I've been extremely wary of runtime performance and have spent pretty much all my time sweating the details on game play without moving onto things like scoring, or the help screens etc.
My last entry I talked about potential optimisations in reading the mummy position out of a BANK but didn't work out.
The next item to try was to switch from calling SPRITE continuously (which prints the sprite to screen) to using SPRITE CONTINUE which lets the hardware animate between points - in my case, the crossroads in the game.
The video below shows before and after (around the 15 second mark). Before, the game play is sluggish as I hit around 4 mummy's and becomes unplayable after that. After, I'm easily able to get to 11 mummy's and they're still running around at breakneck speed!
Next I want to work on the controls. I've noticed that when I play, sometimes I get stuck trying to turn a corner and the player just sits trying to move when they can't.
So my idea to solve this is: if the player tries to move left before they're able to, continue them moving in the direction they were going before. i.e. if they were going up, and try to move left but hit a wall, keep going up (which is usually just one tick) then the left movement will kick in.
The trick, I think, will be ensuring that this method can only occur during movement and not as the first movement…whatever that's supposed to mean.