I took this week to work on refactoring the game’s memory management. It’s not that it needed it, I’m pretty sure that I could do all the worst practices and the game would still run fine. But I did it as a learning exercise.

What Changed?

• The game now minimizes the use of malloc and free, reducing dynamic allocations wherever possible.
• The only systems that still use dynamic allocation are:
  • Game data loading (loading assets and initial world setup)
  • Saving and loading the game state
  • Managing the game state during runtime

While this is not visible to the players, it does helps me with development since now I have less allocations to track whenever I find a memory leak or other type of error.

This week’s video

What’s Next?

Next week, I’ll return to working on town mechanics, including:

• NPC Dialogue System
• Merchants Buying & Selling Goods
• Bribing Guards to Remove Bounty

Thanks for sticking with me through this behind-the-scenes update! Optimizing memory may not be flashy, but I still had a lot of fun working on it. See you next week for more exciting features!