Patch Notes – Shader System and Visual Effects Update

New Features and Improvements

• Skills System: Added in-game skills panel (V key) with the Dash skill, allowing up to 5-tile movement validated through A* pathfinding and enhanced with visual effects such as dust trails, wind slashes, and tilt animations.

• Shader-Based Glow Effects: Replaced old multi-pass rectangle rendering with GPU shader-based glow effects for tile highlights, entity outlines, and dash targeting visuals, improving both performance and visual consistency.

• Wind Aura Effect: Introduced a dynamic orbiting ribbon shader around the player, featuring flow noise, modulated opacity, and velocity transitions for smoother, more natural movement.

• Dash Visualization: Updated dash radius indicators to use batched shader glows, displaying reachable tiles via BFS pathfinding with optimized merged outlines.

• Shader Optimization: Implemented shader precompilation at game load to remove first-use stutters. Added axis-aligned glow variants for batching and optimized shader math by removing redundant trigonometric calculations.

• Targeting System Enhancements: Improved dash targeting visuals with GLSL-based swirling wind aura shaders, adjustable speed and blur parameters, and proper depth layering around the player sprite.

• Death Mechanic: Added a full player death system with fade-to-black overlay and post-death options such as Return to Menu and Quit Game.

• Immortal Toggle: Added an Immortal checkbox in the debug panel to allow invulnerability for testing and debugging purposes.

• Health Bar: Introduced a bottom-center health bar that remains visible and unaffected by color grading or shader overlays.

Behavioral Notes

• Press V to open the Skills Panel.

• Select Dash to enter targeting mode; reachable tiles are highlighted via shader glows.

• Left-click to dash to the selected tile; Right-click to cancel.

• Dash obeys A* pathfinding and maximum 5-tile range.

• The player’s wind aura dynamically reacts to motion, with realistic acceleration and trailing effects.

• All glow and outline effects now run on GPU shaders for a more stable frame rate and consistent visuals.

• Shaders compile during game loading to prevent runtime stutters.

• The player can now die when HP reaches zero; the Immortal toggle in the debug panel disables this behavior for testing.

• The new health bar provides a clear visual indicator of player HP during gameplay.