At last, an update to the incredible AAA Ludum Dare experience everyone has been talking about, with refined visuals and gameplay.

Play the update online here and the original entry here

You can also view the source on Github

Please vote and share your thoughts on my page

The controls have been modified. The new controls are:

Forward / Rear thrust - W, Up Arrow / S, Down Arrow

Rotational thrusters - A, Left Arrow / D, Right Arrow

Lateral thrusters - Q, Left Bracket / E, Right Bracket

Boost - Left shift

Fire - Space

Pause - Escape

Resume - Enter

Here's what's changed:

• Added starfield
• Refined controls and added boost mechanism
• Enemies now explode on impact
• Refactored most of the code
• Adjusted enemy and player parameters
• Reworked intro
• Reworked HUD
• Adjusted scoring algorithm

Here's what hasn't changed:

• No sound

Initially, I wanted to bring sound to this update. However, upon researching the highly touted Web Audio API, I fell into a rabbit hole that I can't yet see the end of.

It seems that the Web Audio API was forced out the gate early by Chrome, and the spec is in shambles. As of right now the API is very non-performant for timing-critical events like those you would find in video games, and the solution is stuck in specification hell. No one has implemented it yet. As such, I am experiencing a lag in excess of 500ms.

I may have to abandon the Web Audio API for now and use some third-party sound library as I would like to stick to real-time oscillators and not samples in order to fit the theme of the game and keep the file size under 64kb compressed.