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The game plays itself on the title screen
Leave the title screen alone for six seconds and a random sector starts behind the menu, flown by a simple bot. It aims for the gap in the next wall, drifts towards pickups, fires in bursts at gates and mines, and boosts when the way is clear. It crashes plenty, and when it loses the ship or the clock runs out, another sector starts. Any touch or key ends the demo at once and does what it would have done anyway, so tapping to launch still launches. After a minute and a half the demo gives up and the title rests, drawn only a few times a second, until someone comes back.
Nothing the bot does counts: no score or time is saved, nothing is sent to the server, nothing sounds or buzzes, and the screen is not kept awake. The demo is drawn at half the display's rate to spare the battery.
Why: the title screen showed an empty tunnel, which says little about the game. A sector being flown, even badly, shows what it is in a glance. A bot was chosen over a recording because a recording goes stale every time a sector or the physics changes, while a bot always plays the current game.
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Buttons you can read without looking
The boost and fire buttons are now their own gauges. Each is a bright disc with an icon, two arrows for boost and a gun sight for fire, and the bright part drains as the boost reserve is used or the guns heat up. Spent, a button goes dark and hollow with a broken outline. Its ring blinks red just before that happens and again if you press it anyway, and it throws off a ring when it comes back. With the buttons carrying all of this, the BOOST and GUNS bars have left the top corner on phones. Keyboard players have no buttons, so they keep the bars.
Why: the only sign of an empty boost was the word on the button changing from BOOST to EMPTY, and nobody reads a word in the corner of the screen while dodging walls. Brightness, shape and a blink can be seen without looking away from the tunnel. Once the boost button worked that way, the fire button needed to match, and the bars were saying the same thing twice.
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Celebrations
Beating your own best time for a sector, or your own best score, now sets off confetti, a jingle and a headline in the five sector colours. A time fast enough for the top three on record, or a posted score that lands in the top ten, gets the full fanfare, and the top of either list gets a longer one. The cast have something to say about it each time. It all happens on the screens between sectors and after a run, never while you are flying, and the confetti is left out if your device asks for reduced motion.
Why: a record used to be marked by a single line of yellow text, which was easy to miss and not much of a reward. While building this, the game also stopped offering a place on the fastest-times list for a time slower than one you already hold there.
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Fastest times
Every sector is now timed. The game shows your time and your own best when you clear a sector, and the scoreboard has a second page listing the three fastest names for each sector. Times are posted along with a score, never on their own.
Why: every player flies the same tunnels, so a race against the clock was there for the taking. It gives a reason to replay an early sector well, not only to survive a late one.
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Guns with limits
Shots now fizzle out a little under halfway down the visible tunnel, and the guns overheat after about two and a half seconds of unbroken fire, locking for a moment while they cool.
Why: shots used to reach everything in sight and never ran out, so holding the fire button cleared every gate and mine long before it was a threat. With nothing to lose by holding it down, the button might as well not have existed. Now when to shoot is a decision.
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Part Two gets its own look
From Sector 6 on, the tunnels are no longer filled with colour. They are dark, hollow and drawn in glowing neon lines, still one colour per sector. At a fork, the light branch is lit and the dark branch is dim.
Why: the second set of sectors needed to feel like a different place from the first. The idea came from the game's new icon, a neon tunnel that looked good enough to fly through.
The look was tried on a test page first, to check that it ran smoothly on a phone.
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Plays without a connection
After one visit with a connection, the game keeps a copy of itself on your device and opens with no network at all. The scoreboard still needs a connection, so a run played offline cannot be posted, and the game now says so plainly.
Why: a flight in airplane mode was coming up.
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This changelog
A record of how the game got to where it is, linked from the manual.
Why: the game keeps evolving, and it seemed worth writing down what changed and what prompted it.
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A warning when the shield is nearly gone
In the last 15% of shield, the shield bar throbs red and the edges of the screen pulse red with it, harder as the shield drains. When the shield gives out, the bar breaks into pieces.
