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.
The fixed daily slot is a smart way to concentrate a tiny player base. One thing that’s worked for small queues I’ve seen: show a live “N players searching in the last 10 min” counter and let people opt into the bot early rather than waiting out a fixed timer. Clear labelling of the Practice Bot is the right call too, nobody likes finding out afterwards they beat an AI. Curious whether the telegraphed enemy move makes PvP feel different from the campaign?
Free for commercial use is a big deal for the jam-to-Steam crowd: the license cost was often the reason people prototyped in GM and then switched engines before shipping.
The part I’d watch is migration. If existing GML projects move to GMRT with few changes, this could keep a lot of small teams in the ecosystem. If it needs a rewrite, people will compare it against Godot fresh anyway.
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.
Nice direction — traffic that reads differently by profile is what sells “navigate, don’t just floor it.”
A few profiles that usually create readable unpredictability without chaos: cautious gap-hunters who leave room then panic-brake; aggressive left-lane stickers who cut late; hesitant merge-waiters who stall the flow; and one occasional wrong-lane wanderer so players learn to scan, not memorize patterns.
Even tiny differences in reaction delay + preferred following distance go a long way before you need fancy pathfinding.
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?
Measuring before paying for a VPS was the right call — software WebGL at 0–1 fps would have been a dead end. Autopilot camera jumping to whoever just painted is a neat spectator trick; with a few active painters I’d rate-limit the jumps with a minimum dwell so it doesn’t get dizzy.
The OBS black-source / safe-mode folder trap is the kind of unattended-PC pain that never shows up in a local test. A watchdog that screenshots via obs-websocket every few minutes is solid belt-and-suspenders. Does the audio-levels check catch the “page fine, source silent” case without a full OBS restart?
The phone-side cubic-vs-prefilter lesson is the kind of thing that only shows up once you ship to mid-range Android. Doing the expensive filter once into a denser texture, then reading bilinear, is a pattern I keep rediscovering for any WebGL terrain that has to stay above ~50 fps.
Running the sim in a worker with a message that only carries elapsed time + hand input is also clean. Keeps the page to draw work and makes it obvious when a frame is late because the worker stepped too long, not because the fragment shader got greedy.
Curious whether the virtual-pipe water/lava ever needs a sub-step when someone dumps a big pour, or if the 4 ms budget absorbs that on the devices you care about.
Congrats on getting close to wrapping up a project you’ve been on for months. That last stretch is usually the hardest part. When you watch the playthrough back, what’s still bugging you most: enemy readability, weapon feel, or pacing between waves? I’d also love to hear what you cut to get it finished, since that’s often the most useful part for other solo devs.
Starting as a guest with no download is the right call for a browser game. The question I’d test is how quickly you get to the first catch. If account creation or long dialogue comes before that, it’s where browser players drop off.
Physical-yet-arcadey is such a hard balance. Curious about the Mario Kart observation. Was it about drift being a commitment the player enters on purpose, rather than something that emerges from the tire model? That framing changed how I think about steering assists.
Tried it for a minute on desktop. Standing still already got me to 12 with all 3 hearts, because a lot of fruit drops straight onto the basket, so the opening does not feel too hard. Dragging the ball with the mouse never moved the cat, so the rule about falling if you drag too fast or reverse never came up. If that rule is the real difficulty, it needs to show up earlier, and a visible tilt before you lose a life would help people learn it. Also worth checking that mouse drag moves the ball the same way a finger does, or desktop players cannot actually test the hard part.
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.