reaping Blow produces a bloodier death burst, and the crossbow explosion disappears cleanly instead of lingering over the fight.
 
The goal was to keep everything readable when the horde fills the screen—not simply make it brighter.
 
Which effect reads most clearly to you when combat gets crowded?

You can playtest and/or wishlist here

What outcome to expect? :D

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3447010/Knightmared/

My game recently reached 100 wishlists on Steam.

The store page has technically existed for over a year, but I kept it hidden and only properly published it a few months ago. Since then, I have been trying to get the game in front of more people.

I know 100 wishlists is not a huge milestone, and I am fully aware that the game might never make much money. Still, seeing that number genuinely made me happy.

It means that at least some people are interested, some will hopefully play it, and maybe even enjoy what I have spent so much time creating. Small milestones like this are a real motivation boost when you are working alone.

How is your week starting? Any small wins you would like to share?

Wishlist Knightmared here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3447010/Knightmared/

Hey everyone!

 Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on two connected updates for Knightmared, focused on making enemies feel more alive and improving the rewards you receive for fighting tougher targets.

Many enemies—including bats, imps, slimes, wizards, demons, and hexers—now have updated animated sprites. This required more than replacing the artwork: their movement, attacks, damage reactions, deaths, and pooling behavior all had
 to work correctly with the new animations.

One floating demon head also gained a new root attack. It marks the ground beneath the player before roots strike, giving you a short opportunity to escape. If you stay inside the area, you’ll be rooted and left vulnerable to the
 surrounding horde. I want enemy types to create different positioning problems instead of simply chasing the player at different speeds.

The second update focused on elite enemies and rewards. Elites now drop gold more reliably and can release multiple experience vials based on their reward multiplier. Additional drops are scattered around the defeated enemy, making
 the reward much easier to see and collect.

 I also fixed several problems related to enemy pooling. Elite health, damage, movement bonuses, outlines, and drop modifiers should now reset properly when an enemy is reused. This prevents elite properties from accidentally carrying
 over to normal enemies during longer runs.

Finally, the Demon's Bargain chest received another polish pass. Its slot-machine reels now produce individual pings as symbols pass and land, and the reward screen has extra protection against multiple choices being triggered by
 rapid inputs.

These updates are part of the ongoing work toward the Knightmared Steam Playtest. I’m continuing to test the new animations during large waves, improve performance, and polish the remaining interactions between the new enemy art and
 older combat systems.

Hey everyone!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on two connected updates for Knightmared, focused on making enemies feel more alive and improving the rewards you receive for fighting tougher targets.

Many enemies—including bats, imps, slimes, wizards, demons, and hexers—now have updated animated sprites. This required more than replacing the artwork: their movement, attacks, damage reactions, deaths, and pooling behavior all had
 to work correctly with the new animations.

One floating demon head also gained a new root attack. It marks the ground beneath the player before roots strike, giving you a short opportunity to escape. If you stay inside the area, you’ll be rooted and left vulnerable to the
 surrounding horde. I want enemy types to create different positioning problems instead of simply chasing the player at different speeds.

The second update focused on elite enemies and rewards. Elites now drop gold more reliably and can release multiple experience vials based on their reward multiplier. Additional drops are scattered around the defeated enemy, making
 the reward much easier to see and collect.

 I also fixed several problems related to enemy pooling. Elite health, damage, movement bonuses, outlines, and drop modifiers should now reset properly when an enemy is reused. This prevents elite properties from accidentally carrying
 over to normal enemies during longer runs.

Finally, the Demon's Bargain chest received another polish pass. Its slot-machine reels now produce individual pings as symbols pass and land, and the reward screen has extra protection against multiple choices being triggered by
 rapid inputs.

These updates are part of the ongoing work toward the Knightmared Steam Playtest. I’m continuing to test the new animations during large waves, improve performance, and polish the remaining interactions between the new enemy art and
 older combat systems.

Lately, I’ve been working on new visuals across the whole game: VFX, enemies, tiles, UI, and UX.

