Three is a Crowd

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It’s been another week of major changes and enhancements. Highlights would include:

• Collecting orbs will level up your drone, and you can pick an upgrade for each level-up.
• Your choice of upgrades now has 3 selections each time, instead of just 2.
• The Magic Space Woo-Woo orbs have been made larger, so they are easier to see from a distance.
• The shots from your cannons have also been made larger.
• Your cannons now fire constantly, and make a much softer sound.
• The Magic Space Crystal cubes will now bounce away when they collide with you, instead of (sometimes) plastering themselves to your metaphorical windshield. They also play a sound whenever collided with, instead of being silent for gentler collisions.
• The saucers are now larger, and they drop many orbs when destroyed.
• The rate at which the music gets faster between missions has been reduced.
• The energy bar on the left is no longer used for engines and weapons, but only for forward boost.
• Your drone has been made heavier, so it will not be knocked around as severely by collisions.
• Console logging capabilities (for diagnostic purposes) have been improved.
• The bugs which were frequently causing the cannons to misfire on my Windows test computer have been identified and eliminated.

There have also been some enhancements to the sound design.

Firstly, there is a new sound for when you level up, and this sound is played again when the upgrade-selection dialog is displayed or closed (to reinforce the connection between leveling up and picking upgrades).

Secondly, the way that sounds and music interact with the orbs has been fundamentally changed. Ever since shortly after the orbs were introduced into the game, each one had been assigned a musical note which was based on the note which was being “sung” by the shattered crystal which had spawned them.

This approach worked well sometimes, but the newer gameplay features are allowing some orbs to be collected long after the music has moved on to a different chord - sometimes with unpleasantly harsh and discordant effects.

Consequently, in this week’s demo, each orb is given a random “size” when it is created. This size does not (yet) affect it visually, but it affects how much Woo-Woo the orb will deliver if collected by the player.

Whenever an orb is collected, the game will examine the current chord voicing of the game’s music, and play the appropriate musical note corresponding to the orb’s size.

I might not be explaining this very well, but the bottom line is that I think you’ll find collecting orbs feels better in this update.

If you’d like to try it out for yourself, the download link is available from the Ko-Fi post.

(Archived gamedev post from 2026-01-23)

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