Build b2026.02.07.0006 (Demo Alpha)

This release brings a major expansion of the city portion of the game, a new traffic and pedestrian system, full lighting and directional shadows, rocket launches with procedural fire and smoke, a new presentation for radiation and death, improved robot presentations, and a broad package of engine, physics, collision, weapon and save-system fixes.

Key changes

• Significantly expanded the first level with a city street, multi-plane buildings, trees, sidewalks and new environmental elements.
• Brought the city to life with a large number of pedestrians, cars and buses in many variants.
• Added a complete traffic system with braking for characters and obstacles, safe following distances, safe re-entry onto the map and vehicle-state saving.
• Significantly improved lighting effects and added an extensive dynamic-shadow system for buildings, characters, weapons, vehicles and world objects.
• Added directional sunlight and consistent shadows that react to object position, movement and height above the ground.
• Added selective emissive glows and metallic reflections visible even in darkness, including on lasers, barrels, panels, mirrors and metal crates.
• Added a rocket-launch sequence with procedural, sprite-free fire, smoke, sparks and a launch wave.
• Added the new character Sally and new pedestrian appearance sets.
• Added an on-screen radiation effect and a completely new presentation of player death.
• Heavily rebuilt moving-object physics, elevators, ladders, slopes and collisions in 2.5D space; objects can now naturally appear in front of or behind one another.
• Expanded the behavior of all flying weapons and their avoidance of moving obstacles and vehicles.
• Extended and stabilized save/load, including rocket state, traffic state and the player's precise position inside an elevator.
• Refined the menu background as well as robot visuals, HUD elements and presentations.
• Carried out a major expansion and stabilization of the engine layer, especially graphics configuration, rendering, high refresh rates and GPU resource management.

New content and game world

• Rebuilt the first level into a broad city scene with a street, sidewalks, multi-plane architecture, trees, traffic and new interactive elements.
• Added oBoy01, a new pedestrian system with idle and walking modes.
• Added five boy variants and one adult man variant, each with matching Idle/Walk animations.
• Expanded oGirl01 with new girl and adult woman variants plus separate Idle/Walk/Run modes.
• Added Sally as a separate character with her own Idle/Run animations, movement routes, stops, player-waiting behavior, footsteps and a smooth fade after the scene ends.
• Expanded the population of rLevelOne with dozens of new pedestrians, additional pigeons, street elements and coins.
• Added passenger cars and buses with separate animated wheels.
• Added several car and bus body variants.
• Added special city-vehicle variants: taxis, police cars and a garbage truck.
• Rebuilt Training Room sections involving antigravity, elevators, ladders, ActionBoxes and buttons.
• Added the Geiger item to the training flow.
• Added new rocket objects and graphics plus an invisible helper-wall variant.

Traffic

• Each vehicle receives its own slightly varied travel speed.
• Added smooth acceleration and braking.
• Vehicles detect the player, NPCs, enemies, other vehicles and movable objects in their lane.
• Obstacle detection is based on the baseline/“foot line,” preventing a tall bus sprite from incorrectly reacting to a character standing on the sidewalk behind it.
• Cars and buses maintain a safe distance and do not drive through slower vehicles.
• After the road becomes clear, a vehicle waits briefly before moving again, producing a more natural result.
• Added a safe vehicle re-entry system after a vehicle leaves the level.
• Multiple vehicles can no longer spawn at the same re-entry point at the same time.
• Added repair logic for old saves in which cars could be restored on top of one another.
• Vehicles are no longer pushed by crates or magnet-held objects; an incorrectly overlapping object is safely pushed out.
• Wheels are assigned to the correct body, do not duplicate and remain synchronized after save/load.
• Wheel rotation reflects the distance actually traveled.
• Body, wheels, collision, perspective and shadow use one shared scale.
• Traffic is correctly stopped during presentations, tutorials, interface pauses and other world-freeze states.