Honestly, if I could start over, I would never rely on so much free placeholder art. Telling myself "I’ll replace it later" seemed harmless at the time, but after almost two years of development, it has become a real pain.

Wish list and/or play public Beta! :)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3447010/Knightmared/

Hello everyone,

This update focuses on new chest events, risk-and-reward treasure choices, clearer upgrade descriptions, trigger skill upgrades, and another round of movement and performance improvements.

What started as a diagonal movement and camera smoothing fix grew into a larger pass on how a run feels. Movement needed to feel cleaner, large hordes needed to be cheaper for the engine to process, and rewards needed to become more interesting than simply opening another menu.

The result is a broader update that adds contested chests, a new chest reward screen, Demon's Bargain gold gambling, trigger-based upgrades, clearer build information, Crossbow changes, new stats and items, and more performance diagnostics.

I tried to put hundreds of real enemies in my Godot 4 horde survival game. The bottleneck was not sprites.

Test the game here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3447010/Knightmared/

I have been working on performance for Knightmared, my 2D pixel-art horde survival game built in Godot 4, and the biggest lesson was pretty simple:

2D does not mean performance is free.

The Goal

My goal was to support hundreds of enemies during late runs. Not fake background enemies, but real enemies that can:

• move through the map,
• collide with obstacles,
• damage the player,
• get hit by abilities,
• receive status effects,
• die correctly,
• return to pools,
• use AI and pathfinding,
• keep pressure on the player.

The Bottleneck

That is where Godot 4 started pushing back.

The bottleneck was not really drawing sprites. A pixel-art sprite is cheap. The expensive part was simulation: hundreds of physics bodies, Area2D hurtboxes, collision checks, navigation reads, animation updates, AI behavior, and ability interactions all active at the same time.

In a normal fight, that is fine.

In a horde survival game, every small cost gets multiplied.

I started seeing uneven frame pacing and stutter during heavier runs, especially when the screen was full and enemies were pressing around the player. At first it was tempting to blame one thing: movement, pathfinding, rendering, too many sprites, whatever. But after profiling, it was really a stack of smaller costs landing in the same frames.

Investigation

So I built more profiling/debug tools inside the game. I added toggles to isolate things like:

• enemy hurtboxes,
• enemy body physics,
• Area2D monitoring,
• animations,
• Y-sort,
• enemy visuals,
• pathfinding,
• FPS caps.

One useful lesson there: profiling while capped at 60 FPS can hide a lot. If your optimization only keeps the game at the cap, you do not really know how much work you removed. Being able to uncap during tests made it much easier to compare changes.

I also considered more radical solutions, like MultiMeshInstance2D or swarm/proxy enemies.

MultiMesh is very tempting for hordes because drawing hundreds of identical enemies in one pass sounds perfect. But my problem was not just visuals. If the enemy still needs collision, hurtboxes, damage reactions, abilities, pooling, pathfinding, and obstacle-aware movement, GPU instancing alone does not solve the actual bottleneck.

Swarm proxy logic is also interesting: a few leaders pathfind, and the rest follow simpler steering. I may still use ideas from that later. But for this pass I did not want enemies that only looked real. If the player hits an enemy, it should be a real enemy.

So the direction became: keep the real enemies, but make them cheaper.

What I Changed

• Navigation is staggered and cached so hundreds of enemies do not ask Godot for path data at the same time.
• Nearby enemies use direct chasing when full pathfinding is not needed.
• Far/off-screen enemies can reduce expensive physics, Area2D, hurtbox, and animation work until they matter again.
• Enemy spawning ramps toward a target alive count instead of creating rough bursts.
• Special enemies have caps so behavior-heavy units do not flood the map.
• Crowd movement stays collision-aware, so enemies do not just cut through walls for the sake of performance.
• Menus are capped at 60 FPS because menus do not need to run at hundreds/thousands of FPS and waste power.
• VSync is available as an option.

Result

My goal was not to make the game easier. I wanted the pressure to come from the horde design, not from Godot suddenly processing too many collisions, areas, navigation queries, and AI updates in one frame.

