A flash that erased the water

Void Engine is a ground-up rebuild of Kuro Kishi in 3D, running on the engine from Void Strike. It keeps the original's side-scrolling play, music and sound effects. Today the shell around the game came together, and the first environments got their art.

The shell

The game could draw a stage but could not be started. It now has a full application lifecycle: campaign launch, ship selection, briefings, interludes, results, watch mode, warp, pause, settings and local high scores. The menus use the engine's existing palette, fonts and panel styling in a separate stylesheet, so the engine's own styles are untouched.

The upgrade meter has eight slots. It advances through the usable upgrades, activates the one you pick, and resets.

Two bugs with a lesson in them

A damage flash that replaced the water

Hit feedback worked by swapping a mesh's material for a flash material and swapping it back. That is fine for a flat-shaded hull. It is wrong for anything animated. The water curtains and energy effects carry a shader whose uniforms are what make them move, and the swap threw those away. The fix skips effect and shader meshes in the flash entirely, so their uniforms are never touched.

A checkpoint that skipped the mini-boss

Each stage tracks whether its mini-boss is done. Respawning from the early checkpoint kept that flag set, so if you died during the mini-boss and restarted, the game believed you had already beaten it and walked you past. The flag now resets with the checkpoint.

Environments

Stages 2, 3 and 4 got their backdrops this round. Each is built from looping layers that share generated textures instead of loading images, which keeps the cost of a stage low.

• The underwater stage. Layered wet cave shelves, aqueduct arches at two depths, teal crystals and fungi, a shimmer along the waterline, caustics, drips and rising particles. The boss's arrival shifts the rim lighting and the colour of the water.
• The city stage. Three looping skyline layers sharing procedural window textures, holographic signs, elevated mag-lev traffic, streetlamps, wet-road reflections, rain and aircraft lights. The boss's arrival dims the grid and shifts the haze. The enemies here are all machines: security robots, interceptors and gun platforms, with cube drones, a lens pyramid and a bipedal gun mech. Each is under 1,000 triangles.
• The desert stage. Four looping dune layers, a half-buried wreck with exposed ribs and glowing hull gaps, sandstone arches, rippled sand, animated lava channels, wind-blown sand and embers, and a heat-distorted sun. The boss darkens the sky and pushes the palette toward red. Enemy models run from 556 to 1,468 triangles.

One detail from the water: foam on the waterfall curtains had been placed from the curtain's centre, which put its bottom ten world units under the surface. It now takes its position from the real waterline.

Capitals

The large ships use a shared kit with a damage and turret contract. They are about 11,000 to 15,000 triangles intact and 20,000 to 28,000 with every gun deck stripped. The stripped count includes the hidden internals, counted separately from the armour they replace, so the budget is not flattered by what you cannot see.

Measured

These are local opening-gameplay measurements at the High setting, 1280 by 720, pixel ratio 1. They are not a guarantee for every device or for the heaviest encounters.

The desert stage draws 76 calls. A browser smoke check now loads all eight environments, steps every enemy kind and boss, and runs checkpoint resets and repeated stage loads. It forces boss damage, so it proves the campaign progresses. It says nothing about difficulty, which still needs people playing.