Good news on the updated version of Neo Thunder. I did a test with extra enemies to make a total of 60 enemies. Currently the max possible without re-organising the sprite layout

In the screenshot below there are 60 enemies, 61 enemy bullets, 7 player bullets, approx 18 background tiles and 2 player ship sprites

= 148 sprites

And there is still a fair amount of frame time left. (you can see by the color bars) and the 60 FPS.



It is possible to fire 20+ player bullets but I can't do it while taking a screenshot. Here I just held the fire button down. The game might find it harder to deal with that. Each extra player bullet here would mean 60 more collision checks with the enemies

UNFORTUNATLEY there is now a lot of noticeable sprite tearing with more sprites on screen. So I will now need to deal with that. I am thinking this should be fairly easy though (famous last words!) since Neo Thunder is a simple game and for most sprites, only the x-coord is updated and only the player ship has any animation. So there should be time to update all the sprites in the vertical blank