Engine and Dual-Shot Powerups
I haven’t gone in the direction of explorable-map gameplay yet, but I may someday. This did seed the idea of impact-bouncing physics and partial damage to shields that would be such a rabbit hole later.
2021-10-23 10:36 PM Tonight, I activated the thruster and turning powerups (and tweaked around a bit to ensure they felt useful, rather than taking away from a sense of control) and dual-shot, which required a lot of messing around until I was happy with the effect. With the help of this question, I learned about lengthdir_x/y to create offsets sensitive to the object_angle of the player (so that the parallel shots would fire in coordination).
I was thinking about an exploration game mode where the player could fly from screen-to-screen on a larger map, with the borders wrapping while enemies were on-screen, but transitioning once the screen was cleared. I’d probably also want static walls, in that case, and then program in wall-bouncing (maybe damage shields?) so that it wouldn’t be insta-kill everywhere.