Astro Loop 1.3

Astro Loop 1.3.

The Black Market's slot machine is now an arcade cabinet. In Endless mode the slots have been replaced by BELT RUN, a vintage vector shooter you can actually play. Insert a coin, fly a wire-frame ship through a rock belt, and shoot your way to 999. Every pilot keeps their own score and the cabinet keeps a top-five board. Outside Endless mode it is the same slot machine it always was.

TB-26 tells you where to go. Some new players were landing at the bar and stopping there, because nothing said the game was three pages wide. Sit on the bar for ten seconds on a first launch and he says the launchpad is next door. Medic, who cannot see who he is talking to, points out that there is nobody there.

Endless mode's asteroid belt scales better. Contact damage climbs from ten minutes on.

Also: the winning card in a Lucky Star draw is held long enough to read, weapon sounds keep up in a busy fight, and corrupted pilots keep their colour through the launch.

Fixes.

• Dying on Android 9 no longer takes the game down with it. Reported on a Galaxy Note 8. I still have no Android 9 device and could not reproduce it on an emulator, which renders through a different graphics stack entirely, so this is still a fix I hope works rather than know works. Below Android 10 the game now draws in software, which costs frame rate on that hardware. That is the deliberate trade: a slower game that survives its own death screen.
• An asteroid pays out once, however fast you were hitting it. Several shots landing on the same frame used to split the same rock repeatedly, each split running the whole payout again.
• The slot machine is a casino again: about ¥95 back per ¥100 over a long session. Rascal's rigged machine still pays you far better than the honest one, but it no longer clears the entire Black Market in fifty spins.
• An evolved weapon now replaces its base in the grid, and the weapon it replaces can no longer be offered to you afterwards.
• Volatile blasts land as the ring reaches you, and grant the same brief invulnerability everything else does. A chain of them used to deal several full hits in the same instant, which was unsurvivable however you were built. They damage enemies again too.
• Vampiric Core leeches from six targets at most, and the streams show you those six. The healing no longer scales with how crowded the screen is.
• Solar Storm leaves the boss where it stands, and respects the deflector shield that stops every other weapon. It used to shove the boss backwards on every strike, in the fight and through the cutscene after it.
• Uninstalling offers to keep your save, on Android 10 and up.
• A run survives the phone changing shape. Unfolding a foldable, or going into split-screen, used to end it outright.
• The launch stops buzzing, including if you background the app mid-drag. It would sometimes keep your device vibrating.
• Bar conversations only name pilots you have actually met.

Install options:

• Obtainium users: add this repo for auto-updates.
• Direct install: download the APK below (enable "install from unknown sources").
• Also on F-Droid.

Free and open source under GPLv3. No ads, no tracking, no internet permission.