Devlog — Visual Pass on the Space Shooter
Went back into the shooter today because the core loop felt good but the screen was still kind of flat and empty between waves. Didn’t touch gameplay balance — this was purely a “make it feel alive” pass.
Background depth. The nebula/planet gradients were already there but nothing moved in front of them, so the parallax felt thin. Added a slow-drifting asteroid field behind the stars — reused the same “irregular polygon + a couple of craters” trick as the alien sprites, just tinted down and desaturated so they read as background clutter instead of threats. Took a bit of fiddling to get the tint right; too dark and they disappear into the gradient, too bright and they compete with the actual enemies.
Also added rare comet streaks that cut across the top of the screen every few seconds. Small thing, but it breaks up long stretches where nothing new is happening on screen.
Combat feedback. Explosions were just round particles before — added a handful of streaky “spark” debris mixed in with the dots so hits feel punchier, plus floating +10 score popups and booster name popups so pickups/kills give you something to actually read instead of just a number ticking up in the corner. Bullets now drag a short fading trail, which sounds minor but makes rapid-fire actually look rapid instead of just spawning dots.
Danger telegraph. Aliens now get a pulsing red glow under them once they cross into the bottom third of the screen — a cheap way to warn the player before a collision without adding any new mechanics. Also gave the ship a faint thruster trail so movement has some weight to it.
HUD. Added a thin progress bar under the score bar showing how close you are to the next level, since before the only signal was the banner popping up out of nowhere. Engine flame now shifts gold when rapid-fire is active, just a small color-coded readability thing.
Polish. Threw a soft vignette over the whole scene (precomputed once, not per-frame — learned that lesson the hard way on an earlier project) to pull focus toward the center. Star colors are no longer uniform blue-white; ~1 in 4 get a warm tint so the field doesn’t look like a uniform noise texture.
Didn’t touch: spawn rates, scoring, lives, booster durations. All of it should feel exactly the same to play, just louder and busier to look at. If it turns out the asteroid field is too distracting during heavy waves I’ll dial the tint/count down — for now it’s 7 rocks max on screen which felt like the sweet spot.
Next up, probably: giving the aliens some actual variation in movement patterns instead of straight-down drift, since right now the visual noise is doing more work than the AI is.