the full changelog is available here: https://mysteriousspace.com/changelog/0-9-x/

but here are the highlights:

[*]damage and health numbers have been totally redone, basically from scratch. importantly, the numbers are all WAY SMALLER than before. for example, you now start with a shield that can take 3 points of damage in a world where enemies are dealing 1 point of damage per hit. there were a lot of other tweaks that were made to support this new scale of numbers… too many to mention here.

[*]bullets are now color-coded depending on whether an ally or enemy fired them. enemy bullets are red (normal), purple (bouncy), or blue (EMP); allied bullets are green (normal & bouncy), or cyan (EMP)

[*]you can now play local 4-player split-screen co-op. this allows up to 5 simultaneous players including an orbital (4 controllers, plus a keyboard). the game can theoretically support up to 8 (4 ships, each with an orbital), however the MonoGame library restricts the number of gamepads to 4 for reasons unknown.

[*]fixed a few uncommon crashes, made another attempt at fixing game shutdown issues for some playesr, and added more logging, to hopefully help with identifying some crashes.

the damage and health change was HUGE, and I think that, in the end, the game has become a little easier than before! this is either a good thing or a bad thing depending in your point of view :P I'm not too worried about it: the game's difficulty definitely changes from update to update based on new equipment, etc. for next month's release, though, I'll definitely try to inject a little more difficulty back into the game :)

finally, I should have a donation update by next weekend.

thanks for reading, and thanks for playing Mysterious Space! :)