(Click or tap to enlarge)
This upgrade provides something I’ve been wanted to implement for a long time: Enhanced protection against hits to the back and sides of your drone. All damage to these surfaces is now reduced by half, and upgrading your shields will reduce it further.
To avoid confusion, I’ve renamed the original Shields upgrade (which affects all damage, regardless of surface) to Structural Integrity.
The timing couldn’t be better, because the enemy is sending more saucers than ever, in an effort to halt your Woo-Woo harvesting activities!
This also ties in, thematically, with where most of my development time has been going lately: Upgrading the structural integrity of the game’s codebase.
As you may be aware, I’m using Super Space Crystals as a testbed for some experimental software architecture ideas, based on a couple decades of research and experience with multi-threaded realtime software systems (most of them intended for music production or industrial control and automation).
The Rust programming language allows for many architectural options which would have been impractical in the other languages that I’ve worked with (due either to performance constraints or maintenance burdens).
Consequently, I’ve been exploring some unusual designs, which leverage Rust’s strengths, to ensure that the game’s systems are able to inter-operate and build upon one another, while maintaining a degree of systems separation and autonomy which should make adding or modifying gameplay features much faster and easier.
Naturally, some portions of the game were written before these designs had matured. I built them knowing that their design was wrong, but also knowing that sometimes (especially when exploring uncharted territory) the only way to build the right thing is to begin by building the wrong thing; only then can practical usage reveal to best path forward.
The time has now come for me to upgrade those outdated software components, and I’m excited for the accelerated development which this will provide in 2026!
Much thanks to all who’ve followed this project in 2025! Wishing you a joyous and fruitful New Year!
As always, the download link is available from the Ko-Fi post.
(Archived gamedev post from 2026-01-01)
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