Three patches in one update: 1.0.7 focuses on the first few minutes of play, 1.0.8 makes boss attacks easier to read and fixes a hit-detection issue with the Act 1 Elite, and 1.0.9 cleans up a few audio and UI issues.
New
- The tutorial now asks you to actually do the two things that matter: graze a bullet, then fire a charge shot. Each step waits until you do it (with a short auto-skip so nobody gets stuck), and enemy ships keep coming while you practice. The prompt also explains what grazing gives you: it fills your charge gauge.
- The game over screen shows what shot you down (boss and attack type), and R / Y restarts instantly with the same aircraft, with no trip back to the title screen.
Fixes
- Act 1 Elite (Sentinel Prime): its homing shots used a separate hit check that triggered on the graze zone around your ship instead of your actual hitbox, so they could "hit" you from well outside your ship. They now use the same bullet system as every other enemy shot: same hitbox, cleared by a charge shot, blocked by shield sub-units, and they count for grazes like normal bullets.
- King bosses and the final boss were firing the same bullets as every other boss. Their own bullet shapes (stars for Kings, hexagons for the final boss) had been made but never switched on. They are in now, so you can tell at a glance which tier of boss is shooting at you.
- Boss bullet hitboxes were slightly larger than the bullets you see. Every boss bullet now has a hitbox smaller than its sprite, at the same ratio across all tiers.
- Ground zone attacks: the warning area now matches the area that actually deals damage. Previously some zones looked bigger or smaller than their real hit area.
- Defeating a boss no longer plays a harsh static/crackle noise. The low rumble layer was generating white noise instead of bass.
- Elite health bars now shrink toward the left edge instead of collapsing toward a point near the middle.
- Background clouds no longer visibly jump a few seconds after a run starts.
Changes
- Boss beam attacks now use hand-drawn pixel art instead of a generated gradient, and the glow at the firing point matches the beam color. Regular enemy beams are unchanged; at their width the pixel detail read as noise.
- Rectangular danger markers have a proper frame, and they now switch to a fast white flash just before the attack lands, so you can tell "warning" from "incoming".
- Ground zones change color as they fade out, so you can see when a zone has stopped dealing damage.
- Default frame cap of 240 fps. Uncapped rendering on some PCs was pushing the GPU to 100% for no visual benefit.
- Korean text: the term for grazing is now 스치기 throughout the UI.
Under the hood
- Added onboarding telemetry (first charge shot, tutorial gate results, cause of death) so we can keep tuning the opening.
- Homing shots are pooled bullets steered by a scene-level driver, so they clean up correctly when the enemy dies.
- If you get short freezes during loading moments (boss entrances, card selection), add --hitch-log to the game's Steam launch options, play until it happens, and send us your Player.log. In our testing these freezes came from installing on a slow external USB drive; moving the game to an internal SSD fixed it.