The Core now spins — and shows its phases. So far it carried a single image, cut out of the menu background, and the game just rotated that flat image. A lit sphere spinning that way doesn’t read as rotation: the lighting spun with it, and the lava veins whirled around like a pinwheel. And all four phases of the Core fight looked identical.
- Rendered in 3D: the sphere now turns on its axis while the specular highlight and the cool rim light stay put. Emission and real lighting can do what flat 2D rendering can’t — glow pushing through the cracks from within, self-shadowing across the crust.
- Every phase has its own look: a dark crust (I), the plates start heating up (II), the veins crack open (III), meltdown (IV). The change lines up with the banner and shake that already existed. Since 0.113.0 the fight takes around thirty seconds, so the phases are now long enough to actually see.
- It spins faster the closer it gets to meltdown (0.10 to 0.32 revolutions per second) — just like its spiral arms already do.
- Smooth despite only 32 frames per phase: each next frame is cross-faded halfway over the current one. Both images sit on their own layer just beneath the other enemies — any higher, and the cross-fade would have hidden escorts flying in front of the Core.
- Hit flash as a veil instead of a flat fill. Under sustained fire, the Core is in its hit-flash state in roughly half of all frames (measured 55 of 120). The old flat white fill would have shown it — and its phases — as a flickering white disc half the time.
- Costs two sprites at runtime. The sprite sheet (3,840 × 1,920 px, 128 frames) stays under the 4,096-px texture limit of older phones and weighs 2.5 MB at the compressed quality setting. If it’s missing, the Core quietly falls back to the old flat image.
The whole sheet is generated by a build script rather than stored as a plain binary asset — it renders all 128 frames headlessly in about 25 seconds.