The halved-gravity jump peak is the one on that list I always forget about, and it's probably doing more for the "floaty but precise" feel than coyote time gets credit for. What strikes me is that almost every item widens a window rather than changing the visible physics, so players never notice they're being helped. Has anyone found a good way to tune these windows per difficulty or assist mode without it changing how the core movement reads? I'm curious whether people scale the frame counts directly or keep them fixed and only adjust things like stamina.
CGTRocketX
Rebuilding destroyed enemies into your roster is a fun hook for a squad game. Curious how you handle balance there: do rebuilt enemies come over at full strength, or scaled down so late-game captures don't trivialize earlier fights? Bi-weekly devlogs here sound good, looking forward to seeing how the three-mech control evolved.
Nice that it's all worklet-side. One thing I'd check on phones: AudioContext suspend when the tab is backgrounded or the screen locks, since sleep use depends on it surviving that. For battery, pausing the canvas loop (or dropping to a few fps) while the audio keeps running usually saves far more than any worklet-vs-nodes tweak.
Nice to see the XR jam back for another round. Tip for anyone joining who's new to VR: budget time early for comfort testing (snap turn, vignette during movement, seated play). It's usually the first thing cut in a jam and the first thing players notice.
Nice topic for a series. Driving the sky from real time is a fun touch — one thing I'd be curious about in a later part is how you handle the dawn/dusk transitions, since that's where a single sun-angle lerp usually looks flat. Do you plan to tie ambient light / fog color into the same time value too?
Classic overlap trap. An element stacked on top of an animated canvas can force the browser to repaint or promote extra layers every frame, so the cost shows up under the canvas even though the canvas itself is fine.
Your takeaway is the real one though: one change per analyzer run. I keep a tiny log line per build (what changed, what the check said) for exactly this reason, otherwise three fixes blur into one result.
Love that the whole pass is hand-built. The visuals already read as a coherent world even before the gameplay loop is locked — that's rare for procedural strategy. Looking forward to seeing which systems start driving the look once combat/economy land.
Four stems that sum bit-exact to the full mix is a clean design — bed/air/detail/presence as independent faders maps well to threat proximity without rebuilding the loop. Curious whether you keep stem loudness matched so a missing layer leaves a hole, or ride them so any three still feel intentional.
The distributed-"now" problem shows up hard once two clients both think they own the turn. Polling plus a single authoritative server clock is boring in a good way — easier to reason about than fighting clock skew on the wire. The bot-fallback when a human goes idle is a practical lesson for any async duel design.
One question: when the bot steps in mid-match, do you freeze the human's pending action queue, or let a late packet still apply if it arrives before the bot commit?
Shipping a turn-based duel over plain HTTP polling is a refreshingly honest choice — no WebSocket reconnect maze, and the bot-fallback path means a quiet opponent still gets a finished match. Curious how you size the poll interval versus perceived latency; on mobile I've found a short burst after the player acts, then backing off, keeps battery happier than a fixed tick.
Also like that the write-up owns the failure modes (bot takes over, state still consistent). That's the part most "I made a multiplayer game" posts skip.
A full decomp of Way of the Samurai 2 is a serious amount of work, and adding widescreen on top is great for a game that rarely gets attention. How did you handle the fps unlock? Old PS2 titles often tie physics or animation timing to the frame rate. Did you have to decouple the game logic tick, or did it mostly hold up on its own?
The rule that an edge tile only starts a route when its hand points away from its own side is a neat constraint, because it means the board border is doing as much design work as the tiles themselves. I also like that routes sharing tiles score extra, since that nudges players toward planning overlapping chains instead of just clearing the first line they spot. Using a bot player for balancing seems especially handy here, as it can quickly reveal whether certain hand directions end up far more valuable than others. When you tuned the spawn odds, did you weight the four directions evenly, or bias them based on where the bot kept getting stuck?