8 hours, I have warded off the illness. Lucky me.
Today was spent getting fast projectile pick ups into the game and spawning them in an automated manner. A second array of data now exists that allows me to state which game tiles are fast projectile spawners and which have a delay on their first projectile spawn. When a projectile spawns it fades up from 0 alpha to 50% alpha over 7 seconds while shrinking from 40% of the tile's size to 10%. At the end of this process the circle snaps to 100% alpha, expands out to be 50% the size of the tile, then back down to standard projectile size. These projectiles inherit the first color of the current color pallet. These circle pulse at 128 BPM, the rhythm of the background music (not in). A new script keeps track of a public float that I can use to sync all the pulsing objects in the game. Picking up a projectile happens when a player's closest tile contains a fast projectile. Getting this working required me to make closest projectile detection work (its broke at some point). If a player fires at a square containing a projectile that is not their color, the idle and fired projectile will be destroyed when they share a tile. This interaction still changes the tile's color. When a projectile is either picked up or destroyed there is a 5 second delay because another is spawned, and once spawned the projectile cannot be collected until its 7 second animation is complete. More things that I can remember had to be tweaked and fixed for all this to work.