Period: August 22, 2025 Total Commits: 30

Daily Dev Update: Player Economies, Action Queues, and Corpse Exploder - August 22, 2025

Quick one today. We focused on getting the alpha playable end-to-end over HTTPS, smoothed out blockchain actions with a queue, pushed a major economy refactor to per-player gold/levels, and shipped the Corpse Exploder tower. Also knocked out a bunch of rendering and UI fixes that should make matches feel a lot smoother.

What’s New

• Player economies (per-player gold and levels)

  • Each player now manages their own gold and level. You start with 250 gold and earn a base income of 5.
  • Spending is on you: towers, minion assignments, and level-ups come from your own wallet.
  • Bounties from kills still split evenly across the team.
  • Minion strength scales with the level of the player who assigned them, so team comps matter more.
  • The HUD now shows your resources prominently.

• Corpse Exploder tower

  • Reactive tower that listens for nearby minion deaths and detonates a scaling explosion based on the dead minion’s max HP (roughly 25–50% by level).
  • Radius scales by level (about 1.5–2.0 tiles). Uses proper circular (Euclidean) distance for range and damage falloff.
  • Balanced with a clear 5-second cooldown and no standard “shooting” cycle, so it won’t spam.
  • Great for area denial and chain reactions if you set up the kill zones right.

  [screenshot: Corpse Exploder chain reaction VFX at 93b7e58]

• Seamless blockchain actions via an action queue

  • Actions now queue and execute sequentially, which removes “wallet not ready” errors and race conditions.
  • The GameHUD shows queued actions as icons so you know what’s pending.
  • All game actions auto-approve behind the scenes with embedded wallets—no popups.

  [screenshot: GameHUD showing player gold and action queue icons at 28af34d]

• Full minion roster unlocked

  • All remaining minions are in: Ice Elemental, Sky Drone, Overlord, Wraith, Yokesh, Zotif, Skeleton, and more.
  • Consistent stats format (bounty, damage, proper size). Air and ground variety for clearer counterplay.

• Level Upgrade UI and roster polish

  • Real sprite icons (not emojis), with a detailed stat card on selection.
  • Auto-replace the oldest pick when you’re at the cap—keeps flow moving.
  • Cleaner layout and default fallbacks for missing sprites.

  [screenshot: Updated Level Upgrade modal with sprite icons at 4ac51a6]

• Smarter placement rules

  • You can’t place towers that would block pathing anymore. Reduces “oops, soft-locked the lane” moments.

What Got Fixed

• Corpse Exploder reliability

  • Fixed a bug where “non-shooting” towers were still having their shot timers reset by the generic fire() call.
  • Cooldowns now respected, correct range math, and proper trigger timing.

• Health bars you can trust

  • Correct percent calculations, consistent centering, and no more “fading when damaged.” They only fade on death.

• VFX correctness and lifespan

  • Proper multi-row sprite sheet handling and UV mapping.
  • VFX entities have a real lifecycle and clean up correctly when done.
  • Explosion visuals now line up with what’s actually happening.

• Performance (2–3x FPS improvement)

  • Stopped disposing GPU resources every frame; reuse is the default now.
  • Cached geometries/materials and textures (including VFX and spawn icons).
  • Disabled expensive damage number textures for now (will revisit with a cheaper approach).
  • Color correctness: SRGB output, crisp textures with nearest filtering.
  • Added an on-screen FPS counter for quick sanity checks.

  [screenshot: FPS counter and improved color/contrast in battle at b5f67e6]

• Wallet and connectivity

  • Privy integration stabilized with retry logic and better error handling.
  • HTTPS-by-default for the alpha with real certs, services bound to 0.0.0.0.
  • Fallback funding flow for dev environments so tests don’t stall.

What’s Still Broken

• Damage numbers are disabled for performance. We’ll bring them back with a lightweight overlay once it’s efficient.
• Rare wallet init hiccups can still happen. The queue and retries hide most of it; re-login usually clears the rest.
• Corpse Exploder in extreme chain reactions can still cause brief hitches on lower-end GPUs. Better batching is on deck.
• Balance is a work in progress. We did minor tuning today; expect iteration as the per-player economy shifts the meta.

Under the Hood

• Economy and contracts

  • Team-level progression moved to per-player mappings and checks.
  • Client state tracks individual gold/levels with a clean initialization flow.
  • UI updated across the board to reflect your own resources.

• Transaction flow and UX

  • Privy embedded wallets with UI suppressed for seamless auto-approval.
  • Action queue ensures strictly ordered blockchain calls to avoid race issues.
  • Better failure surfaces: gas estimation errors and retries are now caught and handled gracefully.

• Rendering and assets

  • Sprites use MeshBasicMaterial for vibrancy; terrain keeps lighting for mood.
  • GPU resource reuse, geometry/material caches, and texture caching to cut spikes.
  • VFXEntity class manages animation frames and lifecycle cleanly.

What’s Next

• Balance pass for the new player economies: income curves, minion costs, and tower synergies (Corpse Exploder + slow/control setups).
• Bring back readable, performant damage numbers.
• More profiling around chain explosions and large-scale skirmishes.
• Practice bots are getting some attention to make solo queueing less lonely.

Try It Out

We’ve wired up the alpha to run over HTTPS with real certs. If you want to kick the tires:

• Head to alpha.towerstorm.com
• Log in (email/social/wallet), place some towers, queue a few actions, and see how the new economy feels
• If something breaks, a quick refresh and re-login usually clears it. Send us the steps you took and we’ll chase it down.

Thanks to everyone sending bug reports and screenshots. It helps a lot. Keep them coming.