A little more joy when you catch something
Spotting is the core of Skydex: you fly over the real sea or under real air traffic, line up a vessel or an aircraft, and add it to your collection. Every catch has always paid XP, and every so often it unlocks an achievement. The problem was how quietly that happened — the reward for a good catch was a small grey line of text sliding in at the edge of the screen, the same box that tells you the wind changed. The moment you worked for and the mundane status update looked identical. That is a waste of the best feeling in the game.
The catch itself
Now, when a spot lands, a bright ✨ +N XP pops up over the world, scales in and floats away. It is small and quick — it does not block anything — but it turns the payout into something you see land, tied to the catch you just made. The toast that names the vessel or aircraft stays; the number just stopped hiding in it.
Achievements get their own moment
Achievements are rarer and mean more, so they get more. Instead of a plain "🏆 Ship Spotter" line, a new achievement now fires a little animated banner: the badge spins in, a gold "Achievement unlocked" shimmer runs across the label, and it shows the achievement's name, the tier you reached, and the XP it paid — because achievement tiers pay XP on top of the catch. If several land at once (a big first-of-something catch can trigger a few), they queue and play one after another instead of stacking into noise.
Rank-ups keep their existing full-screen celebration — that is the rarest moment of all and earns the whole screen. This new layer sits underneath it: more frequent, lighter, but no longer silent.
Why bother with "juice"
None of this changes what you earn — the numbers are exactly the same. It changes whether earning them feels like anything. A collection game lives or dies on the half-second after a catch, and ours was spending that half-second on a status toast. Now the good moments read as good moments. It is a small amount of code and, we think, a real difference to how the loop feels. Go catch something and watch it land.