As per usual, nothing goes according to the plans I make about this game – and last week showed me that in full force!
First, the good news – the Demo 2.0 is out, and I even managed to release it one day earlier, on May 7th, 2026!
Everyone can log in to Steam and play it. It's the closest I can make a demo to the upcoming full release of the game, and I'm pretty proud of it!
But the road to the release was a rough one. It started Monday (as they usually do) when I began testing on my PC with Windows, just one last time before creating the Steam build.
I work on Mac and I test the game directly inside the Godot editor all the time. I've played through the game probably thousands of times, tried every setting, every ship, every weapon – but the moment I tried that on Windows, I was shocked!
The game works (uncapped 800-900 fps), but with stutters every second or so! I tried changing the framerate, tried to see where my physics process became too much – nothing!
So I looked into potential shader cache and particle system issues, and most sources on the internet pointed out that this indeed can cause stutters.
That was a good clue, and I invested 2 days creating a warm‑up scene that shows the most important sprites, particle systems, and some of the shaders.
Unfortunately, that had exactly zero effect on the issue! It still stutters pretty consistently. If you pick a 60fps cap, it shows more; if you pick 120‑240, it's less – but it's still there.
I was starting to lose my mind as the release date was near, and decided to just create a Windows build and test it on my other PC. Just before moving the files, I randomly decided to play the build to see if it was any better.
And behold... it was flawless! All of the issues were apparently because I ran the game inside the Godot editor on Windows!
Just in case, I reverted all of the warm‑up changes, created a different build, and indeed it works perfectly fine, without any stutter or framerate loss.
I'm still not sure why or how this happens (my PC isn't that old), but that was the case! So I just finished up the warm‑up changes – they may help out some older PCs – and created the build for Steam.
It took probably 5 tries to properly manage to put it on Steam, partly because I encountered small last‑minute bugs, and partly because I just forgot how to do it.
But it's there, and works great – enjoy!
What's in the demo 2.0:
https://battleforvega.com/news/46
Demo 2.0 Release Trailer:
View game pagePlay the Demo 2.0 on Steam: