At long last the Beta has arrived! Bringing with it a multitude of important changes, features, and content. 

Stellarsaurus is in a pre-release state, and player feedback is the biggest thing which drives changes to our game. We wish to acknowledge your help and let you know that you’ve been heard, so any changes based off of your feedback will have a 📣 next to it. Drop some comments on our itch page or fill in one of our feedback forms, it all helps <3

NEW Enemy: T-Rex

We finally have our own, one and only, T-Rex enemy. This guy is quite the threat, so be careful if one appears!

New Controls

We’ve listened to the feedback on our controls, and have updated them accordingly. Most notably you now aim in the direction you’re moving in. You can still stand still and aim with a new button which locks your movement, allowing you to line up those shots which require more precision.

Those who played on keyboard will have a much nicer experience as now they don’t have to aim wiith their mouse and constantly worry about compensating for camera movement.

Graphical Improvements and NEW Lighting

Our space levels now have an original background drawn by the team, officially meaning that all assets in the game have been handcrafted by ourselves! Woo!

On top of this, we’ve also started implementing a new Alien World Tilemap so that our stages can have some visual variation. This is still a work in progress, but expect a final version very soon!

Some things looked glowy before, but now their light will actually affect their surroundings. This makes playing the game feel even cooler now, and opens up new design possibilities which we might explore before getting to our major release. We’ve already used this to update some weapons, which now glow and emit light.

New End Game Achievements

After a game is won and done, each players gets some achievements based on their performance. Each one has 3 tiers, symbolised by either being bronze, silver, or gold.

New Maps

We have doubled (maybe even trippled. We didn't keep count) the amount of maps that are in Stellarsaurus. With our expanded workflow we’ve been able to put together quite a number of new and interesting maps. Amongst which is a new main menu, which allows people to customize their characters, test out weapons, and play around whilst people are preparing to jump into battle.

New Weapons

Proximity mine

Laser Rifle is now an actual laser

Molotov

New Environmental Hazards

Water

Electric Fields

Moving Platforms

Big Doors

New Power Up

Shield Potion - Blocks all damage for a short time.

Balancing and Adjustments

Weapons which require time to charge up have animations.

Updated all the sounds and music to be our own creation.

NEW health indicator, no more guessing how many dino bites before you’re dead!

With some pre-Alpha playtesting we got LOTS of feedback on our weapons. We wish we could say that it was all positive, but much of it was valid criticism. A large overarching theme was that fast weapons were good, and slow ones were bad. We’re trying to follow a general philosophy of “buffs are cooler than nerfs”, so for now we’re buffing many of the slow weapons:

📣 Shotgun bullet distance increased

📣 Shotgun bullet spread increased

📣 Gauss Rifle charge time halved

📣 Gauss Rifle now shoots through walls

📣 Grenades now explode sooner

Grenades can now be cooked by holding down the ‘shoot’ button

Boomerang now has a trail effect

📣 Camera zoom has been slowed down.

Weapon spawners have had which weapons they spawn on multple maps.

Adjusted landing/jumping and bullet particle effects

📣 FIXED thrown weapons being able to clip into walls

FIXED collision issues between some projectiles and environmental objects

Sprite Updates:

• Weapon Spawner
• Flamethrower
• Laser Rifle
• Powerup Potions
• Menu Buttons
• Baseball Bat

Final Thoughts

We’re really happy with all the progress we’ve made so far. There’s a couple of small balances that we weren’t able to include immediately, but our release date is right around the corner so expect to see them then! We're working harder than ever now to make sure the final version is nice and juicy.

We will also be hosting a livestream event of us showcasing the finished version as a part of our university showcase, so keep an eye out for more details in the next week or so to catch us live for any questions or discussions.

Download the Beta below~!