The leaderboard is live and I nearly shipped it broken

Since this week everyone plays the same map. 0.30.3 is live and it brings a weekly challenge with a leaderboard.

One map for everyone and a board

Basically everyone plays the same map for seven days and it changes on Monday. You publish your score under a name, there is a new terminal in the hangar showing the top 50 with your position even when you are not in it. You can pull your score back whenever you want from the options.

Two things I would rather tell you straight away. The challenge only opens after your first win against the boss, because as long as progression cuts the start of the map short, two players on the same seed are not playing the same run and the board stops meaning anything. And score checking is light, someone who wants to fake one will manage.

Weight is gone, size decides now

Before, fitting parts on your ship ran on a weight budget, a number you optimised without ever seeing it. Now a big hull IS a big target, its hitbox is wider and fitting smaller parts slims it down. The hangar tells you the profile that comes out, Large, Medium or Thin. What you SEE is what you take.

Along the way each cannon fires from its own mount on the hull instead of everything coming out of the same point. The Plomb became the first ammo finished end to end, with a flame behind the round, a flash at the muzzle and a sound telling you whether the hit went into the hull or slid off it. Fifteen to go.

I nearly shipped you a game where you start with no ammo

The morning of the release I ran the tests and six were red. I had renamed an ammo type the day before and the starter catalogue still pointed at the old name, so a player downloading for the first time started with ten items instead of eleven. The missing one was their ammo. The rename was clean, nothing else broke, no warning anywhere, just six tests counting up to eleven.

Once that was fixed the build refused to compile. A guard I had added three days earlier turns certain warnings into errors and it only fires in the final build, not in the editor and not in the tests. So… it made the exact thing it was meant to protect impossible. Nobody could see it without trying to publish.

What has not changed

Five of the seven hangar terminals are still gray cubes and the boss is still a bag of HP.

What is next

This coming Monday the challenge map rotates for the first time for real. I have never watched it happen, so if you see something odd that day, tell me. And if you play the challenge, publish your score, an empty board makes nobody want to try.