Pedestrians and NPCs

• Improved the behavior of oGirl01, Sally and other NPCs in 2.5D spaces, on streets and on FloorRoom surfaces.
• Synchronized their collisions, perspective scale and depth with the player, vehicles, weapons and environmental elements.
• Pedestrians use a stable collision mask independent of the current animation.
• Walk or run animation plays only when the character is actually moving.
• A character stopped by the player or an obstacle switches to Idle animation.
• After the player clears the path, a pedestrian waits a random one to three seconds before moving again.
• Added personal space in front of pedestrians so characters do not walk directly into the player.
• Movement is performed in small steps, preventing characters from passing through thin obstacles when FPS drops.
• Pedestrians correctly avoid or respect cars, buses, trash, crates and other street obstacles.
• Pedestrians can pass in front of or behind tall sprites when their foot lines are at different depths.
• Characters looping at the edges of the city return from the opposite side without visibly appearing in the middle of the screen.
• Fixed NPCs suddenly moving between separate street sections after contact with a vehicle.
• Fixed the STRING argument is unset error in oBoy01 collision logic and added equivalent safeguards to oGirl01.

Cat

• Expanded the behavior of the cat following the player and its movement across platforming levels, FloorRoom areas and streets.
• The cat can plan routes through ladders, climb down from their tops, jump between levels and return to direct player following.
• Added cooperation with elevators and moving platforms, including stable transport independent of Step-event order.
• Expanded avoidance of walls, crates, cars, buses and other dynamic obstacles.
• Added stuck detection and an emergency safe respawn near the player, used only when normal navigation cannot recover progress.
• The cat is safely moved out of death zones; the return point is checked for collision and valid ground.
• Stabilized the states for joining the player, hiding, disappearing and reappearing.
• Save/load preserves the cat's position, layer, direction, animation state, attachment to the player, hidden state and position relative to the correct elevator.

Pigeons

• Removed the possibility of sudden position jumps of roughly 150–200 pixels.
• Added a safeguard that rejects only genuine state teleports without limiting valid flight speed.
• Restored the earlier animation speed, flight speed and target escape distance.
• A pigeon taking off from oStreet always gains altitude and never flies downward.
• Takeoff now uses a naturally varied angle instead of a vertical path.
• Landing also happens diagonally, with a side approach and smooth gliding.
• Improved approach-point planning so the bird no longer finishes its return by dropping vertically over the takeoff point.
• Improved behavior around oBlackBarrel01; the pigeon chooses a direction away from the barrel and gains horizontal clearance while climbing.
• Expanded avoidance of walls, corners and narrow tunnels, plus detection of lack of progress.
• Added stable return routes to the starting point without bouncing or circling endlessly.
• The pigeon keeps its real landing position on a temporary perch instead of teleporting to roof height.
• Improved rooftop walking so the bird can no longer leave its support and walk in the air.
• Improved pigeon draw order relative to the player, vehicles and street elements.
• Pigeons can be hit by the oGun2 laser, plasma and the oGun5 electric beam.
• Added feathers, knockback, falling physics and a dead-pigeon state.
• Added an expanded electrocution effect with a lit silhouette, pulses and procedural discharges.
• Pigeon state, starting point and position are restored more reliably after loading, including from older saves.

Rockets and launch effect

• Added an invisible, one-shot oRocketTrigger activated when the player enters its area.
• The trigger can launch an entire assigned group of rockets.
• Added oRocket02, which smoothly accelerates upward after activation and is removed only after fully leaving the map.
• Added a shared oRocketExhaustFX that supports multiple rockets and keeps their trails alive after the source disappears.
• The entire exhaust effect is generated procedurally, without additional sprites.
• Added a long, intense white-yellow-orange flame with a bright core and hot outer rim.
• Added multiple flame layers, dynamic wavering, incandescent fragments, sparks and shock diamonds.
• Narrowed and lengthened the engine glow so it no longer forms large circles wider than the rocket.
• The flame is long enough to visually connect the engine with the beginning of the smoke trail.
• Added a dense, continuous white-gray smoke trail instead of separate visible particle circles.
• The trail remains in world space and does not follow the rocket upward.
• Smoke expands smoothly throughout its lifetime, reaching about three times the width of the original effect.
• As it expands, the smoke gradually thins and fades.
• Removed edge jitter from the trail; organic irregularities are now stable over time.
• Extended smoke lifetime and smoothed the fade-out so sections do not disappear abruptly.
• The final part of the trail is drawn beyond the real camera edge, preventing the smoke from ending before the edge of the screen.
• Added a ground-spreading launch cloud, hot vapor, dust, sparks and light camera shake.
• A rocket resumed from a save does not replay the launch impact or camera shake.

