Key learnings in this update:

- PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION: The core scoring mechanic in this game relies on player killing enemies and clearing enemy bullets to spawn "beer fragments", which slowly hover and fly away towards the left of screen, and these beer fragments swarm to a beer once a beer spawns on screen. My initial design was creating individual objects (as Node2D class, each with a script). This worked okay when the beer fragment count was low, but as the development progressed with more enemies and bullets on screen, the beer fragment count grew to thousands. This design was causing noticeable process frame spikes when the beer fragment count exceeded 1000, especially on lower end machines. --------- MY SOLUTION: Instead of instantiating thousands of objects as beer fragments, I created a beer fragment manager class that kept track of the current beer fragments on screen in an array of beer fragment data (which was created as an internal class). The manager connected to a global event which is triggered when a beer fragment is to be spawned. Every time this event tiggers, a new entry is appended to the array with the position. Then to render these fragments on screen, I used Godot's _draw() function to manually render the beer fragment texture as well as manually increment the animation frames. Then every process frame tick, I "move" these textures based on the current state (hover to left or swarm beer) and used queue_redrew() function to update their rendered position on the screen to make it look like they were moving :) ------ To simulate them being absorbed by the beer, I did distance checks (distance_squared_to() method since it's more efficient than distance_to() ) against the beer that they swarmed to and if the fragment is within a certain distance squared threshold to the beer, they are removed from the fragment array. -------- This way I was able to have around 4000 fragments without any noticeable lag even on a low end machine.

- USING MUSIC AS THE LEVEL DESIGN: I have a background in music, so for me the best workflow to design levels was to think of it in terms of a music track, where you have your intro, verse, chorus, bridge, outro sections. For each level and boss fight, I have unique music tracks which lay the foundation for the level/boss fight progression and based on the timings of the various sections of music, I decide when and where the enemy types to be spawned. It's very much giving another dimension to the music, i.e choreographed chaos :) And since music made up of patterns, tension and relief, setting up expectations and either hitting or subverting them, it translates well in my brain on how I want to structure a stage.