Update 0.2.1 — The Redesign: the whole game, redrawn

Every screen and every arena in PUCKVPUCK has been redrawn. The redesign is visual — puck speeds, collisions, rules and the netcode are unchanged, so everything you have learned still works. The few gameplay changes that did go in are listed at the bottom, each one on its own line.

Title and menus

• A new opening screen. Two team pucks face each other over a lit court, under a bigger PUCK V PUCK wordmark and one clear PRESS ANY KEY.
• The main menu is three big choices — LOCAL GAME, ONLINE and TUTORIAL — each with a line that says what it is. Every other screen sits one row below.
• The menus are calm. The artwork no longer bobs, and the logo no longer glitches or pulses.
• Every other screen shares one look — Settings, Controls, Music Tracks, Match Setup, Profiles, Customize, Mods, Shop, Challenges and Credits — dark navy, with clearer text. The old synthwave grid is gone.
• Customize is two columns now, with a framed live preview of your puck and trail.

Lobbies, online and How To Play

• Both lobbies are redesigned: the match settings sit in a frame with the arena preview, the team panels are quieter, and the join prompts stay readable.
• ONLINE opens on four queue cards — 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 — with HOST GAME and ENTER VIA CODE as their own buttons.
• HOW TO PLAY has tabs and a three-column table for every action: what it does, the keyboard and mouse key, the controller button. The tutorial can now be started with a mouse click, and the SHOOTER and kill-streak pages have more room.

Arenas

• Soccer arenas have a court surface: a quiet grid with fine location dots. Goals have mesh nets and less glare.
• Dodgeball courts are an even navy floor with quiet markings, solid pads and machined bumpers. The big glowing centre rings are gone, and team colour lives on the pads only.

Pucks and balls

• The default puck has a machined, team-coloured face. All seven shape skins — Star, Triangle, Hexagon, Arrow, Diamond, Cross, Octagon — get a bevel, an inset groove and light that follows their real edges. Every skin keeps its exact hitbox.
• The soccer ball has a new finish: still white with its curved blue stripe, now with a panelled surface that catches the light.
• Dodgeballs have new finishes with rubber seams, and the tier is marked on the ball: one chevron on green, two on yellow. The BLACK ball keeps its spikes and its eyes.

SHOOTER

• All 15 weapons have their own silhouette — rails, scopes, receiver armour, launcher cones, a heavier blade. The gun on the floor is the gun in your hands.
• Projectiles come in four families — metal rounds, energy bolts, armoured explosive capsules and finned rockets — with a short trail that shows which way they are going. They are drawn bigger than before; hitboxes and damage are unchanged.
• Conventional guns eject brass casings, and grenades look like grenades — casing, lever and pin.
• Portals are metal iris housings with a dark well and spiral filaments. Same gold and cyan pairs, same timing.
• Your weapon panel is compact: the gun, a hull bar and your ammo.

Knockouts, kills and goals you can see

• A dodgeball knockout used to be a puck vanishing between one frame and the next — no flash, nothing. It now bursts: a white flash that cools to the team's colour, a ring and flying shards.
• SHOOTER deaths get the same burst. A bullet kill used to be a tiny sparkle most people missed.
• A goal fires the burst too, in the scoring team's colour, right on the ball.

All three are effects only: they start after the knockout, kill or goal has already counted.

Gameplay changes and fixes since the last update

• The MODS screen stopped working if you opened it after playing a SHOOTER mod or SOCCER WITH GUNS. Fixed in today's 0.2.1.
• SHOOTER pickups are more forgiving. Your puck touching a weapon pad's rim now takes the gun. Before, you could roll across the glow around a pad and leave without it. The pickup checks the gun's real shape plus your puck, with a little grace. Solid cover still blocks it.
• Pause menu on a controller: B and ESC now back out of MANAGE TEAMS and OPTIONS instead of unpausing the match. Before, B could leave a controller stuck in MANAGE TEAMS for good. MANAGE TEAMS also has a BACK row.
• A controller can switch TEAMS / FREE-FOR-ALL in both lobbies (L3). The T key now works online too.
• A READY player can change sides again. The lock from the last update also stopped two players sharing one PC from switching teams.
• SOCCER WITH GUNS: on most maps the ball was being "rescued" to the centre in the middle of open play, because the rule read another arena's size. Fixed, and a dead ball now returns to the real middle of the pitch. Winding up a throw no longer builds a BARRIER wall in front of you: the button throws the ball when you hold it and spends a streak when you don't.
• Dodgeball through PORTALS: a ball that goes through a portal no longer keeps steering toward the target it had before it went in.
• Credits: Yonathan's Instagram is now a link, with a QR code beside it.

Tell us what you think of the new look — and what breaks. Discord link on the store page, #bug-reports.