Power-ups: repair, Overdrive and Shield pods

[saucy-tech]

Three power-ups, per the #gamedev thread. Updated after Brandon's review — see What changed in review at the bottom.

Thirteen pods on a fixed seed, floating and turning to face you. Fly through one to collect it.

	Repair pod	Overdrive pod	Shield pod
Looks like	A green heart	A violet lightning bolt	A blue shield crest
Count	5	4	4
Effect	+35 hull	2× fire rate for 10s	Damage refused for 10s
Stacks	—	Yes, duration	Yes, duration
Comes back after	25s	30s	30s

Screenshots

Every pod is a glyph inside a ring, turned to face you. The billboard is the load-bearing part: a flat extruded glyph thins to a line twice per rotation and foreshortens into a bar for most of the rest, which is exactly why the first pass read badly at range. The ring is sized so its outer edge is exactly the pickup radius — the frame you can see is the hitbox you are steering at.

Repair pod. Lime, because lime is the hull gauge it refills. Emphatically not red: red in this arena means a mine, and a heal sharing a colour with the one object that takes 45 hull off you is a trap rather than a pickup.

Overdrive pod. A lightning bolt — one silhouette with a hard zig-zag nothing else in the arena has, which is what makes it legible at the range you actually decide whether to turn for it.

Shield pod. Blue, pushed well off the Hornet's cyan so it never reads as a contact at range.

Shield holding. A faceted wireframe bubble that brightens sharply over its last two seconds — a second channel saying the same thing as the HUD countdown, for a pilot whose eyes are on the reticle rather than the corner panel.

Both buffs up, one counting down. Gauges in the airframe panel with live second counts, and a centre banner for the last five seconds. Overdrive's gauge has gone amber and is flashing; Shield's is still blue with 9.35s on it.

How it is built

The pods are the minefield pointed the other way — same seeded placement, same instanced geometry, same contact test. That is deliberate, because it is what makes the numbers argue with each other. A mine is 45 flat damage and a repair pod is 35 flat healing, so both land hardest on the thinnest hull: the Wasp fears the minefield exactly as much as it loves the pods. The heal stays under the mine so a pod never fully pays one back.

Overdrive adds bolts, not bolt damage. This is the important one. spec.damage is untouched, so alpha strike — and therefore every one-volley-kill threshold in the game — is invariant under the buff. It also does not discount gun heat, so a boosted Wasp banks heat twice as fast and redlines in half the time:

             stock  overdrive   gain   alpha   repair
  Wasp        47.1       73.8  1.57x       5      50%
  Hornet      66.7      133.3  2.00x      20      29%
  Drone       46.7       93.3  2.00x      40      18%

That alpha column is the unboosted one and stays that way. The airframe that already fires fastest gaining least from firing faster still is the argument the heat quirk makes everywhere else.

A Shield refuses damage outright — bolts, mines, station scrapes, the star. Three things deliberately do not happen while it holds:

• the damage clock does not reset, so a shielded Drone keeps repairing;
• the refused hit is not credited to the shooter, because onDamaged is what the loop counts as "a hit landed" and letting it fire would inflate the accuracy stat with bolts that accomplished nothing — the same trap sear damage already has a comment about;
• the ship stays targetable, so bolts still arrive and splash. A shield you cannot see working is a shield nobody believes in.

Both timed pods stack. Stacking duration is safe in a way stacking magnitude is not: the effect is a fixed 2× whether you hold one pod or four, so the ceiling never moves and the harness has one number to check. Deliberately uncapped — with four pads on a 30s respawn, the real limit is how much of the arena you are willing to cross instead of fighting.

Pods are player-only. Nothing in EnemyPilot steers toward one, so a hostile collecting one would be a coin flip with no tell and no counterplay. That is the one place this breaks the repo's "one flight model, both sides" rule, so it is argued out at the top of src/world/pickups.ts rather than left to be discovered.

Checks

npm run check is green. New coverage:

• simcheck — placement per kind (clear of spawn, stations, mines and each other), contact, collection, respawn timing, the full-hull no-op, that repair does not restart the nanite delay, the measured 2× rate and 2×-not-4× total, that a boosted bolt still does exactly its spec damage, that a Shield refuses damage without crediting the shooter, that a shielded Drone keeps repairing under fire, and that both buffs stack, expire, and do not survive a respawn. Also asserts the contact sphere is wider than the fastest airframe travels in one MAX_STEP frame.
• balance — boosted DPS and TTK matrices, plus contract checks that the buff is worth the detour, that it never exceeds the rate multiplier (which would mean bolt damage crept back in), that no boosted volley can one-shot any hull, that a repair pod does not undo a mine, and that a Shield cannot outlast the worst the arena can do.

What changed in review

• Overdrive is 2× total, not 4×. Dropped the bolt-damage multiplier; the rate increase carries it. This also fixed the thing I flagged last round — an overdriven Drone one-shotting a Wasp. Boosted TTK now bottoms out at 0.78s, above even the stock 0.6s floor.
• 10s, stacking, countdown at 5s, for both timed pods.
• New Shield pod, blue.
• Overdrive glyph redesigned from a pair of stacked chevrons to a lightning bolt, and every pod now billboards inside a ring. The chevrons were accurate — the buff is a rate increase — but they were two small shapes with a gap that closed at distance, so they read as one blocky arrow.

Two smaller things I caught while shooting the screenshots and fixed:

• The killfeed's +10s uppercased to +10S, which reads as +105 in this font. Now +10 SEC.
• The countdown banner sat on the callout's baseline, so a SHIELD UP callout landed on top of an Overdrive countdown. Moved below the callout line.

Worth your eye: thirteen pods is a lot of objects in the arena, and because they billboard, distant ones read as small bright rings. It looks good to me, but it is more visual furniture than the arena had before — say the word if you want the counts down. All counts, durations and respawns are one-line constants at the top of src/world/pickups.ts.

Still drafted for feedback before marking ready.

🐝 Opened by Bumble from the #gamedev thread.

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