The first real play
The packaged game was played by a person for the first time on the night of 14 October. Stage 1 took 277 seconds and was cleared with 3 stars after 2 deaths, one to an orb shot and one to a siege cruiser. The stage 1 boss fell in 14.8 seconds, and the verdict was that it is easy now. The game should not be hard either, so we took the smallest step on offer: stage bosses and mini bosses now carry a quarter more hit points in the Unreal game. Waves, enemy fire and capital ships are untouched, and so are the original game rules and their recorded playthroughs. This is a first guess, and more play is the judge.
A stall with no name yet
The same play log showed a real problem. In stage 2 every frame took between 10.8 and 12.4 seconds while the mouse was captured for play, yet the game ran at 50 to 60 frames a second whenever a pause or options screen was open. The longest stall lasted close to three minutes.
Stage 1 had the same mouse capture for all 277 seconds with a single hitch of 719 milliseconds, so the capture alone is not the cause. The engine log rules out shader compiles, garbage collection and first use of a model. The newest package now writes the game thread, render thread and GPU times on every long frame, plus whether the window is in front, so the next stall will name what is blocked.
Review rounds caught our own regressions
The burning wreck went through thirteen rounds of independent review. Rounds 11 and 12 caught two regressions that our own changes had caused, an all-copper cone and a pale pink puff, and both were backed out. Round 13 passed, marginally, with no critic scoring under 7.