The weather has been HOT this weekend. Being a brit, I'm not overly used to that! So I took most of the weekend off to work on my tan with my other half. It was lovely!

This evening, as the sun dipped below the horizon, I opened up the source code for Final Orbit and started chipping away at tomorrow's patch. I have been on fire, if I do say so myself. This patch is shaping up to be more of an update!

You'll notice some more options have been added to the menu. 'My stats' and 'Global stats'.

Your personal stats aren't currently collected in 0.1 but I'm aiming to have that implemented by 0.2. The global stats, however, are already being collected and will now be displayed as of 0.1.1.

Now, I noticed something that worried me more than it should have. Due to the nature of Final Orbit, a lot of people die. If the Earth is destroyed, billions upon billions of people go with it. This becomes a problem when it comes to displaying that statistic. I programmed a script that would abbreviate the statistic into the quadrillions but I worried that, if the game became popular (I have hope) I would just be waiting for the script to break. The moment that number ticked over to a quintillion deaths (a morbid concept), the game wouldn't know how to display the number.

Long story short, I have expanded the script to display numbers into the vigintillions, a number I expect never to reach!

The old 'message' system I had didn't exactly work. It was too obnoxious to use frequently (since it would place huge text in the middle of the screen) so I restricted it to game start/end text. On top of that, if the Windows version of 1.0 didn't immediately crash, you'd know that the message system didn't even work. While it worked just as expected in the HTML5 release, the Windows version just displayed a strange floating black square.

The new message system tucks itself into a corner and shares some more helpful information with you, for example: how many people just died when you failed to shoot down that last meteor.

A minor change but one I felt was needed, I re-titled the 'Supplies' menu to the 'Pods' menu. Only one of the pods in the 'Supplies' menu delivered supplies. So 'Pods' seemed to suit.

Other changes:

-You can now block incoming meteors by flying into their path. Obviously, you will incur quite a lot of damage by doing this but it can have its uses.

-The menu plays a noise when navigating now.

-I removed bloom and lighting (since they were very broken and not needed).

-I reworked the tutorial to use the new message system (also, it only plays the tutorial on your first game now).

-Minor fix: The rumble sound of incoming meteors could continue after exiting to menu. Now it doesn't.

There may even be more by release time tomorrow. We'll see.