Aliens got my neighbors

A day of changing what the game is about. The working title became LEAVE US ALONE!, with "Aliens Got My Neighbors" kept as the plot hook.

The pivot

The enemies are little green men now, and they are obvious about it. Saucers swoop in and lift neighbors in slow tractor beams while the neighbors flail and shout. The beam can be interrupted. Shoot the craft, the neighbor drops, and you walk them to the community center.

Three rules came out of that:

• Only delivery scores. A neighbor who has joined you and a neighbor who is safe are counted separately, so escorting someone and then losing them pays nothing.
• Escorts are armed with garden tools. Followers fight with a shovel or a hoe and nothing else.
• Saucers come back. An interrupted saucer makes return visits.

Nav-grid routing carries an escort across neighborhoods, and the bot accounts for escorts when it plans. Thirteen browser assertions cover the lifecycle: recruit, tool combat, delivery (and delivering twice only counting once), slow lift, beam visibility, interruption, descent and abduction.

Yard collectibles

Lawn gnomes, TVs and pink flamingos are scattered through each level as three shared sets, so a pair of players fill the same counter.

The design question was how to make an optional pickup readable in a game full of things that want to hurt you. The ornaments that used to be hostile now use the alien rigs, so the silhouette of a collectible means "safe to grab". The TV screens show an original ALIEN ALERT broadcast.

Placement is reachable, the objects persist until collected, and rescuing neighbors stays the main goal. 115 browser assertions pass across all five districts: three of each set, reachable positions, shared counts across alternating players, duplicate protection and an exact 4,650-point total for a full collection. Two bugs the screenshots caught: the TV screen was misaligned, and the HUD count wrapped.

An indoor mission that cannot be farmed

A neighbor's request at the Council, the hub between levels, opens the first indoor mission: a pharmacy, procedurally dressed, with a blocked-route variation, aliens, optional supplies and one insulin pickup in an insulated carrier. Both players return together to deliver, or retreat.

The part worth writing down is the retreat. The reward is guarded by a run flag, and going back out does not advance the night or repeat the hub's healing, so a player cannot walk in and out of the pharmacy to harvest rewards. 25 assertions cover 12 map seeds, retreat without healing or reward, a second-player pickup, shared extraction and the one-time reward.

The bot learned the mission too. Two bots complete the round trip in about 15 simulated seconds.

No black outlines

The decision for the day: do not draw black outlines around the artwork. It overrode the earlier ink-outline direction.

The depth-edge ink shader is gone, along with its render target, its pass and its settings toggle, and an old saved preference cannot switch it back on. Lighting, shadows, bloom and the pixel treatment stayed. The refuge, the green men, the vegetation and the saucer were all checked by eye with it removed.

The same direction drove a pass on the setting. Mint and silver alien suits, saucer hulls with ribs, an animated scan band in the beam shader, electric streetlights, and a community center dressed with sandbags, a first-aid cabinet and a radio aerial. The sandbags are decoration only. There is no crafting or defence system behind them.

A reversible character trial

The alien and the first player's hero were rebuilt as sculpted, animated geometry, each with independently moving limbs, expressive faces and a soft contact shadow.

The originals are untouched. A rollback archive was taken first, and settings choose old or new independently for the next area, so the second player stayed on the old rig for a side-by-side. Eight integration checks and eight animation-state checks per rig pass, and a comparison page shows old and new moving.