After the initial 'beta-ish' release, I wanted to look at some core parts of the design and change them to garner some more interest in the project. During the previous showcase where I demo'd the game on the night of the release, I had very little feedback and very few actual players. Although the room was filled with people, no one wanted to pick a controller and play. That made me realize some core parts of the design and game play needed to altered, and I wanted to fix them quickly and upload a re-release that I would be proud of.

Originally in the projects' conception, I wanted to add a certain graphical/gameplay feature that would tremendously improve the overall design and playability of the game; but after spending over 40 hours researching, testing and recoding it, it still did not function they way I wanted it to. I ended up shelving the idea until the next version due to time and just plain frustration. Instead, I implemented a different approach to the stiffness of the background that the previous feature would have eliminated. The new 3-layer parallax background feature adds a much needed depth, visual complexity and excitement to the game itself. Additionally, it does not interfere with - and will even compliment - the inclusion of the original background concept. :)

On top of that major addition, a whole new slew of other items were included as well. A new boomerang weapon was added, the 'cloaking' ability was removed, and some weapons were fixed to add functionality to them. New exhaust animations for each ship and new sprites for several images were added. The core functionality of the shield has been changed to add a little more flow to the battle, and boosting has been adjusted to be easier to use and more effective. There was also smaller textual changes & alignments and some re-arrangement of visual elements. For the players, input is now more responsive when moving through menus and navigation has been updated to be easier to peruse . Lastly, I needed to remove bugs that came up in play-testing that I had considered dead; they were experiencing a zombie-like reanimation, and it was necessary to seek and remove them prior to an actual release.