Bosses that read as bosses, and a leak in the skeletons

The day began with a note that the bosses looked alike. It ended with a different lineup than the one planned in the morning, a leak found by pattern, and a correction to the previous day's sound fix.

A boss has to read in a still frame

Two new monsters were built as district finales in the morning: a squid-headed alien on two thick legs, and a raptor-beetle with four wings and a stinger tail. Both had real mechanics. The squid's hide takes 45 percent damage, but for a few seconds after every attack it is open and takes 190 percent. The raptor-beetle wears its armor on the front: shots from the front do 38 percent, from behind 85 percent, and 200 percent from behind while it is open. The Expert AI learned to circle round to its back on its own.

In the gallery, though, they looked like alien threats, not bosses. By evening both had become elite enemies at 40 percent of their old size, and the finales were rebuilt around bigger, stranger shapes. Size, a throne or a mass, and a silhouette nothing else in the game shares did more than any number of attacks.

The old walkers had the same problem: every one was a saucer-headed tripod with a different ornament. Two were redesigned from the ground up so they no longer share a shape. The Hollowmere walker, a combine harvester on stilts, is now Tubular Todd, with sawblades spinning round each ankle. Every six seconds he fires a missile at each player. It lands where that player was standing when it launched, so you dodge it by moving, and it explodes in stages over about five feet. The Sunny Acres walker, a ride-on mower, is now Commander Bro.

Lightning and a cartoon X-ray

A new hovering enemy, the Mindcraft, marks a ring and calls a jagged lightning bolt down on it. A hit makes the player convulse, arms up and legs stiff, and for a split second they become a strobing X-ray skeleton, in the spirit of the cartoon gag. With Reduce Flashes on, it is one steady flash instead.

Aliens die on the spot

Aliens used to tip onto their side when they died, so their feet swept round while the body twirled and slid backwards. The cause was two animations stacking: the death spin, and each model's own fall-over pose. The fall-over pose is now off for aliens that spin, and the knock-back slide is gone.

An alien now stays standing, spins like a top and explodes where it was hit. Sampled frame by frame, one death turned 0, 33, 96, 157, 214 degrees and so on up to 718. It never tilted, never lifted off the ground and never moved, and stayed full size for 0.72 s before the explosion replaced it.

A leak found by its pattern

The debugger had warned that graphics memory climbed on every stage load. Every neighbor, enemy and boss carries a skeleton, and each skeleton's small bone texture was never freed. The Council alone holds 14 of them, which is exactly the 14 extra textures it added on each visit. That was the clue: the counters looked fine at one scale and obvious as a pattern across stage loads.

Textures are freed now. In an AI run, resident textures stayed flat at 43 across five stage loads, where before they had climbed from 77 to 227 over a similar run.

Two of the debugger's own warnings were wrong. The alarm that the simulation cost 13.4 ms a frame was a mismeasurement: it included the AI player's own thinking. It now reports the two apart. A debugger earns its keep only when its numbers are honest.

The 30 fps limiter had a bug too. It dropped the remainder every frame, so a 75 or 100 Hz monitor ran at 25 fps, and a 144 Hz one at 28.8. It carries the remainder now. None of the speed work was measured at normal speed, because the AI test ran at 4x, where frame statistics are not recorded, so it counts as reasoned, not measured.

The grass was half black

While taking screenshots we noticed about half of every grass blade was solid black, so the lantern's circle looked like black thorns on green. Flat blades were being lit by their own sideways-facing surfaces, which are dark at night. They are now lit mostly from above, a one-line change to the shader, and the lawn reads dense and green.

The sound fix, corrected

A sound rebuild earlier in the day replaced the gun and blast clips with real recordings, resampled with a band-limited filter and levelled by loudness instead of by peak, and dropped the synthesized thump under each shot. After the first playtest of it, the correction was that the real recordings were not quieter than the old arcade guns. What was missing was what used to sit around them: the synthesized thump, a heavy lift of the body of each sound, and full volume.

Three changes followed. The thump is back under gunfire, shots are driven through a soft clipper as they are built so the body comes up while the crack stays, and machine-gun shots ring out longer and play louder. Explosions went back to a shorter, punchier stock sound pack, because the real recordings, with their long debris tails, piled up into chaos when several blasts went off at once.

Measured over the loudest 100 ms of each clip at the same peak:

Gunfire is roughly 6 to 7 dB hotter than in the previous build. The title menu also gained a Sound Editor that lists every sound and what makes it play, so anything still wrong can be turned down, muted or flagged and the game follows at once.

A cleaner picture

The dark vignette is gone, including the extra darkening as Dread rose and the heartbeat pulse in the corners. The red hurt edges are gone too: a hit still blinks the player and shakes the camera, and the sound and HUD show it. The sunrise glow now lifts the whole screen evenly.

Where this stands

About ten minutes of the Expert AI played the fixed build across four runs, with 0 errors and 0 page errors. The AI has a full arsenal and knows where everyone is, so that shows the fights work from start to finish, not that they are balanced for people. The new sounds are measured, not listened to, and nobody has yet played the new bosses, so their balance is unknown.