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Cheers, thanks @sungk ! :)

When I finally got my bubblegum candybar thing through the hole, my globulo-monstah guy seemed happy I fed him.

I couldn't get any more food out of the machine. I clicked the light button about 20 times. Stupid machine. I came this close to kicking it but realized I had no legs.

I killed Nick Cage!

- New Announcer voice clips for Survival & Team Deathmatch game modes. Announced by yours truly

- Survival mode's scoring is more fun. Much more fun. Your score is now based on how quickly you dispatched of them bots. So do it fast, space brawler

- New gorgeous high-res backgrounds. Pixels were chosen and placed carefully by Lachlan Cartland

- Less "crazyass" bass on explosions (seriously, that's what the Git commit msg said)

- Some sound effects were hurting ears, especially UI ones. That's no longer the case, so leave your ear plugs at home

- Simplified start / menu, since those old perspective ships were old and no longer in the game

- Better object pooling. This helps performance, uses more RAM but less CPU and slowdowns while you're trying to muss each other up (in space)

- Warship now shows up at random times, because who likes a predictable warship? (Answer: no one)

- Reflective icy asteroids only crumble and break down into smaller reflective icy asteroids, and life made sense again

ps. There's nothing Halloweeny in our game. So if you came here for that, you may be sorely let down.

Supercool. We've just uploaded a new build, it has a whole bunch of new artwork, environments and these new icy reflective asteroids.

The new background artwork isn't perfect, we need to fix a few things there. But it's definitely a step in the right direction!

New:

- New ice asteroids, reflect some fired projectiles
- New artwork! Asteroids and background artwork greatly improved
- Explosive asteroids grow as they take damage, will add an animation to show they're about to explode
- Motion blur on ships when boosting

Updated:

- In the middle of adjusting new background artwork so it works on Retina, hi-DPI, and other various screen resolutions (will be adding a resolution switcher to Settings)
- Optimizations to prevent game from locking / stuttering
- Tweaked SFX volumes
- Removed Chromatic Aberration image effect during gameplay as it was annoying

Bugfixes:

- Clicking on the game during warmup will not show the score behind each player's ship in Versus mode
- Fix the sometimes-missing tense music when only 2 or 1 kills left in Versus mode

I think it was a really good suggestion, Frank! It definitely adds to the game. And I've noticed I lose my shield if a fireball mélee into an asteroid now, too. Would probably destroy my ship if my shield was down!

We've toned down the volume of some of those sound effects. That one where you spawn before the countdown start was cranked to full. So that should be nicer on the ears in the next live build.

Regarding the "Start Over" button highlighted. That's a tough one. It has to do with where your mouse cursor was. So if your mouse cursor was right over the "Start Over" button, that will be highlighted when you pause the game. It's super annoying -- and I've been trying to think up ways to fix it without breaking other functionality. Will have to dive into it further!

New:

- Team Deathmatch! 6 selectable ship models w/ 6 different factions (various colourways). Choose the same faction to play with a teammate: (2 vs 2), (3 vs 1), (2 vs 1 vs 1), or classic Free For All.

- Better scoreboard screens, showing which ships you destroyed, hazard deaths and overall score

- Larger asteroids colliding w/ other larger asteroids, the warship, and player ships can cause damage

- Add a 'start over' button to quickly restart the current game w/ the same setup of players, game mode, etc

Updated:

- Tone down some image effects

- Music improvements

- Increase projectile firing kickback

- Lower the boost impulse audioclip volume (better on the ears in singleplayer survival mode)

- New Warship damaged / destroyed graphics

- (keyboard controls) Right-shift boosts, similar to left-shift

- Fixed 'dust' particle effect

Bugfixes:

- (keyboard controls) Enter / return key no longer pulls up ship scores UI during warmup

Thanks Moose ! That's interesting about keyboard / mouse being easier. In order to make the game accessible to more players, we added support for keyboard / mouse and the singleplayer survival mode. This reaffirms my desire to ship the game for Xbox and/or PS! As it was designed to be played w/ gamepads all along. I'm thinking of ways to nerf the keyboard / mouse controls to put them on the same line as the gamepads, but feel that would be the wrong move. Will have to think more on this!

Powerups would be interesting, but would make Astervoid a very different style of game. They won't make it into Astervoid 2000, but possibly in future versions down the road.

Great to hear you've tried multiplayer, too! Have you and your friends found that tapping boost is better for dodging & speed, or do you usually just hold down the boost button?

Awesome. I didn't realize that was a thing. Thanks for that!

So we've tested out asteroids moving at rather high velocity's which can damage ship's & ship's shields, but only the larger ones. And generally if the ship is flying into the asteroid storm. It definitely adds a bit of danger as you really have to watch out for the storm warning (red bars on the sides of the screen) now. Before, the storm could push players out of bounds but now it can obliterate them.

Also, larger asteroids colliding with each other can cause damage to each other. Both of these changes make the environment feel more alive, and I quite like that.

Excited to hear what you think of the local multi when you give it a shot! We only have FFA at the moment, but plan on adding Team Deathmatch as well before release. (2v1, 2v2, 1v3)

Thanks again for the suggestions! I'll upload a build with all of the new changes on Thursday or Friday.

@frankster -- Amazing. Thanks so much for getting into it and giving us all that super helpful feedback! It definitely made my day yesterday (and today) to know you're enjoying the game.

I've thought a bit about how asteroids crashing into ships (and possibly other asteroids) could cause damage. I think it's an awesome idea. We'll probably play around with adding that in and see how it feels.

We've gone over powerups a bunch in the past couple years and we always come back to keeping them out, since it would take the game in an incredibly different direction. With powerups, it feels less like it's up to each players skill where everything is more balanced, to how well you can collect and use those powerups. That said, maybe it'll end up in the 3rd version of Astervoid (if we end up making something like that someday) :)

Cheers, thanks again!

Thanks @mctaylorpants! Yeah hooking Xbox and PS4 controllers up isn't too bad these days. I was surprised I even got my Xbox controllers working on Linux!

Holding down shoot charges up your ship, which let's you do a couple different moves. So holding down fire to fire the regular shot won't work. We're hoping the combat and strategy is more dynamic than holding down fire!

Powerups are also something we're avoiding for now, but they may come in at some point down the road. What kind of powerup are you hoping for?

Thanks Josh. Great catch! Totally an oversight. We put in xbox/gamepad control instructions but forgot to provide keyboard / mouse. Will do that!

Thanks for participating. Get in touch w/ us on Twitter or by email if you have a direct question, otherwise the dev's and other players will be able to receive your feedback, field questions and engage in awesome Astervoid 2000 discussion.

@madcapacity & @chuckbergeron

chuck+astervoid@lrevg.com