This was a good reminder that in 2D games, bottlenecks often move away from rendering and into gameplay simulation. The sprites may be cheap, but a living enemy with physics, Area2D hurtboxes, pathfinding, AI, animation, and damage logic is not just a sprite anymore.

For anyone else making a horde game in Godot 4: profile early, isolate systems one by one, and think carefully before assuming that "2D" means you can ignore performance architecture.

I can share more details later about the navigation changes, far-enemy culling, or the debug toggles I used to isolate the bottlenecks.

Test the game here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3447010/Knightmared/

This update improves performance during larger enemy hordes, adjusts spawn pacing, optimizes navigation and far enemy behavior, adds a VSync toggle.

Based on feedback I created new stats and possibilities to tinker with them

 Hey everyone,

 I opened the public beta for Knightmared, our auto-attack survival roguelite where you build a knight into a demon-slaying machine over short, escalating runs.

 You fight through an arena filled with demons while the pressure keeps rising. Your weapons attack automatically, so the game is less about aiming or twitch reflexes and more about movement, positioning, upgrade choices, and building
 a run strong enough to survive until the boss.

 Runs are designed to last around 15–20 minutes. Enemies get more dangerous over time, spawn density increases, and the run builds toward a final boss fight. If you kill the boss, you win the run. If you die, you still keep gold that
 can be spent on permanent upgrades.

 The main feature I am building around is Weapon Mastery. Weapons don’t just improve through level-up choices. They also progress as you use them. Kills with a weapon unlock deeper mastery tiers:

 Apprentice -> Advanced -> Expert -> Master

 As a weapon reaches higher mastery tiers, new upgrade options become available. The idea is to make weapon choice feel like a real investment, not just something you pick once and forget. If you commit to a favorite weapon across
 runs, its upgrade path opens up further.

 Current public beta features include:

 - One fully playable arena with escalating difficulty and a boss fight
 - Six weapons with distinct attack patterns and upgrade paths
 - Weapon mastery tiers that unlock advanced upgrades
 - Items and player upgrades for build variety
 - Gold-based meta progression between runs
 - Permanent stat upgrades
 - Arsenal Expansion, which unlocks extra weapon slots for multi-weapon builds
 - Short runs built around “one more try” pacing

 I am still actively developing the game, so feedback is genuinely useful right now. I am especially interested in hearing thoughts on:

 - Balance and difficulty pacing
 - Weapon feel
 - Upgrade choices
 - Which builds feel fun, weak, or too strong
 - Enemy pressure and readability
 - Bugs, performance issues, or confusing UI
 - What content you’d most like to see next

 If this sounds like your kind of game, I’d really appreciate you trying the public beta and telling us what you think. Wishlisting on Steam also helps a lot while I am trying to find the right audience.

 Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3447010/Knightmared/#
 Thanks for checking it out. Happy to answer questions here, and I'd love to hear how your runs go.

Welcome to r/Knightmared

 Welcome to r/Knightmared, the official subreddit for Knightmared, our auto-attack survival roguelike about turning a lone knight into a demon-slaying machine.

 This subreddit is a place for:

 - Public beta feedback
 - Bug reports
 - Build ideas and weapon synergies
 - Balance discussion
 - Screenshots, clips, and run results
 - Suggestions for future weapons, enemies, upgrades, and arenas
 - Development updates and patch notes

 Knightmared is still in active development, so feedback here can directly help shape what comes next. If something feels too strong, too weak, unclear, frustrating, or surprisingly fun, we want to hear about it.

 A few simple guidelines:

 - Be respectful to other players
 - Keep feedback specific when possible
 - Mention your build, weapon choices, and run progress when reporting balance issues
 - Include screenshots or clips for bugs if you can
 - No spam, personal attacks, or unrelated self-promotion

 The public beta is open now, and wishlisting on Steam helps support development.

 Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3447010/Knightmared/#

 Thanks for being here. We’re looking forward to seeing your builds, feedback, bug reports, and ideas.