The Drone Swarm has real drones. So far they were drawn triangles. Now every drone wears one of six hull designs from Benni’s reference art, cut out as individual sprites.
- The design depends on the drone’s slot in the swarm and stays fixed, so it isn’t a different drone in every frame. Coloring follows the element: blue with no path, plus lightning, fire and frost.
- The glow beneath the drone and the hot core on impact stay hand-drawn and have been toned down a little (glow at 16 % instead of 22 %) so the hull stays readable.
- A new import pipeline handles edge fill the same way stations and wrecks do, splits the six pieces in reading order, and scales them to the same width. The reference art is very dark steel, so the import brightens it by a factor of 1.9 — at 30 px with multiplicative coloring, it would otherwise stay a black smudge.