Greetings and salutations!

Today was a fairly productive day, I think--although I'm starting to feel a little behind my preferred schedule. The end of the week is creeping closer...

As to a screenshot, have a GIF showing the new chains in action (albeit with some cuts; the process is rather longer in-game):

(Sorry that it's in Tweet form--for some reason my attempts to upload the GIF as an attachment repeatedly failed.)

Perhaps the biggest change made today is the one shown above: the chain mechanic has been implemented! Chunks of level can now be joined by great chains. When these are shot, they disintegrate, sending the chunks flying apart. However, after a short time the chains reach out again, joining the chunks and drawing them back together.

Thus far, this all seems to work reasonably well, I think.

I also switched from using Panda3D's auto-generated shaders to my own. These new shaders are stripped down and heavily-modified copies of one of the main shaders from my primary game-development project (A Door to the Mists), with one variant for the chains (which implements their disintegration and link-by-link extension) and one for projectiles (which may well be changed in the future).

On the downside, I accidentally saved over the working file for one of my enemies; while I do have last night's backup, some changes were made today. That said, I do still have the exported version, so as long as that holds this may not be an issue. And even if it is, the changes made today weren't huge, from what I recall.

Speaking of enemies, a new one was implemented today--although, alas, I may well end up scrapping it. It's a flying creature, intended to harry the player from the air, unbound by the edges of the level-chunks. However, it's not behaving as well as I'd like, and I'm having some trouble getting it to quite work correctly. We'll see how things go, perhaps.

Finally, there were sundry other changes that don't seem worth mentioning in full.

That's all for today--stay well, and thank you for reading!