The forms link for feedback is here
1/20/25 ver. 0.3.0

LOGOS PRIMUS
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As usual for me, the first build was a mess, lol. I spent most of my earlier optimizations on the CPU end and ignored the GPU side because I assumed the project was rather low on the graphics side, not taking into account a lot of the 3D rendering being done in the backend. This is what really caused a lot of the framerate issues, as the rendering pipeline was getting clogged up. This update deals with a bunch of that stuff at the basic level, and as the project progresses I'll be doing a lot more fine tweaking. My weaker pcs aren't compatible with Vulkan, and the other computers I have access to for testing all could handle the high render costs without issue, so I wasn't aware of consistently low FPS on the GPU rendering side, only CPU stutter from loading in assets. I've spent most of my programming experience working with 2D, and I basically have no familiarity with 3D rendering, so I made a lot of really basic errors because I tend to work via negativa by throwing everything together and removing excess as I refine the project. Not to make excuses, but in the last few months, I spent most of the development time of the initial release working 12 hour days and then coming home to program for 4 hours or so, so the result can only be limited by my time placed up against a wall I made for myself, one that I began to realize was more unrealistic than I first anticipated; yet, opening this up to the public will speed it up the development process greatly, since I can take note of where issues arise and deal with them accordingly for the next build, instead of trying to identify issues that don't appear for me. For what it's worth, in working on this build, I had some old patterns cause fps drops, so I was better able to prevent any sort of overload, and I can start to pinpoint where my assest spawning can cause issue. It still might have FPS issues on different hardware, but, look Elden Ring was dropping FPS on high end PC builds, so take what you can get from a solo guy working during his free time.

That being said, the way I compose the music is heavily syncronized with all of the gameplay, in backgrounds, formations, and patterns, so the FPS drop for me is a major issue, and I am trying to deal with it, because the final result should be what I intend -- as an artist, not as a designer or developer -- and I take that task very seriously. This is why working on proprietary, highly standardized, hardware is preferrable over PC or multi-platform.

I apologize if it felt like a long time between this and the initial release, but I have to test 3 stages, with all of the complex orb interactions, compounded by all of the boss interactions. Every change at a micro level matters at the macro level, and I'm not interested in releasing anything haphazardly, as much as I seem like someone who would do that with the first.

This is something to take into account if you're interested in playing these builds: as a "designer"/"developer"/guy who can sort of write some lines of "code," I prefer to think out loud; to throw spaghetti at the wall, so to speak; only after that I really whittle it down to its purer form. It's that old Saint Thomas Aquinas approach, where you pace around the monastery trying to figure out the answer, until you have that moment where you figure out the solution and rush off to write it down, and later on you edit the text to better elucidate it. This is really just my personality, and it's not really effective for a fiscal product (It should be obvious why I can't hold an office job), but this game is free right now so you're ensnared by my working process, and in extension, my own creative philosophy.

VISUALS -- all of the useless graphic design I spend too much time on --
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- removed the rocket from the title. I've been mixed on it since the beginning. I sort of prefer it without it, since it felt like visual clutter, and I rendered all the title logos without it anyway.
- added more visuals to how to play

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bugs
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Stage 1 has a shader being spawned in with some enemy. This doesn't happen in the stage itself, so I need to check for where it comes from.

GAMEPLAY -- all of the mechanical tweaks I've made that will eventually break the game --
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orb
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- tap homing shot now only targets popcorn, and will act normally if none are on screen. The effect and way it moves will be changed at some point, but I wanted the change the base function.
- prevent firing for both player and enemy when orbs overlap. The overlap itself is basic, but there should be some gameplay gimmick for it. In earlier builds freely farming spawning bullets and getting free laser was always unintended, because if the orbs are "LORE ACCURATE," then there should be instability when they interact. Orb sealing only applies to orbs of a similar   size, with larger orbs, like the boss ones, it only seals off sections of patterns, but this has only been implemented limitedly in the stage 2 boss.
- hold laser now interacts with the orb, it's basic, with some FX changing. For gameplay, it does increase the orb intensity, without firing back a laser (ideally, but I might have missed some code somewhere). The bullet and laser are different functions, and it can't cause the enemy lasers to be fired like using bullets, and there is a cooldown after using it. It might end up having more of a purpose, but for now it's simply an interaction that adds more nuance to decisions being made.

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rank
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- some more pattern flucations with rank
- modifications to support rank drain rate, might be changed based on difficulty in a later build

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waves
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- final wave of stage 1 was lagging, changed it out. I sort of like this version a bit more.
- boss 1 popcorn wave is no longer random, less spawns to prevent fps drop. Also allows more control for rank fluctuation in a future build. I was planning on changing it at some point, so this is the first step of many. This version only has one pattern (hand crafted), but in later builds I'll probably test some different versions.