Dynamic shadows and scene depth

• Added oSun as a shared directional light source for the entire scene.
• Added directional shadows cast by foreground buildings.
• Added shadows for the player, cat, aliens, pedestrians, Sally, pigeons and dead characters.
• Added shadows for all five weapon types, both attached to the player and remotely controlled.
• Added shadows for crates, ActionBoxes, barrels, containers, trash bags, mirrors, medkits, coins and other world objects.
• Added complete shadows for cars, buses and their wheels.
• A shadow preserves the actual silhouette of its object instead of relying only on a simple ellipse.
• The direction of every shadow is stable and shared across the scene; it no longer rotates unpredictably as the player moves.
• Shadows move with their casting objects, and their length accounts for the physical height of the silhouette and light settings.
• Overlapping shadows are merged without repeatedly darkening the same area.
• Building shadows correctly fall across characters and objects positioned in front of façades.
• Added masking of obscured portions so the shadow of a hidden character does not show through a car or building.
• Fixed the player's shadow while jumping, climbing ladders and carrying a weapon.
• Fixed the dead player's shadow and its draw order.
• Shadows preserve correct perspective and foot-line sorting.
• Shadow buffers are rendered at a reduced resolution determined by refresh rate to limit GPU cost.
• Added an emergency fallback to simpler shadows after failed surface allocation, with rate-limited retry attempts.
• Added a separate Shadows option in graphics settings; its state is saved and loaded.

2.5D perspective and draw order

• Implemented mutual occlusion based on foot position: an item or character can appear in front of or behind another object without manual layer switching.
• Unified scaling for characters, NPCs and vehicles on oStreet; objects smoothly grow toward the lower part of the street.
• Scale is anchored at the feet, so a character or vehicle does not “jump” when its size changes.
• Unified foot-line sorting for the player, NPCs, enemies, pigeons, weapons, vehicles and movable items.
• In platforming rooms, the player and dead character remain on the Player layer; street-depth values no longer leak into the Training Room.
• Fixed passing in front of and behind trash, containers, vehicles and other tall sprites.
• An object visually overlapping another object is no longer automatically treated as a collision when their bases are on different depth lines.
• Highlights for movable items are drawn in the world and can be naturally obscured by vehicles or foreground elements.

Player, elevators, ladders and slopes

• Improved elevator cabins, their doors, internal and external panels, and travel synchronization between floors.
• Improved transport of the player by a moving elevator and reattachment to its floor.
• A player inside the cabin is moved with the elevator even in difficult edge cases.
• Jumping from an elevator detaches the player from the cabin without immediately “sticking” again.
• Landing back on the elevator correctly restores grounded state and jumping ability.
• After loading, the player's exact position and offset relative to the elevator are preserved.
• Save/load distinguishes standing on the elevator floor, being inside the cabin and being airborne nearby.
• Player movement can immediately cancel the short safety anchor applied after loading.
• Extended automatic avoidance of a descending elevator to a safe 30 px clearance and maintained it throughout the maneuver.
• Avoidance does not activate when the player is correctly riding inside the cabin or standing on its floor.
• Improved elevator layers: the body and interior remain behind the player, while only the doors can obscure them.
• Improved stepping off a ladder onto the top surface of an ActionBox or crate.
• Added one-way passage through an ActionBox when jumping up from a ladder; while falling, its top edge becomes solid again.
• Fixed the player becoming trapped between a ladder, ActionBox and its collision proxy.
• Improved manual escape from an ActionBox collision while CTRL is held.
• Rebuilt behavior on oMirror02 objects: sliding, crossing peaks, valleys between slopes and safely exiting onto the ground.
• Improved the connection between left and right mirror variants: the player crosses the join between two slopes smoothly without stopping, getting stuck or changing direction incorrectly.
• Removed direction flicker and run-animation switching in the valley between two slopes.
• Vertical player movement is checked in steps of up to 1 px, preventing passage through thin walls during a long frame.
• The dust effect is now tied to actual running rather than merely to the active sprite.

