Hey there!
Since the last update, I went back to a question this thread raised earlier: can you tell what's hostile at a glance?
In earlier builds, enemy rounds were amber, the same family as the hulls, HUD labels, and the player's cannon fire. I'd kept amber because it seemed the most realistic colour for a projectile, but on a crowded screen it made hits hard to trace back to anything you'd seen.
The current build uses one rule: magenta means it can hurt you. Hostile rounds are magenta with an outline, a halo and a fading trail; enemies get a thin magenta rim, and amber stays with the player's side and the tools. Enemy muzzles also glow before they fire (0.15 s for single shots, longer for burst and heavy patterns), and the hitbox reticle has a dark backing stroke so it reads over the pale hull.
The two clips aren't time-aligned: the earlier build is from 21 October, and its sprites and wave tempo have changed since, so this compares how the rounds look, not how the wave plays. I also haven't had a new player go through High Threat with these changes yet.
I'm comfortable with the demo as a representation of the game, so I'm treating it as closed and moving on to the post-demo missions. I'll only publish about it again if there's an issue to resolve. There's also a demo trailer now:
A few things I'd like to know:
- In High Threat, can you separate hostile rounds from hulls and from your own fire without slowing down?
- Is the muzzle glow enough warning, or only enough to notice?
- Does the magenta rim make the hulls noisy when many share the screen? And if you have a colour-vision difference, does the magenta/amber split hold up for you?
Thanks for playing and for the feedback so far.