Why: your eyes are on the tunnel, not on a small bar in the corner. The warning had to reach the whole screen.
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Fonts served from the game's own site
The game's two typefaces used to load from Google Fonts. They now sit alongside the game.
Why: writing the manual's privacy section showed that this was the one avoidable request to another company. Now the game loads nothing from other sites.
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A manual
A page that explains the game: how to play, how to add it to a phone's home screen, exactly what the game counts, and how the high-score board works. A small link on the title screen leads to it.
Why: full-screen play on a phone depends on a home-screen step most people don't know about, and anyone playing deserves a plain account of what is and isn't tracked.
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Forking tunnels
Partway through every sector the tunnel now splits in two. The light branch is the easy way round. The dark branch is harder, and it holds the sector's ship token.
Why: a choice in mid-flight sounded like fun. Forks into differently coloured tunnels would have broken the story, which gives every sector one colour, so the two branches share the colour and differ sharply in shade. Putting the ship token in the dark branch turned the fork into a bet: safety, or a spare ship.
The forks spent a morning on a separate test page before going into the main game.
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A ship token you can't mistake
The ship token became a large ringed white coin with a ship on it. Before, it was a small white diamond like the time, shield and boost cells.
Why: at speed it was too hard to tell the one pickup that matters most from the rest.
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Also: the sound and settings buttons swapped the words SND and TUNE for a speaker and a gear, which read faster. The home-screen icon was redrawn as a neon magenta tunnel, replacing the wireframe from the first version. Points for anything shot or collected now show for a moment as a running total beside the score.
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Part Two of the story
Five more sectors and a second run of cut scenes, in which Baron Von Kaboom turns out to have kept a spare Doomsday Device on the Moon.
Why: the first story was fun enough to deserve a sequel, on the condition that it be even more ridiculous.
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Spare ships have to be earned
You now start with no spares. Each sector hides one ship token, and collecting it earns a spare ship when you finish the sector. Miss the token and there is no ship.
Why: a free ship for every sector cleared, the rule from the day before, made spares too easy to come by.
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High scores and play counts
A shared scoreboard that anyone can post to under a name of their choosing, and a private tally of how many runs are played each day.
Why: a friend mentioned he had spent several hours playing, and there had been no way to know that anyone was playing at all, let alone compare scores. One rule was set at the same moment: apart from the name on a posted score, everything counted stays anonymous. The manual has the details.
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Spare ships
Losing a ship no longer has to end the run. A spare lets you carry on with a full shield.
Why: one ship per run was too few. A single mistake late in a good run sent you back to the start.
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Boost with a reserve
Boost became something you hold. It drains a reserve that lasts six seconds, a white boost cell refills it, and the whole screen shows when it is on.
Why: the first boost built up so gently that it seemed never to switch on.
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A story, with cut scenes
Baron Von Kaboom, Mister Fluffles, the General, a talking ship's computer and Ace Chase arrived, in chunky cut scenes between sectors.
Why: the sectors needed a reason to follow one another, and a cheesy 1980s cartoon plot was the most fun reason available.
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Tilt steering
An optional way to fly: tilt the phone to steer, and use the thumb stick to aim the guns.
Why: an experiment in whether steering and aiming could be separated. The verdict was that it is harder than the thumb stick, so it stays as an option for anyone who wants the challenge.
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One vivid colour per sector
The bare wireframe tunnels were filled in, each sector in a single strong colour.
Why: the first version looked duller than the game it was modelled on. A first attempt at brightening it used many colours at once, which was too much. The problem turned out to be the number of colours, not how bright they were.
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Smoother steering
The ship now eases into its turns, and a settings panel lets you adjust how it handles.
Why: the first version was too twitchy to enjoy.
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The first version
A wireframe tunnel, a countdown, walls to dodge and gates to shoot, playable in a phone's browser held sideways.
Why: a memory of Tunnels of Armageddon, a 1989 tunnel flyer for the Apple IIGS, and a wish to play something like it on a phone.
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Also: sound was silent on phones at first, because phones only let a page start sound as a finger lifts, not as it lands.