In the first space sequence where we try to kill ourselves we have 10HP and take 3dmg for every ship we hit, so we usually have to hit 4 ships. I've noticed that when I miss the 3rd ship I still sometime die from the 4th ship and I had no idea why. It turns out that I take 2dmg from a near miss with the 3rd ship. See the following video:

It seems that when we're close to spaceships we take 1-3dmg the first frame, so often when they die they actually die over the course of 1-2 frames but we don't notice this as there is no animation for partial damage and 2 frames is not very long.

I don't know the specifics of how this works, or whether it really matters but since we're trying to understand the game I wanted to share.

I can confirm this as well, often times I miss the second ship entirely though their hitboxes appear to be a bit larger than they are.

Yeah, I sometimes worry when I only hit 3, but end up taking 4 hits worth of damage, so it's probably a hitbox issue

I looked at it in the code and i think i figured it out. The function coding the damage we take by collisions is this one:

        for each (_loc_9 in _loc_4)
        {
            
            if (_loc_9.collideAABB(this.player))
            {
                _loc_9.decrementHealth();
                this.damagePlayer();
            }
        }

Basically, when your hitbox touch a starship hitbox, the game consider you're in collision. While you're colliding with a spaceship, you and this spaceship loose one health by frame. The first starships we encounter all have 3 healths each that's why we take 3 damages by colliding with them. But, if we stay only 2 frames in their hitbox we will take only 2 healths of damage and they won't get destroyed.

We can also see this by looking at a collision frame by frame:

You can clearly see you take one damage per frame.

I found this like the first time I ran this game and thought it was common knowledge... :/

Btw, the first ships we encounter have 3 healths, slightly bigger ships have 5 and the biggest one have 10. Our ship has 10 healths too, but I guess this was obvious enough.

Also, if you want to have a bit of fun, you should try to switch the ships type in \Steam\SteamApps\common\outtheresomewhere\shmup\ships.json by any of the following : [player|bigShip|shipFast|shipTiny]

You can also change their behaviour to "still" to get some nice big and compact formations. (Other options being [still|sin1|sin2|straigth])

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/622974311987264878/8769B8EE004981E3CDF0A7179C731CC2FB33AC7E/ http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/622974311987265208/C434773ED2E94566C2D7F8469D1AA2131B40E531/ http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/622974311987266125/78D5FD1C43D86C3105A9BA333701BD91257378D8/

I also boosted my health bar to 1K to be able to ignore their bullets.

Edit : While modifying this file for the fun, I also discovered this 2 facts : 1.a) One ship kill will randomly drop a loot. (already known fact) 1.b) As long as 1 loot or less (being 0) has been picked up, the loot droped by the ship will be a Power Core. 2.) Once 2 Power Cores have been collected, every future loot will be a health pack. Picking up this health pack will give you 1 heart back.

Edit²: Yeah, I know it's not useful for speedrun, but fuck it.