Ok following up on this for anyone who may find this. The specific issue I was hunting had to do with a third party plugin dynamically creating fat textures that was inflating the size of my .tscn and .materials.

Right six seconds is great, it was ~14-20 seconds before I squashed these bugs, and also would cause my fans to spin every time I booted the game lol.
And I just thought that was normal for developing, like I’ll never run into this again because I have context for what good/bad performance means.

Happy birthday! Hope it’s a good one

Thank you so much!! It’s been awesome getting to know everyone. Happy to be here.

I think everyone should be entitled to a little bit of both. Like everyone should have a living wage, and have a right to be happy through self-determination. But chasing large personal wealth in current system will corrupt anyone along the way. I guess it’s a balance 🤷‍♂️

Yea results were kinda inconclusive due to some other errors im still working through. But the real lesson is make sure to test occasionally with an export rather than editor 🤷‍♂️

ok, so the load times could be different on an exported project 😱 I'll try an export and see what happens. I've been relying on editor to test.

Yea your right, the demo will promote itself if it's good at Next Fest. My energy is way better spent honing skills and getting demo in shape for proper playtesting.

Ahh I see this is an issue that does not get easier 😅

I'm in my clean-shaven Riker era, excited for season 2 though!