haha....hahaha.....Hahahaha.....HAHAHA....HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA!!! RISE, MY BROTHEREN, RISE! RIIIIIIIIIISE!!!
Also,
Omni-
It took you literally one hour to add a feature that puts us way far ahead of the competition?
Well, it was a joint effort between myself and Schema. I think it didn't take much longer for him to do the rest, though. We discussed the implementation until we had something conceptually sound, I made what he needed to do it in about an hour, and he did all the coding magic to make it work not long after. Great day, and doing it helped me get over something I was struggling with in my own work.
As always, the real magic is Schema's. What I made is optimized, attractive and concise, but taking what I made and making it behave in an efficient and effective way ingame is another matter entirely. As always, he made it all dance beautifully. Also, it wouldn't be possible to have a feature like this without the extensive and optimized game underneath. Anything like this is going to leverage the incredible number of hours Schema has put into everything else.
This is also an example of a wonderful little aspect of game development: as you put down a solid foundation, adding new and awesome features gets easier and faster.
Things like this are the easy part. The constant work Schema puts into the things people don't notice is both the hard part and the most important part. Watching debris from an enemy you're chasing bounce off your windshield is only fun if you have an enemy to chase and a windshield they can bounce off of. (And a way to chase the enemy, and guns to shoot the enemy, etc....)
...and yes, FlyingDebris, the entire time we were working on this I kept thinking of you. I figured you'd enjoy this, haha. One could now make an argument that flying debris is officially part of the game.
What Omni said. I was going to say that I can understand the comments about effectively applying resources, but as a software developer (non-game) I absolutely relate to doing this kind of thing as a "productive break" or even self-reward for accomplishing more tedious stuff. It really does keep up one's enthusiasm to take care of some minor visibly useful ("entertaining" qualifies here for games) self-satisfying thing, even if it's not high on the product priority list.
It's amazing how much fun those bits of side work can be.
Especially when you're doing other things later on and notice them again. Often makes me smile, or just feel proud of myself. Even if it's the tiniest little thing.
Good luck with your work! *salutes* May your bugs be easy to find and your syntax never be missing a character! (Thank the coding gods for debugging tools.)