A public build, and a first look at how it holds up
Void Strike v1.0 is live in the browser: ten worlds, a destructible boss in each, formation dogfights with tractor-beam captures and a dual fighter, challenge stages, and keyboard, mouse, touch and gamepad play. The first full day of testing went into finding out how well it actually holds up.
Every local run leaves a log
Played locally, the game writes one JSON line per event: level loads, clears with score, kills and accuracy, every death and the state it happened in, boss arrivals and kills, every exception with its stack, frame spikes and memory once a minute. Each run ends with a summary of error, warning, soft-lock and crash counts. On the public site nothing is written anywhere; events stay in memory for the session.
An AI pilot that plays the whole campaign, silently, at 20x
The game's own Watch Mode pilot now runs headless through all ten levels. It retries a lost level up to three times, then moves on so every level gets exercised. Each sped-up tick is exactly one 60 fps frame of normal play, which is why the speed-up can be trusted. Runs at 5x and 20x agreed: the same kill counts on levels 1 and 4, and about 1.7 deaths per game minute in both.
| Result | |
|---|---|
| Full campaign | about 3 minutes of real time for 42 minutes of game time |
| Sound plays refused in the run after the HUD fixes | 100,495 |
| Errors, soft locks, crashes in that run | 0, 0, 0 |
The pilot clears levels 1, 2 and 4 but loses to most bosses: 55 of 71 deaths came in boss fights. Nobody sees that pilot fight, but it means the later levels are not yet covered past their bosses, and it points at where difficulty climbs. An endless mode (?mode=watch&endless=1) loops the campaign forever and ignores input, so it can run on a stream or a kiosk.
Two bugs that only long runs could find
A 12-minute headless soak at 20x covers about three and a half hours of play, and it found two real problems.
- A start position before the start. When a commander dove with escorts, the escorts were placed slightly "before" the start of their flight path so they would trail behind. The 3D library cannot handle that and threw an error for a few frames on every escort dive. Players saw only a hitch, but it happened on most levels. Escorts now wait at the start of the path.
- Graphics memory that never came back. Level backgrounds, every defeated boss and every power-up icon were left behind on each level change. In the first soak, live geometry counts went from 361 to 3,230. Levels now free everything they made when they end, and shared models are kept.
The final soak ran four full campaign loops with 0 errors, 0 soft locks and 0 crashes, and memory stayed flat at about 250 geometries and 100 textures.
What a hostile art review caught
A separate reviewer looked at all 33 renders, every world, every boss and the menus, and failed the build with four blockers. Three were small and are fixed:
- The boss health bar covered the world name, so "ASTEROID BELT" read "BFLT". The HUD now shows the level number while the bar carries the boss name.
- The ship could hide under the lives and power panel. Panels now fade to a ghost whenever the ship is underneath.
- In one world the enemies were dark red on a dark red nebula. They are now amber-gold.
The fourth was the big one: all ten bosses were the same model in different colours. Each now has its own silhouette. One rams with a drill prow, one reaches out on three necks, one is a small core held inside a great ring, one is a fortress with corner towers. Anything that sticks out can be shot and collided with, matching what you see, and hit flashes now tint the boss's own plates instead of flashing a flat white that looked like a missing texture in any still. After four review passes the reviewer lists no blockers; what remains is polish on bloom, the pixel-grid shields and planet rims.
The controls screen and controller pop-up also now say "standard gamepads" instead of naming console brands, and the font licence texts ship with the site.