Changelog
Last updated: August 12, 2026
Everything new and changed in Galactic Overkill, newest first. The game updates often — check back for new content.
Version 1.3 — The look and sound pass
August 12, 2026
The arena
- Space has depth now. Planets, a sun, distant galaxies and nebulae used to appear only in PvE — every mode gets them, graded so each one still reads as its own place. The starfield gained colour, density, drift and a graded backdrop instead of flat black.
- Ships are lit craft. Hulls are drawn from a single key light with a shaded facet, panel seams, a cockpit, wingtip nav lights and a hot engine slot, with a rim that runs warm on one side and cool on the other.
- You can see your shots. Rounds are brighter and larger with a coloured streak trailing along their heading, so you can find your fire in a busy frame and tell whose it is.
- Thrusters are flames. A continuous plume with a white-hot throat, replacing the chain of separate dots.
- Kills land. A brief freeze, a camera punch, a directional shake driven by where the damage came from, and knockback when you take a hit.
- Asteroids are lit and cratered, health bars drain, and captured Conquest sectors glow at their rim instead of flooding the screen with a grey wash.
The HUD
- The pilot panel is an instrument. The old readout was nine rows of monospace text with bars made of block characters, which meant they could never animate. It is now a drawn panel with a level badge, a hull meter that eases and flashes on damage, and an XP meter that creeps.
- Secondary stats moved into a drawer that appears when a stat changes or while you hold Tab, so the panel stays quiet while you fly.
- The radar is a proper scope, the match clock has a frame, and colour now means something — chrome for labels, bright only for live values, amber for time, red for damage.
- On a phone the HUD gets out of the way, and the touch controls are designed hardware with hit areas that match where they are drawn.
- The game takes the whole screen during a match — no page header or footer around the arena.
Sound
- Flying makes a sound. A continuous engine bed that tracks your throttle and speed.
- Every effect was resynthesized with a real transient, body and low end, running through a proper mix with reverb and compression so the game sounds like one space instead of separate beeps. Repeated shots vary instead of machine-gunning the same tone.
- Kills have their own confirm, and the big moments duck the mix so they land.
Menus
- The home screen is one composition with a single place to press, illustrated art per mode, and your ship flying on it.
- Mode screens show the game being played rather than a stack of identical buttons, and Settings uses drawn controls instead of browser form fields.
- The Ship Editor is a real collection screen — every cosmetic is previewed as artwork with a rarity tier and a progress bar toward unlocking it, instead of a list of text labels.
- You can start a match immediately on a phone; the callsign field is a rename, not a gate.
Version 1.2
June 5, 2026
New weapon & power-up
- Ricochet weapon — a bouncing bolt that banks off the arena edges and asteroids up to three times before it fizzles. Grab it from a level-up card and bank trick-shots around cover to tag pilots you can't hit head-on.
- Ghost power-up — a timed boost that lets enemy bullets phase straight through your hull. Your ship flickers translucent while it's active — but watch out: flak blasts, the harvester beam, and ramming still hit, so it's not a full shield.
Ranks & ship colours
- Career rank — your lifetime stats now earn you a rank, from Recruit up through Cadet, Ensign, Lieutenant, Commander, Captain, and Admiral. See your current tier and progress to the next on the Career screen. (Like everything else, it's computed on your device — no account.)
- Unlockable ship colours — every pilot now starts in clean white, and you unlock new hull colours by ranking up. Pick your colour (and ship skin) in Career & Achievements — the colour picker is gone from the main menu.
Daily quests
- A new quest every day — alongside the weekly challenge, a fresh daily objective rotates in each day. Complete enough of them to earn the Grinder badge.
More to unlock
- New engine trails — Inferno (250 Ricochet kills), Aurora (capture 100 loot crates), Nebula (play 10 hours).
- New name badges — [GRIND] (complete 7 daily quests) and [ELITE] (win 25 matches).
- Your equipped name badge is now visible above your ship to everyone in the match — show it off.
Support the game
- Buy Me a Coffee — there's a support widget in the corner of the menu if you'd like to chip in for development. Supporters get a code to redeem in the Career screen for an exclusive coffee-cup badge and a set of coffee-styled ship skins (Espresso, Latte, Caramel) — both show to everyone in-game. Thank you for keeping the servers running.
Version 1.1
June 5, 2026
New weapon & power-up
- Tri-Shot weapon — fires three bolts in a tight forward fan. Grab it from a level-up card; great for spraying down a group at mid range.
- Magnet power-up — a timed boost that widens your pickup reach, so you vacuum up nearby loot just by flying near it. Perfect for hoovering the pile a fallen rival drops.
New boss variant
- Enraged Mothership — every so often the mothership warps in enraged: much tankier, noticeably faster, and escorted by extra minions. Its fatter health bar warns the whole lobby it's the harder fight. Bring friends — and still collect the pile of loot crates when it goes down.
Career, achievements & cosmetics
All of this is saved locally on your device — no account, no login, nothing sent to a server.
- Career & Achievements menu — a new button on the main menu opens your full profile.
- Lifetime stats — kills, deaths, K/D, matches played, wins, motherships downed, loot crates captured, bounties claimed, your longest kill streak, best single-match score, favorite weapon, and total playtime.
- 17 achievements to chase, from First Blood to Annihilator.
- Unlockable cosmetics you can equip from the Career screen:
- Engine trails — Ember (100 career kills), Plasma (1,000 kills), Toxic (down 10 motherships), Void (10,000 kills).
- Name badges — [VET] (play 100 matches), [MVP] (win a match), [PRO] (claim 10 bounties), [ACE] (reach a 10-kill streak).
- Weekly challenge — a rotating goal that resets every week.
Kill-streak callouts
- String kills together without dying and you'll earn escalating callouts — Double Kill, Triple Kill, Mega Kill, Rampage, Unstoppable, and Godlike — each with its own sound.
Play with friends
- Custom lobby settings — when you host a private game you now set the rules first: the win target (first to 10, 20, 30, or 50 kills), how many bots fill the lobby, and which mutator is active.
Mobile & display fixes
- In-game announcements no longer run off the edge on narrow phones — they wrap and scale to fit any screen.
- The HUD now respects notches and rounded corners (safe areas) on modern phones, and the scoreboard always fits on screen.
Polish
- Cleaned up the interface across the menus, HUD, and overlays for a clearer, less cluttered look.
Version 1.0 — Launch
June 2026
- Free-for-all neon arena — fly, shoot, and stack power-ups in a wrap-around space arena. First pilot to the kill target wins the match.
- Level up & pick cards — every level lets you choose an upgrade: new weapons (Shotgun, Railgun, Homing, Flak, Twin, Harvester beam), orbiting defense shells, or big stat boosts.
- The Bounty — the top killer is marked and hunted by everyone for bonus rewards.
- Mothership world event — a giant boss and its escorts warp in for the whole lobby to take on together.
- Loot & comebacks — loot crates, breakable asteroids, and an economy where fallen ships scatter their power-ups for everyone, so anyone can claw back into the fight.
- Daily mutators — a different game-changing modifier every day of the week.
- Play with friends — private rooms via shareable invite links, plus a spectate mode to watch live games.
- Mobile & onboarding — full touch controls and a built-in how-to-play guide.
Contact
Spotted a bug or have an idea? Email [email protected].