Growing vs. Glowing

(Click or tap to enlarge)

This week brings some visual upgrades to the game. When I initially added the pulsing sound of the “singing” crystals, I wanted a way to visually indicate that the sound you were hearing was connected to the cubes you were seeing. Since, at the time, I lacked a way to modify the color of the cubes while the game was running, I opted to have them swell in size with each musical pulse.

The problem with this approach was that, on a 2-dimensional screen, it made the cubes look a bit like they were moving toward and away from the player, rather than actually changing size.

With this week’s demo, I’ve disabled the pulsing of size, and replaced it with a pulsing of color. I’ve also enabled an HDR “bloom” effect, adding a soft glow to the lights in the scene - including the crystals.

While I was at it, I also tweaked the collision detection for the cubes, so it should more closely match the visuals.

Better Flying Saucers

I discovered, this week, that some of the saucers in later waves were accidentally invisible. I’ve confiscated the cloaking devices that the sneaky little robots were using, so this shouldn’t happen anymore. (This was definitely an issue with the flying saucer pilot droids using unauthorized cloaking technology, and not an issue caused by the “destroyed” saucers being faded into transparancy and placed back into the pool without being made opaque again.)

I also found that, after several minutes of evading the saucers, many of them would begin clumping together into a single mass of flying saucerage, and this looked a bit silly. There’s plenty of room for silly in this game, of course, but I didn’t think this particular instance of silly was especially interesting (gameplay-wise), so I decided to give each saucer a healthy sense of personal space.

One of the biggest performance bottlenecks turned out to be the nearly-inaudible hissing sounds which I’d attached to each shot which the saucers fire. I have more efficient ways of attaching sounds to moving 3D objects, but I decided that it was simpler to remove the sounds altogether, and this dramatically increased performance when large numbers of saucers are present.

Ya lose some, ya win some….

For the time being, I’ve disabled two features that weren’t serving much purpose in the current version of the game. Namely, the gravity bubble gun (which will almost definitely make a reappearance at some point), and the inertial brakes (which were a holdover from early prototypes where the ship would retain its momentum indefinitely, in the tradition of the original Asteroids game).

To replace them, I’ve added a handy new capability to your cannons: burst firing!

When you have dual or quad firing mode selected (via the right mouse button or the X key), there will be a slight delay between each shot. In many cases, one shot will break a crystal, and the next one will immediately break one of the fragments.

Obviously, this consumes a correspondingly larger amount of energy, but I’ve found that the increased yield of released energy orbs from the shattered crystals tends to more than make up for it.

Download link is available from the Ko-Fi post.

(Archived gamedev post from 2025-10-24)

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