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Novus Striker

Release notes

Every build we have shipped, newest first. 10 so far.

Each release is published under an id that is a hash of its own contents, so the id below is not a version number we chose. It is what those exact files add up to. Subscribe by RSS if you would rather be told than check.

b1bdd147090b5c25~87 MB downloadNow playing

Goals stop costing frames, and the ball keeps its feet

Three places wrote a velocity to a ball the engine had already made kinematic. A kinematic body refuses that write and answers it with a warning built from a full stack trace, so the goal presentation was paying for two of them every frame a goal was on screen. The dribble had the same fault with a worse symptom: while the ball was held for a goal or a replay, the drive computed where the ball should be and then had the write discarded. This release also replaces the main menu backdrop, whose upper right was less detailed than its centre, which is the opposite of what a plate sitting behind menu text needs.

What's new

  • Replace the main menu backdrop with a plate that keeps its centre quiet.

Fixed

  • Stop the goal presentation writing velocity to a kinematic ball every frame.
  • Guard the dribble drive so a held ball is not driven and silently ignored.
  • Restore replay bodies without writing a velocity a kinematic body refuses.
40da7f5bb4b33784~87 MB download

Matches start again on WebGL

Starting a match could leave the loading screen up forever. The renderer asked WebGL for a multisampled depth copy, which the platform cannot compile, so the pass that every match camera depends on failed and the match never appeared. Turning multisampling off in the WebGL render pipeline removes the impossible shader. This release also publishes the roster, arena, audio and career work finished since the last published build.

What's new

  • Promote forty-six reviewed Mixamo clips through override controllers.
  • Dress the arenas and finish the menu art set.
  • Add the character voice bank and close the cue gaps.
  • Close the menu and career integration gaps.
  • Ship fifteen roster characters with AURA in MAESTRO's slot.

Fixed

  • Fix the match loading screen never handing over to play. The WebGL render pipeline requested multisampling, which forces URP's depth-copy pass to sample a multisampled texture; that type does not exist in WebGL 2, so the shader failed to compile and the pass could not run. Because shader variants compile asynchronously the failure was intermittent, which is why a page refresh sometimes reached the match.
  • Stop the renderer probing multisample formats the WebGL context does not support, which was logging an invalid-format error on every startup.
  • Repair torn character meshes at import, and fail blank captures.
  • Fix hit-stop, ally AI authority, and the WebGL link failure.
1720d9270d0c823f~81 MB download

Definitive beta visual and mobile polish

This beta removes the black WebGL renderer regression, restores full-detail character and pitch materials, retunes every match camera around active play, spaces AI around one loose-ball presser, upgrades club selection previews, sharpens mobile fullscreen and publishes fresh in-engine captures.

What's new

  • Tactical, overhead, chase, sideline, side and first-person cameras now use stable active-play framing with smoother target blending and arena-safe sightlines.
  • Home and away selection now includes club crests, kit swatches, a live striker preview and match identity before lineup confirmation.
  • The website now publishes a current tactical gameplay capture and renders the Unity canvas at a bounded 2x device-pixel density on mobile.
  • Phone-sized WebGL displays use a compact 1440x810 logical canvas and enlarged typography so menus, prompts and the match HUD remain readable in landscape fullscreen.
  • Fresh in-engine captures cover all three arenas and all fourteen playable or career-unlockable strikers and bosses.

Fixed

  • The WebGL mobile renderer no longer applies the full-screen ink pass that made the pitch and characters black.
  • Hero character, boss and keeper meshes retain high-quality import settings while world and crowd assets remain governed for the 90 MiB budget.
  • Only the nearest eligible AI player chases a loose ball; supporting teammates hold distinct width, depth and rebound anchors instead of collapsing into a crowd.
  • The browser F1 conflict is removed: the in-game control legend now opens with H.
  • Mobile fullscreen hides the website toolbar and presents exactly one labelled Exit fullscreen control in the safe top-right corner.
  • The compressed playable is 80.65 MiB, below the 90 MiB public-release target.
81bc6f7486025b9a~69 MB download

The complete arcade-football rebuild

This release rebuilds the match around readable team play: wider cameras, assisted passes and support runs, 5v5 or 4v4 lineups, aerial finishes, physical Power Strike keeper contests, original items, goal replays, highlights and a coherent career/menu flow. It also installs the five career bosses, restores authored character materials and teamwear, and adds full keyboard, controller, touch and mobile-fullscreen support.

