Health bar can now be seen in the shop

I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for playing Cosmic Cursor over the last year, it really has been a pleasure watching everyone enjoy the game! I don't think I ever expected so many people to enjoy the game and watching YouTubers like Olexa play the game was a real treat!

Cosmic Cursor is my first ever commercially released game, and I was responsible for all aspects of the project. It was born out of a very successful game jam I did back in 2022 called Impact-Effect.

You can play the original version here: https://ideaspersecond.itch.io/impact-effect

I started to consider creating a larger project after the game was front-paged on Newgrounds and was played by over 10,000 people:

The very early version was called Into the Swarm:

I was able to start working on what would become Cosmic Cursor in October of 2023. I rushed to release a demo and by November, I released an initial demo.

I was very happy to see that Retromation covered the game only a few days after release!

However, it was clear to me that I had released the demo too early, and the game wasn't as complete as I thought it was. The game just didn't have much room to grow with its core systems. The ships just weren't different enough and this realization would lead to a very challenging design process for the next few months.

I spent quite some time redesigning how ships gained charge, which I blamed for the engagement issues and I released an updated demo a few months later:

It was still clear to me at this point the game still needed a major overhaul of all of its systems.

The gameplay just wasn't engaging enough.

I had done so much work already and now I needed to resigned most of it. As you can probably tell from the video above, all three ships were completely reworked!

The core issue was that even though each ship charged differently, they needed to also attack differently.

This change in my thinking is what led to all of the new ships you now see in the current release.

After quite a lot of development, I had a nearly completed game in May of 2024:

I spent a few weeks taking a break and partaking in the June Next Fest.

And then the game was released on June 24th, 2024!

Thank you all so much for playing Cosmic Cursor over the last year, it really has meant the world to me to see players enjoying my work.

Thank you!!!

Ideas Per Second