The sea war and redrawn worlds

Two weeks in, the builds were going out as numbered releases. Releases 1.2.1 and 1.3.0 are where it started to look like a war.

The first target was the sea. Enemy boats were flat shapes. I replaced them with torpedo boats, flak barges and destroyers. They have turning gun turrets, muzzle flashes, bow waves and wakes. When you hurt one it burns on deck. When it dies the hull lists and sinks and leaves an oil slick. If you go down over water, your plane now hits the sea with a water column and foam rings instead of leaving a crater.

Then came the worlds. In 1.3.0 I redrew all of them. Coastlines are smooth and have a shore gradient. There are clouds over the ground. I added canyons with layered rock, swamps with reeds and shacks, ruined street grids, oilfields with derricks and flares, and crash furrows in the soil. Trees got real canopies. Trucks, jeeps, staff cars and half-tracks drive on the roads, and freighters and destroyer escorts cross the sea.

A change I care about more than it sounds: your plane and the bosses are now drawn above explosions and smoke. For a while a big blast could swallow the thing you are steering. Enemy planes also got a thin dark outline so they separate from the ground.

The same releases added things that are not pretty but matter:

Leaderboards per plane and per Heat level
Even Footing, a weekly run where every upgrade is switched off
Heat 6 to 10 for players who clear Heat 5
A save backup you can export and import as a code
A main menu that drops to low power after 15 seconds without input

I also removed the fog. It looked moody in screenshots and made enemies hard to read on a small screen. Readability won.

Not everything went smoothly. Late waves with eight weapons stuttered on slower phones, and I spent a lot of this stretch on that. It is not glamorous and nobody writes a review about a frame they did not drop, but it is the difference between a run you finish and a run you quit.

Next I wanted to go further than the look. The weapons and bosses were still talking in the wrong voice.