This is a major update that completely changes the way you play the game!

First, asteroids now have health so they don’t get destroyed immediately on contact with the lasers.

Second, the most important thing - lasers’ damage is now proportional to their heat. The hotter they are, the more damage they deal. That means, properly managing heat is now a crucial part of the game. You may play it safe and keep the heat level low, or you may push the lasers to their limits but at the risk of overheating, which probably means inevitable death in dense asteroid gatherings.

This also mitigates the strategy “Spin ’n Spam”, that is, spinning the ship and spamming the fire button very fast. Since lasers are not very useful at 1% of their capacity, you now have to hold the fire button longer in order to get some firepower.

All the HUD is now moved to the center of the screen, so it’s easier to check your fuel and heat level without having to constantly look up and down, which was straining the eyes a lot. And I also think it just looks way cooler!

Lasers are now red and change their transparency depending on how hot they are. Asteroids also change their color to red depending on their health. It helps a lot with visually determining their state and just looks nicer. Even though I had to sacrifice the game’s “1-bitness” (although it never really was 1-bit), I think it’s an acceptable price to pay, as long as it makes the game more enjoyable.

And last but not least, the game is now available for download as AppImages, so it can be easily played on Linux without the need to have LÖVE installed on your system! Just so you know, this game was 100% developed on Linux using only FOSS tools, so it’s really important to me that it’s available on this awesome platform as easily as possible.

I hope you will enjoy this new update. Any feedback is appreciated. Stay tuned for the future updates, I still have a lot of plans for this game!

See the changelog for the full list of changes.