What's new

  • Choose 5v5 with four outfield players and an AI keeper, or the alternate 4v4 format. Lineups, formations, AI lanes, cameras and local-player capacities follow the selected format.
  • Assisted ground, lob and free passes now reserve a receiver, guide support runs and support buffered volleys, headers, bicycles and scissor finishes. Lob and free-pass modifiers are first-class rebindable keyboard, controller and touch actions.
  • Team-mate and opponent AI now evaluates open carries, progressive passes, one-timer lanes, shots, defensive cover and items instead of repeatedly dashing straight at goal.
  • Five original items, a one-slot inventory and fair seeded pickup lanes are available through match presets, with AI use, HUD feedback and replay events.
  • Goals feed a rolling replay recorder, cinematic goal playback, a skippable end-match reel and a persistent local highlight gallery with favorites and deletion.
  • Career, progression, achievements, Strike Road, earned-STK gear shop, tournament settlement, boss unlocks, roster browser and match-result flows now have dedicated live-updating screens.
  • Vexa, Ironhorn, Prism, Aegis and Sunmane are staged as career bosses with original mechanics, balanced profiles, teamwear-ready materials and defeat-to-unlock progression.
  • Menus use responsive previews, arena and roster captures, animated navigation, controller focus, pointer/touch feedback, safe areas and an asynchronous branded handoff into Unity.
  • Menu and match music now cycle through separate playlists, while expanded UI, gameplay, crowd, progression, item and replay banks provide interaction feedback without stacking audio sources.

Fixed

  • Characters retain their authored fur, skin, scales and body colours; only the kit and accent slots take club colours. Cold-start fallback polygons and black material imports are blocked by validation.
  • Tactical, overhead, sideline, side and chase cameras are pulled back and constrained around a planar field window instead of an oversized spherical target. First-person near clipping and uncontrolled spins are guarded, and CPU players no longer show local-player numbers.
  • Local Co-op and Versus require explicit joined devices, side assignments and ready states. A single laptop no longer silently invents extra local players before filling remaining slots with AI.
  • Settings, controls, team management and progression layouts refresh immediately, preserve canonical camera labels and remain legible across desktop, ultrawide, 4:3 and mobile landscape.
  • Mobile players get a safe-area-aware website control above the Unity canvas to exit native or pseudo fullscreen and return to the site without discarding the loaded session.
  • The playable download is 69.04 MiB after governed model and audio compression, below the 90 MiB release target and GitHub's per-file limit.
2ef592aa46f042f6~78 MB download

Nine real characters, teams you can tell apart, music, and a goal that celebrates itself

The nine sculpted athletes are in the game, wearing their club's colours. Until now both sides played in the same kit, and the only thing separating them was the coloured ring under each player's feet. The stadium's props are visible for the first time, the side-on camera no longer puts a wall between you and the pitch, and a goal is now an event on screen rather than a word in the banner. There is also music.

What's new

  • Teams play in their club's colours. Each athlete's shirt, shorts, socks and boots now take the kit palette, with a contrasting waistband, so a glance tells you who is who.
  • The nine sculpted characters are the squad (the fox, the gator, the shark, the golem and the rest) replacing the placeholder bodies that had been standing in for them.
  • A goal gets its own screen: who scored, how it went in, how fast it crossed the line, and a live turntable portrait of the scorer in their kit.
  • Music. A menu theme and a match track from an attribution-not-required library.
  • A live character preview on the team screen, so you can see the athlete in a slot rather than read their name.
  • The stadium's fittings are visible. Advertising boards line the walls facing the pitch, and spectators, camera rigs and banners sit where a camera in the bowl can actually see them.

