(Click or tap to enlarge)
Looks like you’re not the only one getting new stuff. The maintenance crews in The Fraternal Brotherhood of Evil Magic Space Robots have been retrofitting their entire fleet of flying saucers with deadly new ring lasers. The ‘bots have also upgraded their targeting systems, so they’ll be significantly more accurate now - although still nothing you can’t handle, I’m sure.
Speaking of accuracy, your auto-fired shots and your manually-fired shots are now tracked separately, so you can get a more accurate impression of how you well you were aiming. The manually-fired shots are a different color now too, and they have slightly different physics properties than the auto-fired shots.
As a matter of fact, all of your shots are heavier than they were before, so they pack a lot more punch. You’ll be able to push the crystals around a bit even if your first few shots don’t shatter them.
In related news, the stats and upgrades which previously increased the size of your projectiles will now increase their weight (and their knockback) instead. This mitigates the “flashbang” effect that was happening when large numbers of huge glowing projectiles were being rapidly fired against the backdrop of space.
The sky, it seems, is also being “upgraded” (so-to-speak). You’ll notice things being a bit more colorful now, with more distinct transitions between different parts of a mission.
The mission system itself has become more sophisticated, and can now provide a much more dynamic number of enemies, bringing more ebb and flow to the gameplay.
One thing which was unexpectedly disrupting the flow of gameplay was the new upgrade system which I introduced last week. The main problem was that the upgrade selection screen showed up too quickly to register that anything was happening, and this often resulted in upgrades being selected by accident. As a solution to this, and an in-universe explanation for why you are invulnerable while choosing your upgrade, there is now a bubble-shield which appears around you before you are able to make your selection. This slight delay seems to be enough to shift mental gears, without actively getting in the way.
On the more technical side, I’ve explored and enabled some additional optimizations in the 3rd-party physics engine that I’m using, and discovered that a soon-to-be-released new version of this physics engine is expected to bring even more improvements to performance.
I’m very close to releasing the web demo, and I’ll be giving early access to a handful of close friends and family over the next day or two, followed by a broader testing preview on the Super Space Crystals Discord server sometime next week. I expect the web demo to publicly launch on Itch.io in about 2 weeks.
(Archived gamedev post from 2026-08-07)
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