So, I've added a fun visual effect. You'll probably never guess from the cheesy title of this devlog. Go on, guess.

The effect itself is fairly simple. It treats the water surface as a tapestry of springs, where each spring is linked to 8 samples around it. They're spaced in a circle but aren't directly linked between neighboring pixels - it turns out to look better this way!

I was up until about 6 AM last night trying to get it to work, mostly because of texture precision issues before I finally went to bed. After about four hours of attempted sleep I got up and, feeling at least somewhat more rested, I actually checked a thing I should have checked to begin with - turns out that LÖVE does, in fact, support floating-point textures, specifically for the purpose of shaders with feedback effects. That would have saved me about 3 hours of tired frustration last night. Oh well!

Anyway, the rendering of the water shows both the shapes of the ripples, and the reflections of the play arena above it. The reflections have a very slight (probably unnoticeably so) Fresnel effect.

I've also tweaked some of the gameplay stuff, in particular having multiple sorts of Randomizer spawns. There are two - the "miniboss" kind (that we saw before, which moves quickly, has a crapton of hit points, and drops a bullet on every beat), and a "herd" kind where there's three that spawn staggered by 2 beats, and each one drops a bullet every three beats. It gives a nice little syncopation effect, if you're paying attention to it. You probably aren't, though, because this game is developing as basically a sensory-overload bullet hell Pong thing. Which was sort of the idea in the first place.

I still want to come up with a few more brick spawn patterns (I guess I should, like, play Arkanoid or something). There's a new one I've added which adds zig-zags of bricks with larger heavy bricks between the zigs (or are they zags?) and it's nice but I feel like there should be more variety.

But before I do that I have a LOT of code cleanup to do in the game event sequencing - right now it's a total mess and I need to (ahem) refactor the functionality out into functions so that I can have a more timeline-like view of things. That won't take too long, I hope, and will make it easier for me to keep track of what happens when. Whee.