Hi! I'm the developer of Mini Legends Idle, a voxel desktop idle RPG built in Godot. I'm starting this thread to keep development progress, visual iterations and performance work together as the game grows.
The idea
I want the game to feel like a small fantasy world beside whatever you're doing on your PC. Your hero handles basic combat automatically, while you make decisions about equipment, upgrades and skills between stages. The challenge is making progression rewarding without making a desktop companion demanding to run or distracting to use.
Making equipment progression visible
I've been working on giving equipment a distinct silhouette and making upgrades readable on the character. This comparison shows unenhanced Legendary gear, Excellent variants and +10 finishes rendered in the actual game. Some of this equipment belongs to the full-game progression rather than the demo.
A small decoration, a surprisingly large rendering cost
A player reported very low FPS in the island hub, even though other areas ran better. Looking into the scene revealed that the mail sign alone had more than 912,000 cube instances: it had been built at character voxel pitch despite being a town-sized prop.
The optimization work includes using a more appropriate voxel pitch for the sign, combining the posed geometry of static residents, batching more building parts and drawing only exposed faces on static sculptures. The exterior voxel shapes and colors remain, while enclosed faces are removed.
In the same 960×540 island test, high-quality rendering fell from approximately 47.3 million to 10.0 million primitives per frame, with draw calls dropping from about 5,437 to 1,870. These are local rendering-workload measurements—not a promise of a matching FPS increase. The real test is how the game behaves across players' hardware, and this performance work is still being validated for updates.
The current playable demo
The free Windows demo currently offers the Warrior class and stages 1–35. You can find the download, gameplay screenshots and installation instructions on the itch.io project page. The game remains in active development.
For anyone trying it, I'm interested in the balance between readable equipment effects and keeping the desktop view comfortable. If you report performance, please include your CPU/GPU, selected graphics preset and whether the slowdown happens on the island or in combat.
You can also find the Steam demo, full-game Steam page and our Discord. Future development notes can stay in this thread rather than creating a new announcement for every change.
Disclosure: generative AI tools have assisted with code, some artwork and localization. The equipment image above is captured from the game.