A cargo hold full of new features are coming!
This update is available to closed beta users and will be rolled out to the public demo next week on 8/14/25. The update is focused on adding a host of new game mechanics, and brings exciting updates to cover in detail. This includes updates to Grabbing, a new Missile type, Bullet Sealing and Grazing, as well as a complete overhaul of scoring mechanics and menu systems.
Where is Cosmic Destroyer Headed?
I am very excited to be charging towards 2DCON on August 22nd to 24th in Minnesota, where Cosmic Destroyer will be on demo at our booth on the Indie Island.
Here is a quick overview of the current development timeline for the next few weeks, which will bring more major updates every Thursday up to August 21st! There are even more exciting features planned, including an update to the Steam demo for Cosmic Destroyer on 8/14/2025 which will include a teaser of the new Shipyard 7 Stage – a nearby military installation constructing powerful ships for the defense of civilian colonies in the belt. It’s also the incursion point for the enemy force from the unknown.
The plan going forward is to have a steady stream of updates with releases and roadmap updates every two weeks. Stay tuned for more updates, news, features. The ultimate goal is to release the full version of the game before the end of 2025!
Grabbing and Tossing Enemies
Small enemies such as Mining Drones, Scout Pods and Interceptors can now be grabbed just like special weapons by pressing the action button.
A held enemy will provide special abilities based on the enemy type. These abilities range from firing at other enemies like a turret, altering your ship’s Primary or Secondary Weapons, or providing completely new abilities. You can also hold the action button after grabbing an enemy to charge up a throw maneuver which is being considered for other charge-up abilities as well! If that wasn’t enough, the enemy can be rammed into other enemies and used to protect your ship from projectiles while held.
New Secondary Weapon: Lock On Missiles
This new secondary weapon locks-on to enemies within an area in front of the player’s ship while the fire button is held down. During that time, a lock-on reticle will be shown over targeted enemies. Upon release of the fire button, missiles are fired at each of the targets. These missiles trade stopping power for versatility, and are particularly well suited to hitting targets which are moving or positioned vertically in relation to the player. The maximum number of targets increases with missile power level and missile power-ups now cycle between the missile types which are available in the current game.
In Arcade Mode these power-ups will cycle as follows:
“M” Power-Up – Adds a missile of the current equipped type. If no missile was previously equipped, the default missile type for the ship will be used (generally Dumbfire Missiles).
“D” Power-Up – Switches to Dumbfire Missiles. If Dumbfire Missiles are already equipped the power level is increased, adding an additional missile. If another missile type is currently equipped, the missile power is reset to 1
“L” Power-Up – Switches to Lock-On Missiles. If Lock-On Missiles are already equipped the power level is increased, adding additional missile(s). If another missile type is currently equipped, the missile power is reset to 1
Note: some enemies being introduced soon will also fire Lock-On missiles which can be shot and destroyed. Missiles cannot be absorbed or grazed like normal bullets as they detonate when near a target and apply damage in an area.
Option Drone Power-Up Behavior
Option Drones currently provide a small score boost when they absorb an enemy projectile. Additionally, option drones which have absorbed a projectile become powered up for a limited duration, which increases based on the player’s Hit Multiplier. The projectiles fired from an empowered drone have a larger hit detection box and graphic, and do bonus damage. Option drones which collide with enemies and boss cores inflict damage, and this damage is also increased while powered-up.
Bullet Sealing
Getting up close and firing point-blank at an enemy is a risk which should be rewarded, not punished. While this was always planned, we’ve heard your feedback and have implemented this mechanic. Point-blanking bosses and spinning turrets is no longer certain death. Enemy firing logic will not create bullets if the player is right on top of them. This does not apply to charged lasers and other telegraphed special attacks such as jetstreams, flames, and missiles. The strategy of point-blanking works great with the damage buffs to option drone collisions and skilled players can use this dangerous strategy to maximize damage and take down enemies quickly.
Bullet Grazing
Bullet grazing mechanics allow a player to narrowly dodge a projectile to get an added bonus effect. This is generally reflecting the projectile back at a nearby enemy, which does heavy damage. Spread shots can be a powerful countermeasure to a screen filled with enemies – and this risk-reward pays off! In the future, we’d like to introduce more player choice to this mechanic, to allow players to chose the effect when grazing. These concepts range from trading reflected bullets for additional scoring, temporary power-ups, and temporary shields just to name a few.
