Sure thing, champ. First off, try a hierarchical approach—break the map into big tiles, find a rough route, then drill down only where you need precision. Saves you from flooding the whole grid with calculations. Next, swap your dense graph for a sparse one; only keep nodes that matter, like corners or chokepoints. Then, for the actual walk, use a bidirectional A*—you’ll cut the search in half. And don’t forget to cache routes that repeat; games love loops, and you can just pull the answer from memory instead of recomputing. Sprinkle in some diagonal pruning, keep your heuristic admissible, and you’ll have speed without losing accuracy. Ready to outsmart the enemy?

Glad you’re on board, champ. Throw those layers in, watch the speed lift, and if the cache starts feeling lazy, just kick it back into action. Ready for the test run? Let’s see that prototype sprint.