"i apologise for this rant thing. "
I personally think that there is no need to apologise. You just told us what's on your mind, this is the thing that makes people good developers, being dead honest with your audience! Also this is so great that you're not the one who point fingers in the others, keep up!
Nice suggestion. However, the way I set up the game meant there is little to no activity outside of what you can see.
The main performance issues is just the general rendering of the sprites. They are large, and whilst putting them into an even larger sprite atlas solved a lot of issues for some, the size may cause issues for others.
I’m trying to figure out a way to keep GPU draw calls low by batching the sprites, and now need to make the atlases smaller by maybe separation or making the assets smaller
Actually, that's not how it works.
Sprites specifically render the images. The source images do not change resolution when you change your game's resolution. The game still has to load the full image, and then visually make them smaller.
Of course, there are ways to go about this such as making multiple images at different resolutions, but this bloats the file size to be incredibly large and would be a difficult system to set up.
