Nothing was played this round. The code was typechecked and reviewed, and the build is deployed.
The full title, and no year
The game's full title is now Atomic Acres: Aliens Attack. The title screen shows the ATOMIC ACRES logo with ALIENS ATTACK under it, and the browser tab and page description use the full title. The line above the logo is gone, so the screen is the logo, the subtitle, the tagline and the menu.
Every named year was removed from the game's text, signs and story. The atomic-age art stays exactly as it was.
The first town used to be called Hollowmere Acres. It is now Atomic Acres, and the rename covers the first area, the newspaper (The Atomic Acres Crier), the mayor's title, the welcome sign, the headlines, the dawn tally and the boot text. The other areas keep their names. Saves are untouched, because the internal storage keys did not change, so existing progress still loads.
A critic for sound
A critic cannot hear, so it measures. A new tool checks every sound in the game, all 545 clips, and ranks the worst first. It looks at how loud each clip is, whether it clips, how much silence comes before the sound starts, whether it stops mid-sound, how its energy spreads from bass to treble, hiss, loop clicks, and whether two different events use the same recording. Each clip is measured twice, once as the raw file and once run through a copy of the game's own mix, so the numbers describe what a player actually hears. A full run takes about 2.5 minutes.
The notes appear in the Sound Editor, where a "Critic's worst first" switch turns it into one ranked listening list.
The first version was wrong
It scored the whole game 1.6 out of 10. Its "muffled" rule flagged almost every natural recording, and its "hiss" rule fired on every normal fade-out. Both rules were rebuilt on band levels and a flat-noise test, and the extreme results were checked by hand before the numbers were trusted.
What it found
| Sounds | Count |
|---|---|
| Total | 185 |
| Clean | 38 |
| Minor problems only | 27 |
| A clear problem | 117 |
| Serious problems | 3 |
The 3.5 out of 10 it reports is the share of sounds with no clear problem, which makes it a defect count and not a grade. The serious three are two sounds that start more than 40 ms late and one that clips. Some guns have a weak crack: the pumpkin cannon, the blunderbuss and the salt gun, while the alien blaster has no low-end thump. The ten ambience loops are stored at 16 kHz, so nothing above 8 kHz survives, and 82 recordings are reused across two or more different sounds.
Credits
A Credits screen is now on the title menu. It is built from the clips that actually ship, so a credit that a sound licence requires cannot go missing. Until now the game had no credits anywhere, though 63 of its clips need one.
Difficulty that adapts
A hidden "heat" level follows how the squad is doing: damage taken, falls, how fast nights are cleared and how fast neighbours are freed. A struggling squad gets fewer invaders, slower Dread and softer hits within about half a minute. A squad that is cruising gets a bit more to deal with the next night. It stays inside safe limits, Assist mode and the Moons cap it lower, co-op is judged per player, and boss fights are left as designed.
Faster on weak PCs, not yet measured
On the Fast and Balanced settings, the level's static scenery is grouped into bigger chunks. By the code's count that cuts draw calls about 2.5 times, most of all in the zoomed-out co-op view and the moon-shadow pass. Grass thins out only at the widest zoom, a few shaders skip work on pixels that would not show, and Ultra keeps its exact look.
That number is a count from the code, not a frame rate from a run. A performance change does not count until it has been measured in play, and the next AI Watch or play session will show it.
A small fix
A Council scene left open when AI Watch is stopped can no longer wipe the title menu, and the sunrise tally only says "not one chair empty" when everyone really came home.