Posted February 09, 2026 by qwack!
Hello everyone!
I’ve started updating the version number instead of just the buildNumber (which now gets generated by my build system), so this is version 0.3.0!
A lot of work has gone into this update, although not so much that can easily be shown through flashy animated GIFs ^^
The main focus this round has been on making the early experience as smooth as possible.
To do so, I’ve revised several existing parts, starting with the achievements.
I remove all needlessly trivial achievements that brought nothing and clobbered the early game.
Secret achievements are now shown blurred out in the achievements screen.
Achievements are displayed in a specific order, indicating a progression and “families” of achievements, hinting at what to do next.
I made less achievements secret on startup (in particular the achievements unlocking game modes) and added special descriptions to locked achievements to better indicate what to do.
The secret status of achievements is now saved to disk so that external achievements viewers show the same data as the game.
The second existing part that needed revising was the hints system.
In the same fashion as for achievements, hints are now displayed in a specific order to the player to ensure that the most basic gameplay information is communicated as early as possible.
Hints triggered by specific conditions (eg, hints about powerups) are shown as early as possible after meeting the condition.
Hints specific to game modes have been added and hints are arranged by game mode in the hints screen.
Changes have been made to the gameplay to make the game more welcoming and less cryptic.
The number of planes has been reduced, as well as the number of missiles they fire, which now starts low then increases the further the player goes.
Damage when hitting enemies is now more consistent, as well as reduced. To make it clearer when the player is taking damage, a sound effect and animation have been added.
When getting a powerup, its level is displayed in the banner that scrolls in the background.
When resuming the game from pause or device lock, if the crank is docked then the resuming countdown is paused until the player undocks the crank.
To round up everything I added game over reactions.
Game over reactions show a little message commenting on the run that just happened. It tells encouraging messages and tries to detect common early mistakes to give advice.
In addition, I’ve made some more optimizations, and various fixes.
I optimized how certain sounds are played to be lighter on the CPU, which could cause some framerate drops.
To maintain a high framerate even in the most demanding conditions, some graphical elements (speedlines, particles, stars, etc.) are skipped for a few frames if the game detects a drop in framerate.
This is completely imperceptible yet it prevents the game from suffering too much framerate drops when having to display too much stuff.
Upside-down turrets mounted on blimps would not follow the player in the south-west quadrant, and all turrets positions on blimps were not properly distributed as well as properly positionned on blimps.
This was due to a mistake in computing the normal to the surface of a blimp, which also slightly affected the bouncing of the player and bullets on blimps.
The daily mode generation was correctly repeatable… until you quit and restarted the game, which means different players would not actually play on the exact same run!!
The achievements tally in the pause menu on the achievements screen were sometimes wrong, as the counts were made before updating the secret status of achievements.
I turned some pixels on and off in the icons for hints and secret achievements.
Scrolling has now a bit of coasting, the elastic overscrolling is more smoothly dampened, and the scroll bar auto-hides when not scrolling.
I added the qwack! logo and lettering in the credits