Performance Issues with Hyper Casual Web Game

Since I have released a version of  the Runner game that does not meet performance requirements and fails to provide a perfect player experience, I present the following:

STATEMENT

Why is this Hyper-Casual Game currently performing so poorly?

What is the problem?

Patrons who tested the latest version found that the game does not meet the required performance standards on Android devices. In certain cases, it struggles to reach even 2–3 FPS. Patrons noted that under such unfavorable conditions, the screen appears dark green and nothing is visible. I also reproduced this issue on the Oppo A15, a mass-market device.

Causes

This situation arose due to my lack of professionalism and arrogance. By testing exclusively on high-end Apple devices (M1 and 14 Pro Max), I failed to account for how outdated standard hardware is. The game’s code was insufficiently optimized for common devices. In a rushed effort, I implemented some diagnostic tools that allowed me to pinpoint the technical causes of poor performance more precisely.

Diagnostics revealed that the biggest performance issues lie in the rendering pipeline, specifically when rendering terrain platforms, especially in levels with many platforms. Additionally, there are problems with the main character’s animation and collision detection between the character and platforms.

Technical Analysis

Diagnostics showed that:

• More than 50% of processing time is spent on rendering logic, most of which is terrain platform rendering (white color in the diagram).

• Character animation significantly slows down the game (red color in the diagram).

• Black color represents input processing, but due to an error, it also includes time spent on collision detection between the character and each platform.

Actions Taken

To address this issue, I not only developed additional diagnostic tools but also optimized rendering by moving certain per-frame calculations to the level loading phase, if the results remained constant. For example, texture scaling for different platform sizes is now precomputed.

I conducted a more detailed analysis of a wider range of hardware. Below, I provide a table comparing test results before and after these micro-optimizations.

I also fixed numerous bugs, such as:

• The “falling through the ground” bug, which occurred when frame times were too long, causing gravity from the previous frame to displace the character too far before collisions were recalculated.

• A glitch where the character would fall inside a platform, leading to a “transcendental state”, resulting in a green screen with no visible objects.

• Adjusting the animation keyframe rate to 15 (originally 60 keys per second), though this only affected file size, not performance.

Additional Testing

To assess the full extent of the issue, I conducted further tests on additional hardware to determine whether the micro-optimizations improved performance.

* Some of the values are limited by a browser

Next Steps

To improve the situation more significantly I am planning to take the following actions in the priority order

I was thinking of changing the Mixamo rig to the variant having fewer bones, but I am not convinced that could make a big impact.