Fixed

  • The side-on camera no longer films through the stand. Every camera view is an offset from the play rather than a fixed position, so as the ball drifted towards a touchline the lens travelled outside the stadium: with the ball on the near side it ended up nearly forty metres out, behind a seven-metre wall and nine tiers of crowd. The view is now held inside the bowl.
  • The eighty-eight stadium props were in the build all along and impossible to see. Thirty-four of them stood inside the crowd itself and most of the rest sat below the top of the wall, because the rule that kept scenery off the pitch said nothing about height.
  • Every goal in the game reported no scorer. The goal event was built to carry who struck it, whether it was an own goal, how it was scored and how hard, and the goal line raised a bare team number instead, so the scorer callout and the power-strike celebration were unreachable.
  • The characters no longer render untextured. Their artwork is baked into each model rather than shared with the rest of the project, and the import treated that as a fault and overwrote it.
3ed11f981d57c26b~69 MB download

A bigger pitch, a stadium around it, and controls that follow the camera

The pitch is larger and the camera sits further back, so players read as athletes on a field rather than filling the screen. The stadium around them is furnished for the first time: dugouts, tunnels, a scoreboard, lighting rigs, a broadcast position and a crowd close enough to see. The largest fix is the controls: in the touchline camera views, which versus always uses, every direction you pressed was a quarter turn out.

What's new

  • The pitch is larger, and the camera pulls back to match. Both were asked for together: the camera was framing the ball so tightly that players filled the screen whatever size the pitch was.
  • The stadium is furnished. Dugouts with canopies, a tunnel behind each goal, a scoreboard, speaker arrays on the walls, floodlight rigs, a broadcast position and spectators in the near rows.
  • Flags and banners move in the wind, fans shift in their seats, floodlights settle, and the trophies and pickups on the display turn. Nothing moves in step with anything else.
  • New match balls for all four types, and a new look for the gold gear tier.
  • The pitch surface is mown in bands that catch the light in alternating directions, and it wears where a real pitch wears: both goalmouths and the centre circle.
  • The download is compressed for the first time. This release adds a great deal more to look at and costs about ten megabytes more than the last one; uncompressed it would have been double.

Fixed

  • Movement now follows the camera. In the two touchline views, which a versus match always uses, pressing forward sent your striker across the pitch instead of up it, because the input was being read against the world rather than against what you could see. Skill-stick flicks had the same fault, and a spin move went sideways only if you happened to be facing one particular way.
  • The ball you see is now the size the ball actually is. It was being drawn at two-fifths of its true size, so it appeared to rebound off nothing and pass through feet.
  • Charging a shot now visibly charges the ball. The glow had been described, coloured and tested for, but nothing in the game ever lit it.
  • A ball driven hard into either end corner could leave the arena. The end walls had been sized for a much older, narrower pitch and no longer reached the side walls.
  • Opposition and team-mates now use the full width of the pitch. Their movement was bounded by a box measured for a smaller field, so they never worked the wings.
  • Keepers stand on their line. In a freshly opened arena they were positioned nearly fifteen metres in front of it.
e9304a5003e022e6~58 MB download

Five stats, grounded feet and a stat model that actually reached the game

The fifth stat is now something you can spend points on and something the game reads, feet plant on the pitch instead of floating over it, and a first session opens with the offer of a walkthrough. Most of this release is repair: the five-stat model had been added to the code without ever reaching the saved profiles or the character data.

What's new

  • Passing is allocatable on the create screen. The stat rows were still the old four, so the fifth stat could never be spent on the one screen that exists to spend it.
  • Passing now drives what it is for: how readily a pass finds a teammate, and how deep a through-ball into space may be played.
  • Foot grounding, so feet meet the surface under them rather than the height the animation assumed.
  • A first session is offered the training walkthrough, and can decline it for good.
  • Body checks and team-tackle boosts scale with Strength.

