Cloud materials were eating Garden of Giants' framerate

The new move in Garden of Giants is an aerial attack, and its maker grades it the way you'd hope: "Tasteful, elegant, dignified—and feels great to press." The game is a dark-fantasy action project built solo in Godot by Dakota Pailes-Friedman, and the reel showing the animation comes with something rarer than a combat clip—a full accounting of what it costs to make.

The old clouds, it turns out, were eating performance, so the sky got rebuilt. That is a performance budget narrated as an aesthetic decision. The clouds look the way they do because of what they no longer cost, and the fights can get crowded because the sky got cheap.

The silhouette this game cuts—airborne, sword-first, giants in the murk—reads closer to From Software's Otogi than to anything on current shelves, a mystical strain of character action Killscreen has cared about since Bayonetta 2 made excess into a discipline. Playtest builds are going out through the game's Discord, linked from the project's account, which means you can feel the frame budget yourself. Development in public usually means screenshots; this is the less common kind, where the numbers come too, and watching a game get faster is part of the show.