hex4

i submitted to the jam!

but before that, I had to attempt to fix a huge problem with the game. it was EXTREMELY unoptimized. who knew running expensive vector math 1500+ times a frame would tank your FPS? not me! i spent a lot of time trying multiple different ways to improve performance, and it kinda worked? at least the game doesn't crash 25% of the time like before lol.

i also polished everything up, added a pause menu, high score saving (which for some reason doesn't work on web), and a little tutorial on the main screen.

oh man, been a while. i added a lot of stuff, like a whole new enemy type, a start screen, music, juice, and 4 kinds of pickups!!! there's also a score system now.

there were a TON of really weird crashes without errors, strange Object Freed errors, and mysterious Tween started with no Tweeners messages. This is probably because of my terrible code, but I did have to spend a lot of time debugging this one.

the game has gameplay now! enemies try to form a loop and short you out, but you can shoot back at them. there's also 2 kinds of enemies and a life counter!

hardest part was probably the enemy code - it took a lot of debugging to get the enemies to connect properly and I had to figure out how to separate the enemies so they don't all clump together.

next up is score, dynamic difficulty, more enemies, upgrades, and JUICE!

• started a godot project
• tried a few movement systems but settled on friction + acceleration with lerp()
• drew some art! a ton of background tiles + the ship itself
• made the ship turn in the direction it's moving (with tweens) which makes movement feel much nicer