Fixed

  • A custom striker made before this release loaded as a flat 70 in every stat. The save upgrade that converts an old four-stat profile existed but was never reachable, so an existing striker's allocation was discarded on load.
  • Every character in the game loaded with four of five stats at their lowest possible value. The character data files still described the old four stats, and the renamed fields were simply dropped when read.
  • Body checks scaled with Shooting instead of Strength, so the heaviest strikers shoved like mid-table forwards.
  • The pass assist judged a striker on ball control rather than vision.
  • The arena energy rail rendered as a dark strip instead of glowing.
  • Archetype character data had drifted from the values the create screen offers.
699233c7147acadf~48 MB download

Species characters, arcade feedback and mechanic fixes

The squad was rebuilt with faces and three distinct species, the pitch got a crowd and match effects, and a run of mechanics that had been contradicting each other were corrected.

What's new

  • Characters rebuilt at arcade proportions, with faces and three distinct species.
  • A world-space charge arc, so a charging shot reads on the pitch instead of only in the HUD.
  • Team-coloured player indicators.
  • Pitch dressing and a crowd.
  • Match visual effects.
  • The two charge mechanics, which had been contradicting one another, reconciled.

Fixed

  • Half the squad rendered as untextured whitebox: a club lists three roster ids while player ids run 0 to 5.
  • Characters rendered black under the single directional light.
  • Short passes were physically impossible to receive: a 0.3 second loosen window applied to every pass, and a short pass crosses its 2 to 5 metres inside it.
  • Allies scored own goals by aiming at a cursor point left stale after control handed off.
  • Two menus drew as floating cards with the live main menu still visible behind and around them.
e7466503acf1744e~44 MB download

Sculpted characters, the skill stick, and a failed load that finally says so

The overhaul build: animation wired to real controllers, a three-point lighting rig, ACES and bloom with HDR actually enabled, the physical Power Strike and the skill stick. On the site, a load that fails now says it failed.

What's new

  • Sculpted characters with the animation set wired to Animator controllers.
  • A three-point lighting rig.
  • ACES tonemapping and bloom, with HDR enabled. Without it both were inert.
  • The physical Power Strike.
  • The skill stick, driven by a gesture recogniser rather than a rising-edge check.
  • Settings that persist between sessions.

Fixed

  • A failed load was indistinguishable from a slow one. react-unity-webgl reports initialisationError and the page never read it, so a truncated payload, a bad Content-Encoding or an out-of-memory all showed the same frozen progress bar forever. Failures now say so and offer a reload.
  • No WebGL 2 check. Unity 6 WebGL requires it, and a browser without it sat on the loading bar indefinitely instead of being told to switch.
  • The controls legend had drifted: it still called Power Strike by its old name and described the skill stick as a flick.
  • The download size was overstated as roughly 75 MB in four places against an actual 44 MB. It is now summed from the release manifest at build time and cannot drift again.
a8a5619d6d28a5e3~41 MB download

Gameplay overhaul

The first overhaul build after launch, shipped alongside site-side work on the game player and the consent provider.

What's new

  • A gameplay overhaul WebGL build, replacing the launch-day one.
  • Substantial rework of the page that hosts the game.

What is coming

In order, not on dates. Each phase starts when the one above it is done. Problems in the build you can play today are listed as known issues.

Nothing is on it right now. Novus Striker is still in active development, but the current build declares no capability as planned-and-unbuilt, so there is no honest list to print here. Everything the game does today is already in the build above, and what changes next will show up in these patch notes when it ships.

    Only the current build is playable

    Older releases are listed as history, not as a download. The site serves one build at a time (b1bdd147090b5c25 right now) and the previous one is kept only as a rollback. There is no way to play an older version, and no archive of them.

    Known problems from these builds, and the dates they affected players, are on the status page.