The screen before the round is now a place

The screen before the round is now a place

The moment before you start a round used to be a box floating over the game. You looked at your own playfield through a hole in a menu. It is a room of its own now.

A room, not an overlay

The playfield disappears behind a full-screen retro backdrop that slowly cycles colour — the same filtered look the options screens use.

It fills the whole screen. The stage bar is hidden there and its job is done by a big headline in the room itself: "STAGE 1 · ROUND 3". You still know exactly where you are — you just read it in much larger type.

Opponent, target score and payout sit above the buttons as a proper heading instead of being crammed into them.

The bets are arcade tickets

Each stake is a ticket with notched edges and a perforation across the middle.

When you take a bet, the bottom part tears off. It comes loose at the perforation, tips over and falls.

The price is printed on that stub. So you literally watch yourself hand it over — that is the whole reason the name sits on the top half and the price on the bottom one.

It costs about a third of a second, and only when you actually bet. A round without a stake starts exactly as fast as before.

Easier to read

Every line on that screen is bigger — opponent name, target, round info, and the text on the tickets.

Boss ability descriptions are short now. They used to be paragraphs, and one of them literally read "Overclock: Overclock". A boss tells you what it does in one line; the rest you find out by fighting it.

From the workshop: the wall I ran into

The plan was simple — make the text bigger. Then I measured what was already there, and the plan fell apart: the longest ticket name, "SHORT BENCH", was using 209 of the 212 pixels it had. Three pixels of slack. Turning the dial up would have broken the word in half mid-render, and only in English, which is not the language I happened to be looking at.

The way out was already in the code: the name wraps, so what actually matters is the longest single WORD, not the longest line. That is "GLASKINN" in German, eight characters. It fits up to 26pt. The update ships 24, because at 26 the next long name anyone adds breaks silently.

Same story with the tear-off. The stub fell away cleanly, and a hard dark rectangle sat where it had been. Not a hole in the ticket: the button is disabled while it tears, and the theme's disabled style is a dark box. Found it by rendering the screen on a blue background instead of a gold one