Hey everyone, this is Zodiac GameLab. The incremental game Crystal Ascend has made some progress!
Last time I finished the hit effect for the crystal.
But just having a hit effect isn’t enough – there’s nowhere to display the crystal’s health. Simply putting a health bar won’t work; with so many moving crystals, health bars would create clutter and hurt performance. After much thought, I decided to add cracks to the crystal. The less health it has, the more cracks appear, making it look closer to breaking.
By writing a shader, I made the number of cracks change smoothly based on remaining health. This only uses a small amount of GPU computation, with almost no performance impact.
Next, I added floating numbers to the absorption effect, showing how much aether was actually absorbed. I have to say, floating numbers bring a great sense of satisfaction.
This won’t be the final version—there are still plenty of effects to add, but I’ll stop here for now.
A simple incremental game where you nurture crystal elementals by destroying floating crystals and harvesting aether. Upgrade the skill tree, unlock new abilities to gather resources faster, and build your ultimate crystal companions. If you’re interested, feel free to add to wishlist 😊