A bit of a tease of the first area of the new stage "Shipyard 7" and some of the ships. This stage will be playable in the demo update coming next week on 8/14/25.
New Scoring Mechanics
In addition to the score pickups found in ground objects and when destroying complete enemy waves, additional score pickups can now be earned based on overall enemy destruction. Every enemy killed by a player is tracked, when enough enemies have been killed, a special score pickup is created which automatically is pulled into the player. The number of enemies required to spawn this score pickup is determined by the player’s current hit multiplier. The higher the multiplier, the fewer the number of enemies required to create a score pickup. Since the multiplier also applies to these pickups, this further incentivizes the player to make every effort to keep their hit multiplier high – because racking up a high score not only contributes to the leaderboard score but also results in additional lives at 50,000, 200,000 and 1,000,000 points.
There are a few more changes to mention related to scoring:
Each player’s Hit Multiplier no longer drains while transitions are occurring – as this was just not fair. It’s intended to be possible to complete all stages without ever losing your score multiplier.
Hit multipliers over 4X periodically create additional power-ups when enemies are defeated. Picking up a power-up which is already maxed-out provides a 100 point bonus (multiplied by hit multiplier, this is a substantial bonus).
Scoring bonuses are applied upon completion of the stage based on performance, which is outlined in “New Score Summary Screen”.
New Score Summary Screen
At the end of a stage, each player is now shown a progress report for the completed stage. This includes a roll-up of the following metrics, as well as bonus points awarded for performance in each area:
Ships Lost – A player which manages to complete a stage without losing a single ship is awarded a hefty reward of 10,000 points.
Bullets Canceled – Bullets cancelled either by grazing or special abilities such as power bombs are tracked here. 10 Points are awarded for each cancel
Enemies Defeated – Each enemy gives points when it is destroyed, but an additional bonus is given when reaching the end of the stage for all enemies. This bonus is 10 points per enemy. Additionally, if a high percentage of enemies are destroyed the player is awarded additional large bonuses:
100% Destruction – 100,000 points!
98% Destruction – 25,000 points
95% Destruction – 10,000 points
Enemies Defeated Visual Summary – All enemies encountered in the stage are shown as visual representation at the bottom of the scoring screen, each defeated enemy is shown as a darker version when defeated.
Objects like asteroids are grouped into one entry and may be removed from the “Enemies” classification in the future – as the only realistic way to destroy them all currently is by using bombs.
Finally, all totals for the stage are rolled-up and applied to the player’s total score for the current game session.
Reminder: Using a continue currently resets the player’s current score to zero when it is used. This is for the purpose of embracing the 1CC (One Credit Clear) goal of many skilled SHMUP players. In the future the plan is to replace this logic with flags for 1CC completions, which will have their own separate Leaderboard. We want to track each stage’s scoring and the over-all game session scoring non-destructively so players can see their score history in the future.
Menu Overhaul and UI Improvements
The entire menu system logic, as well as the visual style of menus has been overhauled to provide a better and more consistent experience. This also enables development of more dynamic menu layouts and flows in the future, and ability to configure and customize menu style in the future.
Projectile Pattern and Enemy Spawn Determinism
Previously, when bullet patterns and enemies were spawned on the screen, their behavior could be inconsistent on different devices or depending on system performance. This was because the system was starting the logic for these entities based on the position of the object relative to the current scroll position of the stage, which could happen on frames which were not within a fixed, predictable timestep (which is used for behaviors, and physics calculations such as collisions). By ensuring that all projectile patterns and enemy initializations occur at a determined time, a much more consistent player experience can be ensured.
Bug Fixes
Collision Rework – the methods used for detection of collisions of ships and projectiles has been overhauled to support new grazing features and fix performance and false-positive collision bugs.
Fixed an error where the options menu remained active while closed.
Fixed an issue with game scroll position being inconsistent
Fixed an issue where stages would display slightly differently for users on Steam Deck or Linux compared to Windows. Arc Parameterization for splines has been overhauled to be more consistent when calculating rotation regardless of platform.
Platform Updates
Major performance improvements to Ship Manager and Projectile Managers, allowing for a 30-35% boost to maximum frame rate in busy scenes.
Future support for Alternate Game Modes has been added. The entire game’s high-level logic is now hot-pluggable, with systems such as ship loadout behaviors, upgrade paths, stage layout and composition logic all being configurable. This avoids any impact to code needed for other game modes which will be added in the future.