For ten days the game was not drawing what I had written
A shader missing from the build, a perf number that did not exist, an optimisation I removed. Nine days of measuring and what it changes on screen.
Impacts, muzzle flash and trails are finally rendered the way I made them. For ten days, the demo you downloaded drew them with the wrong shader. I did not see it: the game did not crash, it did not lag, it just drew something other than what I had written.
The shader was not in the build
The game looks its shader up by name at draw time. In the editor that always answers. In the build it was not there, so the name stopped answering and the code took a fallback that works and says nothing, except it draws flat instead of adding light. Three families at once: impacts, muzzle flash and trails.
I spent a whole evening looking in the wrong place. I had three explanations and they fell one after the other. So I set the intensity to 100 times normal, the kind of value that can NOT go unnoticed. The image did not move one pixel. I was tuning an effect that was not even loaded.
The number I had been chasing for a month was wrong
I was carrying 27 KB of memory thrown away every frame, the stuff the engine collects afterwards and that causes the micro stutters. I had measured it in the editor.
Measured again on a real build, with the bot playing a full run: 3 KB. Not 27.
What was left I killed anyway. Two HUD counters rewrote their text every frame while nothing moved on screen, now they write 21 frames out of 600. And a good half of what remains comes from my own measuring probe, which does not ship in the game you download.
I removed an optimisation
The impact halo ran at a quarter of the resolution. I had read that somewhere, cheaper on small machines. Nobody asked me for it and no measurement in this project called for it. Meanwhile the halo of a fresh impact bled over forty pixels for a block that is one pixel wide. I put it back to half. Cubes look like cubes again.
The rest, you had it in front of you
The hangar music was clipping. I thought it was one track, it was all three, about ten decibels too loud and already clipping before they even reached the game.
The Codex thumbnails were 4.9 times too dark. You can finally see what the mobs you met look like.
Killing the boss fast paid nothing. It was scored with the thresholds of a normal mob, so you would have had to take it down in 30 seconds to get the bonus, when a boss dies in five. The bonus was always zero and nothing said so.
The extraction portal too: passing over it ended your run. Now you have to STAY on it.
What has not moved
Ships are still test cubes, five of the seven hangar terminals are grey and the boss is still a bag of hit points. Nine days of measuring change nothing there.
What is next
The demo is free and it takes every update. If you launch it again, look at the impacts, that is the only place where these nine days show to the naked eye. And if something looks off, tell me.