It's been a long road, but I'm finally ready to share a preview demo with the Super Space Crystals community on Discord!
The week has been entirely focused on preparing for this release. Here's a quick rundown of what has been done:
Unused music files have been removed, for smaller download sizes.
Unused sound effects are no longer being synthesized, for faster start-up times.
All difficulty settings now have names and descriptions, to make it clearer what to expect from each.
Choosing the "New Game" option from the main menu now brings up a dedicated dialog where you can quickly choose difficulty, and toggle tutorial messages, according to your preferences.
Pressing the W key while the Ctrl is being held (e.g. to go forward while moving down) no longer closes the browser tab in the web build.
The web build also includes a workaround for a longstanding mouse input bug in Firefox.
Gameplay in the demo now consists of a single 10-minute mission, with a clearer progression of events.
Safeguards have been introduced, to prevent rare and unlucky physics interactions from confusingly 1-shotting you from full health.
Additional stats are now tracked during gameplay, and reported upon mission completion or death.
Much progress has been made toward resolving lock-ups when running under Firefox, and this is still ongoing.
At the time of writing, the web version of the demo is playable in the browser at a secret URL in the #announcements channel on the Super Space Crystals Discord. You can also download standalone builds of the demo (which look and perform better) for Linux and Windows there.