Just tried the demo...

[Hiro_Antagonist]

Well, the demo installer size is large because it includes the .NET and Managed DirectX installers. Those two components inflate the installer by about 55MB.

I too have noticed that the installer is slow to respond at first. We're not entirely sure why this is, but it's the behavior of the Nullsoft Installer, which is otherwise a very nice and usable installer.

As to why the game may run slow, the most honest answer is that this is our first game and highly efficient graphics programming isn't our forte (yet). Even though all art in the game is 2d, we use Direct3D, so we have access to alpha-blending, dynamic coloring, fluid scaling/rotation, etc. But with the sheer number of sprites we draw on the screen on every frame, that becomes enough to bog down slower machines or machines with slower 3D cards.

The other developer for the game has been looking into some graphics improvements for the last week or so, and our hope is that we can introduce some performance improvements in a patch. We cannot garauntee this, however.

For what it's worth, we're rebuilding our graphics engine from the ground up for our next game. In fact, we've learned a lot of tricks from the PopCap Framework (which is now open source), and we hope to be able to leverage some of the performance-enhancing tricks ourselves in our next game.

-Hiro_Antagonist