Getting down to the wire here. I was going to make these separate posts, but they're all so related, so here we go.
Hyper, Bullet Cancels, Bees, and you.
(The -New- Scoring System)
Let's just take in this holy-shit moment for a second. There's a lot packed into these 6 seconds, so here's a short list. In the upper left corner, a second bar/meter creeps up from blue into white, and finally reaches the top. That's your Hyper meter. When it maxes out, you see a screen flash, a bullet cancel, the words "DOUBLE!" start scrolling in the HUD, and an invincibility/flame animation on the ship. Also note the HIT combo meter, which jumps instantly from ~40 to ~180 and then zooms insanely up to 220. (btw, this is the midboss bullet pattern on loop 2; pretty cool yeah?!). Finally, note the chain meter stays green even after the boss dies. Yes, your chain will never drop during the ~15 seconds it takes to drain down that Hyper meter.
If you play for survival, I will leave you at "invincibility" and you can just plan your route carefully to trip Hyper when you need it most. It's automatic. The invincibility is about as long as when you respawn from death. Speaking of death, if you die your Hyper meter goes to zero. Sorry.
If you play for score, read on... In this version you accrue HITs by killing enemies or sustaining damage on them with the laser. It's accrual is faster in certain circumstances, and notably so during Hyper. Also,
bullet cancels add the on-screen-bullet-count to the HIT meter. There are several added bullet cancels to the game, keep an eye out. As a result of these new mechanics, and some new enemy placements, it will be common to chain entire levels, and it will be common to hold chain above 1000+ HITs throughout. Why is this important?
Bees.
They're important, now. Like really important.
Here's the tale of two bees. First, I give you:
"YAY I found a bee"
(Don't spend all those 100 points in one place young'un!)
Now I give you:
"I held a decent chain and collected ALL the other bees"
That was 100,000 x 298 (HITs) which is, pragmatically speaking, bigger than 100. Computationally speaking, it's also pretty big but not too bad. The problem is that the bees can of course be worth much more. If you collect all the bees, they top out at 1,000,000 per bee. And let me tell you that 1000000 x 2000 is actually too large of a number for the previous score-keeping engine, which only handled 8 decimal digits (they ignored the ones place, so 9 total). Code-wise it was a super big pain in the butt, but I'll save you that detail. You'll at least notice some repercussions like...
the high scores (and max HITs) wouldn't fit anymore, so they ditched the silver frame:
they reoriented the top of the screen so you could fit all those gigantic numbers next to each other:
and of course, they 10x'd the extends!
So I hope you enjoy the new meta, score-seekers.
Don't drop your chain, maximize the bullet cancels and Hyper windows, and get all the bees.
May your million point bees and your thousand-count HIT meters counter-stop all 10 digits!
P.S. If you get hyper while in Maximum, buckle up. It's called
xHyper mode, and it persists until you die...