I appreciate your feedback !
I actually did implement object pooling on the swarmlings, though since I didn’t know how many I would need I made sure my system could add more to the buffer on the fly, and while testing I set the buffer to 0 and forgot to set it back, so the first few swarms that spawn are actually spawn, then being pooled for later.
The background is actually just 36 polygons as ‘slices’ which I rotated 10’ each. I did this to save time on the background effect I wanted, but unfortunately I wasted a lot more than I’d like to admit trying to get gimp to squish the repeated texture the way I wanted…