Crates, barrels and other movable objects

• Introduced shared physics and collision rules for CrateBoxes, ActionBoxes, mirrors, black barrels and medkits.
• Added bounded step movement to prevent tunneling through thin obstacles.
• Removed unbounded collision-resolution loops caused by fractional speeds or corrupted data.
• Added safeguards against NaN values and unnaturally large velocity jumps.
• CTRL now only establishes the grip and no longer moves the object or its invisible proxy by itself.
• Pushing and pulling use consistent speed and preserve the true grabbing distance.
• Movable objects respect vehicles, enemies, the player, other movable objects, trash, gates and elevator blockers.
• Character collision in 2.5D depends on matching foot lines, allowing visual passage in front of or behind an object without a false block.
• An object already embedded in an obstacle can move only in a direction that reduces penetration.
• Repaired old saves containing objects embedded in containers, vehicles or other obstacles.
• Added a stable support system: items can stand on an elevator or another moving object and are transported independently of Step-event order.
• Added detection of cyclic stacks and corrupted support chains.
• A dropped medkit correctly regains gravity, lands and follows moving ground.
• Magnet-held objects use safe target values, do not enter infinite correction and stop when blocked.
• Old magnetic-grab and throw states that could cause autonomous movement are cleared after loading.
• Collision between a thrown item and an enemy uses the last valid flight vector and deals damage without requiring entry into the enemy's mask.
• Movable-object simulation is correctly frozen during presentations and tutorials.

Weapons and combat

• Expanded object reactions to hits, including crates, ActionBoxes, barrels, containers, trash bags, medkits and collectible items.
• Added and refined hit effects: sparks, panel flashes, scorch marks, laser hits, plasma trails and short impact glows.
• All flying weapons now use one movement, navigation and collision system.
• Weapons following the player avoid walls, crates, barrels, trash, cars and buses.
• Dynamic obstacles are not permanently written into the navigation grid; their current position is checked live.
• Vehicle avoidance uses a precise mask, so transparent sprite corners do not form a rectangular invisible wall.
• Added vehicle-motion prediction so a weapon can begin a smooth avoidance arc earlier.
• Movement near an obstacle preserves the tangential component and slides along the edge instead of repeatedly bouncing.
• Limited total position correction per frame, removing stair-step weapon teleports.
• Added stable bypass points, replanning after genuine sticking and an emergency tangential target.
• Removed zigzagging between both sides of a vehicle and oscillation at the end of a path.
• Remote control retains precise collision without an additional invisible prediction zone.
• Added a clear blue effect marking the maximum remote-control range of a weapon.
• Rebuilt weapon transformation after pressing Q: particle disassembly, spark waves, reconstruction and support for changing the decision during the animation.
• Enlarged and diversified transformation sparks; trajectories no longer form one regular spiral.
• A weapon remains inactive and cannot be hit until transformation is fully complete.
• A weapon attached to the player inherits the player's depth, so a vehicle no longer hides only the weapon while leaving the player visible.
• Added full shadows for flying weapons.
• oGun2 uses soft, GPU-accelerated beam and glow rendering consistent with world lasers.
• The oGun2 beam is blocked by vehicles and can hit pigeons.
• Protected creation of the helper beam texture against surface errors and an unbalanced render-target stack.
• Increased the range of the short oGun4 flashlight glow and unified its appearance between the Training Room and the main level.
• oGun5 can damage different target types, including pigeons.
• A short continuous oGun5 hit kills a pigeon without changing damage balance against aliens.
• During a presentation/tutorial, the beam remains visible, but the frozen world receives no damage or hit reactions.
• Alien projectiles use a full sweep from the previous to the new position and select the nearest physical contact in the frame.
• Removed dependence of projectile results on object-class order and eliminated tunneling through thin obstacles.
• Projectiles correctly interact with the oGun1 shield, the player, gates, crates and other obstacles.
• Added a limited lifetime for alien projectiles so missed shots do not remain on the large map.
• Improved alien movement and direction changes around vehicles, trash and movable obstacles.

