Updated: 2026-06-15 10:34 CEST

Pilots called out a few late-run enemy and boss-support ships that looked too soft, too flat, or too much like little glowing badges. Fair hit. This pass sharpens that whole visual family.

What changed:
- Reworked the full late-mayhem enemy/support art set: 177 ship silhouettes now use darker metal hulls, sharper outlines, smaller cores, and cleaner neon accents.
- Improved boss-support ship readability in the Codex and in combat. Ships like Weld Barge, Union Courier, Fuel Canoe, and the rest should read as ships first.
- Removed the oversized baked circular glow look from that asset family. Runtime effects still add energy, but the base art is now much crisper in busy combat.
- Kept enemy counts, names, unlock timing, balance, Codex identity, and performance budget intact. This is visual polish, not a difficulty spike.
- Tightened the Codex boss-story layout at short desktop heights so long entries scroll more cleanly.

Audio follow-up:
- Rebuilt the full 100-line boss death agony voice pack with a darker boss-death performance direction.
- Boss deaths now use darker, more fearful pain screams, with less joke energy and a much clearer "I hate dying" mood.
- Strengthened the exclusive boss-death voice lane so mission-control and victory chatter do not talk over the scream.
- QA confirmed a boss kill plays boss_death_agony as the latest and only active voice during the death moment.

QA notes:
- Packaged Steam build smoke passed.
- Packaged performance smoke averaged about 60 FPS with no warnings.
- Steam bridge still reports AppID 4765070 and leaderboard nova_swarm_global_score_v2.
- Boss death voice runtime check passed after the voice rebuild.

Thanks for the blunt screenshots and audio calls. They help a lot. Keep sending the ugly bits; we will keep sanding them down.