Blog Entry Part 1: The Problem

This week, we ran into a problem with our dash mechanic that I couldn’t ignore any longer. From a surface-level perspective, it was doing what it was supposed to—pushing the player forward quickly in the direction of input—but once I started testing it more rigorously, it became clear that it was falling short in a big way. The core issue was that the dash didn’t offer any form of invincibility or collision bypass. You could dash into an enemy by accident and take damage, or worse, get stuck against them and not actually make it out of danger. It felt awkward, unresponsive, and at odds with what most players expect from a modern action dash.

In testing, I found myself instinctively trying to use the dash to dodge through enemy patterns or escape from tight encounters, but half the time, it would result in damage or death. This was a problem because it made the dash feel unreliable. If a mechanic is meant to be a quick escape or a moment of invulnerability, but doesn’t behave that way, it creates confusion and mistrust in the controls. Even I, as the developer, wasn’t confident when using it. That told me something had to change.

Another issue I ran into was visual clarity. As the screen gets more crowded with enemies and projectiles, pickups started to blend into the background. I often found myself missing them completely or only realizing they were there when I happened to run over one. For a system that’s meant to reward the player, that lack of visibility was a huge problem. It reduced the impact of pickups and made them feel like background noise rather than exciting rewards.

Combined, these issues made the movement and feedback loop feel sluggish and unsatisfying during testing. It wasn’t fun to navigate space with a dash that couldn’t be trusted or to chase down pickups that were too easy to overlook. These were the problems I set out to fix.

Blog Entry Part 2: The Solution

To address the dash problem, I updated the mechanic so that the player becomes invulnerable while dashing and can now pass through enemies. I modified the collision logic to temporarily disable interactions with enemy hitboxes during the dash window, giving the dash the reliability it was missing. 

On the visibility side, I added simple but effective particle effects to pickups, making them pop visually on the screen. Even in more chaotic scenes, they now catch the eye right away. I also spent some time updating the map layout for one of the final times this week.

These changes have made the game feel much more responsive and rewarding during testing. The dash now feels like a proper escape tool, and the pickups are easier to collect and enjoy. It’s a solid step forward, and I’m excited to keep building on it.