Lighting, lasers and radiation

• Significantly expanded dynamic lighting, emissive glows and material reflections.
• Lasers, energy gates, panels, sensors, barrels, mirrors, metal crates, weapons and selected environmental elements now have glows or reflections visible even in darkness.
• The intensity and number of metallic reflections scale with quality settings, preserving the effect without uncontrolled rendering cost.
• Unified the lighting profile between rLevelOne and the Training Room.
• The Training Room now uses the same effect-quality policy and lightmap resolution as the main level.
• A dedicated RTX-like pass in the Training Room renders only lasers without accidentally capturing broad sensor fields.
• Unified thickness, core, glow, emitter flare and wall reaction for training lasers and world lasers.
• Laser effects scale for very wide views to limit rendering cost without an abrupt visual change.
• Lighting, lasers and the flashlight remain visible even when the helper darkness surface temporarily cannot be created.
• Added controlled surface-allocation retries after device loss or insufficient VRAM.
• Added an on-screen irradiation effect based on distance from the nearest radiation zone.
• The radiation effect combines gradual desaturation, grain, scanlines, flicker and horizontal interference.
• Entering and leaving a zone uses smooth buildup and fade-out.
• Radiation affects the game world before the HUD is drawn, keeping the interface readable.
• The effect is correctly preserved in the frozen pause frame and death screen.
• The Geiger loop changes volume with distance, stops when no player is present and is correctly cleaned up when leaving a room.

Death screen

• Added a four-second linear time slowdown after the player's death.
• The camera smoothly zooms into the scene while gameplay comes to a stop.
• The image gradually loses color and freezes when the sequence ends.
• The frozen frame preserves complete lighting, shadows and the radiation effect.
• Added a context-sensitive continuation prompt: restart, load the latest save or load the training save.
• SPACE input activates only after the previous press is released, preventing accidental skipping of the screen.
• Death closes an open inventory, takes control of input and correctly hides the cursor.
• Added a safe fallback when the frozen-frame surface cannot be created.
• The sequence recovers after a graphics-surface loss instead of leaving a blank screen.
• Improved falling-body physics, holding the final animation frame, the shadow and layer sorting.

Interface, inventory and menu

• Refined robot modules in the HUD: icons, integrity rings, resource bars, regeneration states, individual type colors and smooth panel extension.
• Expanded robot and weapon presentations with clearer boards, control hints and controlled demonstrations.
• The Geiger counter is now a hidden system item rather than a normal inventory slot.
• The counter automatically slides out in a radiation zone and can be shown or hidden manually with G.
• Manually hiding the Geiger counter inside a zone remains active until that zone is left.
• The inventory can be opened even with no visible items; stats, quests and the robot tab remain available.
• The hidden Geiger counter is not duplicated in saves or inventory-slot memory.
• Improved dragging the access card onto the security panel.
• A card used on the correct panel is consumed, changes the panel state and disables its assigned electric gate.
• A card dropped away from the panel regains gravity and correctly falls into the world.
• Dropping an item over the inventory-panel background cancels dragging and returns it to its slot.
• The inventory tutorial does not start during the death sequence.
• The wallet in the home remains a quest item and no longer adds an artificial 50 points; old technical wallet-coin entries are cleaned up.
• Added the option to enable or disable shadows in the graphics menu.
• Improved the scrolling multi-plane menu background: sky and buildings use alternating mirroring for smoother tile joins and more natural parallax.
• Optimized the startup-logo screen: the large texture is loaded only for the intro and released before the menu.
• Saved resolution, V-Sync, fullscreen and frame-rate settings are applied before the first logo frame.

Pause and presentations

• Pause captures a clean, complete frame at the target GUI resolution.
• The frozen image contains lighting, shadows and radiation exactly as in the last gameplay frame.
• Removed additional blur that could create blotches and alter shadow appearance while paused.
• The pause surface is forced opaque so clouds and background do not show through the frozen scene.
• Added safe retries for pause and inventory surface creation after allocation failure.
• Pause cannot be opened during a critical room-loading and synchronization phase.
• Unified world freezing for inventory, tutorials, robot presentations and weapon presentations.
• After a presentation, previous speeds, animations and object movement channels are restored exactly.

