I’ve made some significant progress on the Vector Mode, added a 3rd background “Stage 3”, as well as the usual collection of smaller tweaks and requested options.

The work on Vector Mode has made a new milestone with the completion of conversion of the fonts to 80s style vector fonts. These will also smoothly transition when switching back and forth between the regular graphics and the vector mode graphics. This includes the main menu, option menus, leaderboards, stats, and in-game prompts and scores. They still could use some additional optimization, so if you’re playing on a modest system, you may notice a loss in framerate when things get serious. This will improve over time as I squeeze out additional performance. Only basic characters are supported at the moment as well, so you may notice some missing punctuation, or in the case of fancy non-ASCII characters, missing characters.

I’ve incorporated a 3rd background accessible under “Stage 3” in the options under the Gameplay category. In addition, there is now a “Random” setting (the new default) that will give you a random background each play. You can still set it to a specific one if there is a favorite. I have some other backgrounds designs available and will be hopefully incorporating them real soon.

Finally, worth mentioning is there are a few other little features that have been added. One is a requested Reset Options feature is now available under the Miscellaneous category that will reset all the options back to the defaults, not just the controller bindings. Another is when accessing the “exit to main menu” dialog, you can do a quick restart instead of returning all the way to the main menu and then restarting from there.

Many thanks to the great players that have helped shape things with feature requests and stay tuned for more enhancements based on your feedback.

Thank you for supporting me on my journey to try and make the Best Asteroids Style Space Shooter. If you ever want to chat about Solaroids with myself or other players, or brag about your top scores and share tips, join the Solaroids Discord Server. It’s quiet there now, but maybe you can help change that!

I’ve also created a dedicated Early Access Page filled with, gifs, links, and a place where you can sign up to be notified at full launch.

Cheers and happy blasting!

New Features

• Vector mode now supports vector fonts which replace all in-game fonts, with the exception of keyboard key images.
  
• Vector shapes now support multiple colors.
  
• Scores on periodic leaderboards now fade out based on the age of the score.
  
• Optimizations to level generation.
  
• Added a restart option to the menu used to exit back to the title screen to quickly start a new game. This is equivalent to exiting to the main menu and then re-entering the game mode you were in.
  
• Moved some non-control based options from the Controls category to the Player category.
  
• Allow binding keyboard controls to TAB, Backspace, and Caps lock.
  
• Add a Reset Options command to the Miscellaneous category. This literally resets every option back to the defaults, including resolution, full-screen, etc.
  
• Add another “Stage 3” background.

Issues Addressed

• Reticle in vector mode now works for the most part. It still doesn’t match the size of the non-vector version exactly but it’s usable.
  
• Fix issue where the lens flare on the sun would disappear when returning to the title screen and then starting a new game.