Patch v1.1.0 - "Down" to Cancel Boost

Hello everyone! In response to feedback, we added some features. Note the first one!!

1. Pressing "down" during balloons and jetpacks will now cancel the boost. This should provide players with more control to chain even more combos!
2. WASD controls for our astrochild
3. Integration with Newgrounds scoreboard for those who've played there! The board within our game is still cross-platform though :) 

We've also fixed some bugs: 

1. Long start up times with older machines / Firefox
2. Lag spike when players combo for the first time after startup.

Now onto some technical details for those who are interested! First, Upbound is built using Godot 4.2.2.stable.

Bug #2 was an interesting one for me. Here's what it looked like in slow-mo. Note that the game freezes a little when the astrochild reaches the second balloon. 

Solution

This is due to the way Godot loads shaders. Shaders are not compiled until you need it for the first time! And since our combo meter on the left is animated using shaders and the pink combo bubble is hidden (as in, not rendered by Godot) until you combo the first time, the shaders for the pink bubble does not load until that very frame and that causes the lag.

The solution for us is to force load the shaders at the beginning of the game rather than until that frame. We consulted the fix here. Instead of hiding the pink bubble by setting the "visible" property on Godot, we hide the pink bubble using shaders, by setting the alpha of each pixel to 0. This way, Godot is always rendering the bubble and therefore loading the shaders at the beginning, but the 0 alpha makes it invisible to players when they're not combo-ing.

That's it for now! As always, comments and questions are always welcome! :)