Save/load

• Extended saving and restoration of the full level state for NPCs, the cat, pigeons, crates, ActionBoxes, items, vehicles, elevators, doors, panels, gates and other interactive objects.
• Added saving of the cat's position and state, including attachment to the player, hidden state and exact position relative to an elevator.
• Added saving and restoration of every rocket's position, speed, flight phase, visibility and launch state.
• Added saving of one-shot rocket triggers; a launched and removed rocket does not reappear after loading.
• Added state saving for cars and buses: position, speed, direction, stop time, respawn time, wheel angle and visibility.
• Vehicles are matched by a stable start-point identifier, and wheels are rebound to the correct body.
• Expanded player-in-elevator saving with exact offset, floor state, airborne state and the identifier of the correct cabin.
• Improved restoration of the player standing on an elevator, inside the cabin or jumping nearby.
• Added emergency restoration of player position from the room snapshot when the main save section does not contain a valid position.
• Improved restoration of pigeon starting points and matching by stable UIDs.
• Expanded access-card saving with gravity settings and saving of panel and gate states.
• Temporary velocities and magnetic grips for ActionBoxes and barrels are reset after loading.
• Old inconsistent support relationships are removed so an item is not dragged by remembered movement from another object.
• When enemies are restored, old weapons, projectiles and transformation sparks are cleared, removing doubled or thickened alien shots after loading.
• Missing input and weapon controllers are recreated automatically when directly loading the bonus room.
• Old rendering surfaces are released before lighting is restored, preventing the previous image from remaining visible.
• Old Training Room saves no longer restore the retired global x2 effect multiplier.
• Backward compatibility is preserved: saves without the new rocket and traffic sections use objects placed in the room.

F5 quick save

• Changed operation order: the quick-save message appears before synchronous file saving and screenshot capture begin.
• The HUD confirms that the message was actually drawn, and saving starts only after two complete presented frames.
• The quick-save message appears immediately at full readability instead of beginning with an almost transparent fade-in phase.
• Removed the impression that the game freezes first and only then reports that it is saving.
• Protected a pending save against room changes and repeated F5 activation.

Stability, performance and technical fixes

• Expanded and stabilized the graphics-configuration and engine-performance layer.
• Added high-refresh-rate support, automatic FPS-target matching and two frame-pacing modes: Smooth and Low Latency.
• Enabled pixel/texture interpolation in platform settings and improved presentation smoothness at high refresh rates.
• Expanded settings for resolution, V-Sync, fullscreen, effect quality, dynamic lighting, emissive glow, RTX-like lighting and shadows; configuration is preserved in the settings file.
• Improved the camera, GUI and image scaling, and support for different resolutions and aspect ratios.
• Improved full renderer reset when changing or loading a level: old surfaces, temporary textures and particle systems are released before reinitialization.
• Added safe motion-delta limits and stepped movement for key characters, projectiles and physics objects.
• Many simulations are now independent of 60 FPS and use a shared time step.
• Screen-sequence timing can run independently from world slowdown or freezing.
• Added rejection of corrupted speed values and states that could previously cause a large position jump or a long main-thread loop.
• Added rate-limited retries for GPU-surface creation so insufficient VRAM does not trigger allocation attempts every frame.
• Added release of particle systems and surfaces both when an object is destroyed and when leaving a room.
• Improved cleanup of looping audio and pending fade-outs during room changes.
• Added draw culling for distant pedestrians, vehicles, wheels and the aircraft without stopping their simulation.
• Optimized shadow processing using visible caster/receiver lists and limiting work outside the camera.
• Removed duplicated or orphaned shadow projectors for wheels and objects after save/load.
• Improved behavior after graphics-device loss and recreation of application_surface.
• Normalized blend state and surface alpha, preventing holes, background bleed-through and brightness shifts.
• Prevented effects and physics from continuing to simulate during pause, tutorials or frozen presentations.

Technical scope summary

Comparison of the current project with copies from May 21, June 14 and June 27 confirms both a major content expansion and deep changes to existing systems.

Compared with the May 21 and June 14 copies, the current version contains:

• 22 new GameMaker objects,
• 52 new sprite assets,
• 5 new shaders,
• 1 new system script,
• removal of 2 retired sprites replaced by a newer scene organization.

Compared with the nearest snapshot from June 27, the project additionally contains:

• 21 new GameMaker objects,
• 49 new sprite assets,
• 5 new shaders,
• expansion of 17 major system scripts,
• broad changes to rLevelOne, rTrainingRoom, rPlayerHome and rLevelOneBonus.

Beyond new assets, the existing controllers for the player, cat, NPCs, weapons, physics, elevators, lighting, menu, camera, rendering and save/load were thoroughly changed. The scope is therefore considerably larger than the number of new objects alone would suggest.