OK. I'm back.

In my defense for disappearing for so long, it's been a hell of a time here in America. I'll say this about the Capitol Riot—Goodman, the man who baited the angry rednecks away from the senate chamber before it was locked down, is obviously a hell of a gamer. Our domestic terrorists are clearly not.

I'm a very empathic person and have been under a great deal of stress lately, accordingly. Aside from having nearly a half million dead from a horribly mismanaged virus, we have a true narcissist in power and the formal change won't happen for another seven days. I know that I am completely glossing over all the other things, but there are better sources for that. (Al Jazeera, AP News, and Reuters, for starters.)

Part of my stress management, when I'm capable, is working on this. I like knowing that I'm making someone's day, somewhere, a little brighter.

Stars now use OpenGL instancing—which is, like, the best thing ever—and work in the web version again. Linux & Windows versions now use the same system. Honestly, I think the stars are a little big right now and could stand a decent slimming, but there's always going to be something and this is definitely worthy of an update.

I've been missing adding general silliness to the game, but a lot of things I have lined up down the road—curved surfaces, procedurally generated terrain, and background distortions for one—just aren't easily possible with raw SDL 2. However, they're exceedingly easy with OpenGL, if you understand the math. I'm also working on cut scenes, but am going to need to find a video playback library that I'm comfortable with in C, and of course, works well on the web.

(Yes, I use C, not C++. I have a lot of respect for Bjarne Stroustrup; he didn't just create C++, arguably the first commercially viable object-oriented language; he set up practices that have been followed by many other OOP languages over the years and has done a lot of good for the industry. However, C++ in its modern state seems a little dirty and disorganized to me, and he has the downside of never really saying "No" to a feature. C is simple, almost as ground-level as Assembly, and ridiculously efficient. I apply modular structural programming, in lieu of object-oriented practices, to my code and while it's a little wordier it keeps up with OOP nicely. Additionally, you can build for friggin' anything.)

There were a lot of things that needed to change, between SDL and OpenGL. To begin with, the coordinate system—SDL uses an origin at the top-left of the screen, with Y proceeding downward; whereas OpenGL has a more traditional mathematical system with the origin at the center of the screen. Moreover, I'm now programming for the GPU too. There was a lot to update, and if I was making something more akin to Blaster Master I might not have changed anything. However, in the end, this should most certainly be worth it. Expect some amazing graphical complexity to be added in the future.