Period: August 27, 2025
Total Commits: 14

Hey — here’s what we pushed today. Focused on clarity and competitive flow: smarter minion routing, a new tower to play with, a cleaner bottom bar, and a proper InfoPanel. We also put time into guest onboarding and alpha infra so it’s easier to jump in and play.

What’s New

• Smarter minion routing

  • Minions now target the castle they can reach via the shortest actual path, not a fixed order.
  • This removes weird edge cases where minions ran past a better target and improves PvP pressure reads.
  • You should feel counterplay decisions (block, bait, reroute) matter more.

• New death-and-decay tower (plus better animations)

  • Brought in the death-and-decay tower and cleaned up sprite handling to show the right frames at the right time.
  • Detonation frames are supported in non-instanced projectiles, so explosions look like explosions instead of sprite sheets.
  • Practical effect: clearer threat zones when this tower pops.

  [screenshot: death-and-decay tower detonation frames at 5be96fd]

• Cleaner bottom bar, clearer actions

  • New BottomBar layout: minions on the left, towers on the right, action queue centered.
  • Uses the real icons, not stand-ins. Less scanning, faster decisions under pressure.
  • Styling lines up with the top bar for a more cohesive look.

  [screenshot: redesigned bottom bar with minion and tower icons at 54a70c0]

• InfoPanel + team color pass

  • Selecting a tower or minion shows detailed stats: damage, range, cooldown countdown, kill count, health, and costs.
  • Team colors are carried through headers so ownership is obvious in PvP.
  • You can have a tower and a minion selected at the same time; right-click to clear both.

  [screenshot: info panel with team color highlights at 472e371]

• Placement clarity and color coding

  • You can now select towers even when you don’t have enough gold.
  • Placement feedback colors: green = valid, yellow = insufficient gold, orange = blocks path, red = invalid.

  [screenshot: tower placement colors showing yellow insufficient gold at 14c0335]

• Consistent health everywhere

  • Standardized on health/maxHealth (replacing hp/maxHp) across entities and UI.
  • Tower cooldowns now show a clear countdown timer instead of ambiguous states.

What Got Fixed

• Projectiles lingering on screen

  • Cleaned up instanced projectile data so dead targets don’t leave ghost shots behind.

• Minions walking through new towers

  • Path recalculates when towers are dropped, so routes update and collisions behave.

• Player B team view and spawn zones

  • We now initialize the correct team from chain state.
  • Spawn zone colors are consistent: green on opponent board (you can place), red on your own (you can’t).

• Guest onboarding and wallets

  • Automatic guest account creation on first visit, with clearer upgrade options.
  • Fixed missing embedded wallets after refresh and made the loading state sane.
  • General persistence issues should be resolved; we added logs to keep an eye on it.

• Selection and info mismatches

  • White glow selection effect behaves again.
  • Minion cost display now correctly shows gold (not souls).

What’s Still Broken (or at least “we’re watching it”)

• Guest accounts and wallets
  • The flow is much more reliable now, but we’ll keep monitoring persistence across refreshes and environments.
• Projectile cleanup edge cases
  • The fix covers the common cases; if you still see stuck visuals after chaotic fights, let us know with a timestamp.
• Path recalculation hitches
  • We’re watching for micro-stutters when a lot of towers drop at once.

Under the Hood

• Alpha infra upgrades

  • The alpha environment now runs on Reth instead of Anvil for better stability.
  • The client reads chain ID from environment config for safer deploys.
  • We’re standardizing on alpha.towerstorm.com for access and consistency.

• Rendering and animation correctness

  • Proper UV coordinate calculation for multi-frame sprite sheets.
  • Projectile renderer always runs a cleanup pass, even on empty sets.

• Naming and UI consistency

  • Shift to health/maxHealth across code and CSS for fewer special cases and clearer debug.

• Pathfinding logic

  • Distance checks now use real path length instead of naive proximity.
  • Minions dynamically retarget if castle states change and won’t spawn into unwinnable boards.

What’s Next

• A pass on PvP clarity under pressure: tighter cooldown telegraphs and clearer damage/range indicators at a glance.
• More tower readability in fights: additional FX polish to separate CC from burst.
• Continued onboarding friction work so you can get into a match faster with fewer steps.

Try It Out

If you want to poke at today’s changes, play on alpha.towerstorm.com. Guest accounts are created automatically; you can upgrade to a full account from the UI. If something feels off, drop a note with what you were doing and we’ll dig in.

Thanks for the steady stream of reports on pathing oddities and stuck projectiles. It’s getting there.