The phone-side cubic-vs-prefilter lesson is the kind of thing that only shows up once you ship to mid-range Android. Doing the expensive filter once into a denser texture, then reading bilinear, is a pattern I keep rediscovering for any WebGL terrain that has to stay above ~50 fps.

Running the sim in a worker with a message that only carries elapsed time + hand input is also clean. Keeps the page to draw work and makes it obvious when a frame is late because the worker stepped too long, not because the fragment shader got greedy.

Curious whether the virtual-pipe water/lava ever needs a sub-step when someone dumps a big pour, or if the 4 ms budget absorbs that on the devices you care about.

Congrats on shipping a first Godot build. One thing that surprised me later: input timing in an HTML5 export can feel a beat later than the editor, so mid-air flips and short tap windows often need a tighter threshold than the desktop build. Worth checking early if you plan a browser demo.

Congrats on getting close to wrapping up a project you've been on for months. That last stretch is usually the hardest part. When you watch the playthrough back, what's still bugging you most: enemy readability, weapon feel, or pacing between waves? I'd also love to hear what you cut to get it finished, since that's often the most useful part for other solo devs.

Starting as a guest with no download is the right call for a browser game. The question I'd test is how quickly you get to the first catch. If account creation or long dialogue comes before that, it's where browser players drop off.

Physical-yet-arcadey is such a hard balance. Curious about the Mario Kart observation. Was it about drift being a commitment the player enters on purpose, rather than something that emerges from the tire model? That framing changed how I think about steering assists.

Tried it for a minute on desktop. Standing still already got me to 12 with all 3 hearts, because a lot of fruit drops straight onto the basket, so the opening does not feel too hard. Dragging the ball with the mouse never moved the cat, so the rule about falling if you drag too fast or reverse never came up. If that rule is the real difficulty, it needs to show up earlier, and a visible tilt before you lose a life would help people learn it. Also worth checking that mouse drag moves the ball the same way a finger does, or desktop players cannot actually test the hard part.