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bugs
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- htp/practice bug where playing HTP and then going to practice sends you to HTP
- if you kill a laser enemy early, the laser is still active, despite being invisible. it shouldn't be active but I'll need to recheck the code.
- support ship gave invul frames after ending.
- boss 3 has a bullet spawn issue in part 3 that limits what I can really do, need to work on it. You won't notice it because I've written a workaround, but this issue means I can't really design a more dynamic cycle like the stage 1 and 2 bosses, so either I expand section 1, or it needs to be fixed. Unsure where I want to go.
- might be able to kill bosses very fast, unsure, only saw it while doing a test run -- not going to say why it happens, I'd rather see it happen organically, but I think I fixed it; though, who knows.
- end of stage score tally ends early, need to recode

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to-do
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- orb overlap should have an additional effect, but it's not quite determined. I sort of want you firing into the orb have some effect, and the overlapping maybe should feed into some unstable reaction, hard to say because I don't want to design anything crazy broken, because it's harder to fix a broken idea than design a balanced one.
- laser interactions ideally should act similar to Metal BLACK, Border Down, and G Darius, where there's some sort of effect when they clash, but I haven't really figured out the programming side of it; or really, how I want to implement it. Also, how much more it complicates everything needs to be balanced. It won't be a strong cancel where it creates a large area of effect, as in those games, I want it to take advantage of the angle of incidence, but that's a lot of work and I failed trig in high school. :p
- bits will at some point have similar interactions to main orb, bit since they're smaller
- overall tweak most orb interactions.
- fine tune how to play boss (prevent it from moving on death, etc.)

OPTIMIZATION -- someday someone else might actually be able to play the game --
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- THE BIG ONE -- textures were much larger than they need to be for the actual size of the model in practice. Soaks up GPU memory. killed like 200-300mb of VRAM use but we can probably kill more in the future. The current textures are merely placeholders, and I'll be painting my own in the future, so this will definitely become more compact in later builds.
- shifting certain calculations from every frame to specific states for when they're active. I let a lot of my experience with -2 and -3 in MUGEN states lead me astray (though really in mugen you shouldn't spam negative states, but the render and computer cost is a lot lower), but this should help with some FPS stutter.
- Lighting optimizations, which definitely cost a lot of performance in the last build.
- Rendering optimizations. The style is an on the fly pre-render, where I take 3D models and make them 2D for FX purposes; however, I hadn't yet really cracked into changing the rendering settings, so all of the objects were being rendered at the maximum quality, which is useless when they're then shrunk down to something like .15 of their true size when passed to 2D. This should really cut down a lot of memory usage, and it has killed some of the lag for me on spawning. Larger sprites will be rendered at higher values, according to the enemy and use, and that'll be a big part of the tweaks in the future.
- modifying resources used in stage 1 (i.e. spawning the orbs from the water).
- optimized bullet deletion when offscreen
- Performance mode - turns off glow and other extra effects. As issues appear, I'll add things to this to create versions of the game that can work on weaker hardware. This can only be done on the main menu, because it gets applied on load. Later I'll make it so you can change them indepenently, but that requires going back and expanding the options menu.

thanks for windows OS quirks, playing windowed (naturally) causes stutter. There is no stutter in fullscreen. Resource use seems lower in fullscreen as well. thanks bill gates.

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to-do
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- mesh optimizations
- texture optimizations
- Particle FX optimizations, which probably cause slowdown.
- enemy and bullet spawning optimizations.

LOGOS ULTIMUS
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still a lot to fix, but I aim to keep the game below 720MB, so updates will never be large (we already dropped a few MB just editing textures) -- most of my of my life has been lived with 156k download speed, and I aim to maintain something easily downloaded, not just to maintain the original surface NAOMI concept. I know I called this a "demo," but this is an early build more akin to a beta, I just prefer the terminology because most of the mechanics were already determined and it felt like a good vertical slice overall. I like releasing my builds publicly for the sake of transparency, partially because I've always had a strong hobbyist attitude, and -- having been a professional, gigging musician -- I have thick skin, so I'm not afraid of negative public reception for a build or two, especially when negative reception can lead to the next build being better. On that note, I'm not doing any community outreach or making a discord server (I already don't care for private tests in the first place, and I have full time job already, so I don't want to deal with organizing a private group). A new build with updates will come out probably every few months, and a video will be uploaded that covers it. I apologize if you bought into this expecting something polished, but it also isn't a finished game, and I don't like how people market unfinished products, with all that steam page wishlist shit or anything related to transactions in general because I know the game isn't close to being done, and if it isn't up to my own standards, why would I play to the expectations of people who aren't, willingly or not, self-aware about what goes into making something? itch gives me a bit more eyes than me posting links to builds on a hosting platform, or hosting on a private site, like we used to do back in the 2000s, but otherwise I hate the hype cycle shit. I'd rather a few people play a more polished product than 1000 people play a shit one, but this is the world we live in, and for some reason I have to compete with people who think a game jam project is worth releasing, while I'm biting my nails trying to to put out three stages and knowing I can't compete, to some degree. The indie game people sell false truths, there's no glory in making anything other than in making it to make it, and, likewise, I don't like to deal with the pressure of fickle consumers, those people who view hours of work as another 5 dollars spent poorly -- the only person I want to please is myself, and I already have high standards for myself, so I don't need those of others. This is just how I like to work, and you can either enjoy the process or ignore it. All of my work is free in the end, so complaining gets you jack squat. See the forms link to post feedback, there will be a new one for each build, so I can address problems immediately for the next release.

I'll probably dump out a linux build at a later point. I'm keen on switching to linux at some point personally, since I've been unhappy with NU-Windows and the perpetual "update" hell for a long time, but I currently don't have any hardware with an OS installed to do any testing.