Update: BlastWave, Tool Unlocks & Performance

Another big patch just dropped. Here's what's new:

💥 BlastWave Effect

Explosions now trigger a full-screen radial shockwave distortion using a dedicated GPU shader. When something big hits — you'll [i]feel[/i] it. The effect is applied on large impacts throughout levels and integrates with the AntQueen boss fight for an extra punch on heavy damage events.

🔓 Tool Unlock Screen

Unlocking a new tool is now a proper moment. A brand new modal overlay slides in with shine, sparkles, and a satisfying padlock-pop animation when you earn access to a new weapon. No more quietly acquiring tools — they deserve a reveal.

🐜 Ant Health Bars

Ants now show a health bar when damaged. You can finally see how much punishment they're taking before they go down — useful for calibrating your chaos.

Performance Improvements

Several heavy systems have been rewritten with NumPy array operations:

• Pheromone grid — chemical trail updates are now batch-processed

• Particle system — thousands of particles update in vectorized ops

• Padded sprite rendering — GPU upload overhead reduced

Shader pipeline also optimized — fewer redundant uniform uploads per frame.

UI Polish

• Menu buttons now have satisfying juice on hover/press

• Campaign level selection menu received a full juice pass

• Unlock overlay tweaks and transition polish

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fixed egg and tomato tools occasionally spawning as duplicates

• Fixed level unlocking not registering correctly after completion

• Fixed first-frame sprite not updating on state entry

• Fixed a float-to-int conversion error causing crashes on certain hits

• Added event recursion guard — prevents rare infinite callback loops

🔧 Under the Hood

• CallbackList.fire() now correctly handles once() listeners removed mid-iteration

• Gameplay state waits for proper initialization before first tick

Thanks for playing — more coming soon.