Hey, love the vibe you’re chasing—pixel crispness is my jam. The trick is to treat the background like a single canvas, not a bunch of moving sprites. First, keep the art in a low‑res tileable grid, then use a GPU‑accelerated texture that’s power‑of‑two sized. That way you can let the GPU do the upscaling without touching your CPU at all. Use PNG‑8 or WebP with a tight 8‑bit palette; the little dithering keeps the edges sharp and the file size tiny. If you really need extra sharpness, layer a low‑res base with a subtle high‑res outline that only renders on the GPU – no audio bleed. And don’t forget to lock the background on the main thread; make it static so it never forces a frame update. That way your audio stream runs free, and the visual stays crisp. Remember, perfection is a mindset, not a file size. Happy creating!

Just keep the background as a single sprite and never touch its texture during a scene change. When you swap scenes, unload the whole scene and reload it with the same texture reference; the GPU holds the data in VRAM, so switching the scene is just swapping the shader’s render target. That way you never re‑draw the art each frame. For high‑DPI, pack your palette into a 16‑bit format and then apply a slight Gaussian blur to the edges before you upload it. The blur softens the aliasing that pops on 4x displays. Also, let the pixel art run at its native size and use the GPU’s nearest‑neighbour upscaling; the edges stay blocky but clean, and the little dithering in the palette keeps the colors from bleeding. That gives you the crisp look without drowning in data.