Steam Deck update is finally a go for next Monday!
Skip this paragraph if you don't care about technical details, but the root of the performance issue was found to be that Cairo, the root 2D rendering library used by WebKit to create their visuals from individual shapes, was being forced to do downsampling from full HD 1920x1080 to the actual 1280x800 of the Steam Deck itself. Apparently, Cairo lets you do direct GPU buffer transfers for GL stuff, but all of its mixing parts are CPU-only (which is one reason WebKit has moved to Skia a few years ago, but we can't update because Steam Deck is Debian 11-based). By just hardcoding the resolution for that platform, we can bypass most of the CPU access, and are back up to full 60fps. Excellent.
With our last technical hurdle out of the way, it's time to turn our cutesy little time waster into an actual full-fledged experience. So, next up: Campaign Mode. The current sales pitch (ahem) :
"Handle a gauntlet of timed challenges one after another to fill the requests of incoming customers. The longer you hold on, the better the tips, but the time margins get tighter and more crazy twists get thrown into their order."
Think WarioWare, but it's going to be all of the different stages instead of unique minigames. Each stage has several potential modifiers that can be picked from (and combined), so gravity could be doubled, the stage could be flipped, the ball might be extra bouncy, or any other of a dozen effects could be in place. (This was actually planned to be ready for the release all the way back at the start of March, but unfortunately was heavily delayed due to the technical issues. Oh well.)
Also expect a demo to pop up sometime here between 1 and 2, as well as the usual sets of additional tracks and extra mini-games sprinkled in as they finish.
Huge thanks for all early adopters into the project. We really appreciate the support so far, and hope to be able to turn this into something extra special.