Today’s update has two things:

NO SHOOT ZONES

Tired of shooting? Looking for diversity? Besides the game’s numerous power ups, there are now no shoot zones. Once you go past them, there is no shooting until you fly into a danger zone once again. For the player this means they are forced to evade while enemies can still shoot. Bullets fired into the zone disintegrate with a new effect. Without the ability to shoot, there is no way for your shield to recharge as the shield recharges when you shoot enemies. You can still get collectables to recharge the shield.

The enemies that require you to destroy them to proceed, now keep moving as there is no way for them to be killed. This mixes things up, old enemies become new enemies.

STAR WIPE

Here comes a new power up… without the ability to shoot came the inspiration of the star wipe. For ten or so seconds your ship increases in size, becomes invincible and lets you plow through enemies. Even bosses get wrecked from the might of the star wipe! Its a great new power up and different than the rest that do things such as double your damage, double your defense, increase your firing rate and so on.

Here is a video of both things in a single test level using the game’s in game level editor:

With the star wipe, I piled on the foes with 800 – 1,000+ enemies, which caused performance issues, so I added more optimization. Its amazing that even things doing nothing still take up a lot of computer processing when they’re over the 1,000 mark.

* edit * Yeah the performance enhancement backfires for the rest of the game though. Activating and deactivating causes a noticeable stutter when there was never one before.