Period: August 31, 2025
Total Commits: 6

Daily Dev Update: Ice, Justice, and More Gold - August 31, 2025

Hey, here’s what we’ve been working on today. New control and economy tools landed, some visual cleanups went in, and we tightened up how castles take damage. Nothing too flashy, just getting the core loop cleaner and clearer.

What’s New

• Ice Tower (control tool)

  • Shoots iceballs that slow minions by 30–70% for 3–4 seconds, based on tower level.
  • Attack speed now scales per level for this tower, so higher levels fire faster.
  • Minion animations now slow with their movement so the visual matches the debuff.
  • Gameplay note: this tower sets up lanes for AOE or single-target burst. Use it to buy time, not to delete waves on its own.

  [screenshot: Ice Tower freezing a wave mid-lane at a74bddb]

• God of Justice (burst/AOE)

  • Instant “god-ray” attack that detonates on target and applies AOE magic damage.
  • Expanding ring VFX communicates the damage zone from small to large.
  • Cost is currently 350 gold to keep early rushes honest and make it a deliberate buy.
  • Gameplay note: this is a cleanup button for clumped threats. You’ll want some setup (stuns/slows) to get max value.

  [screenshot: God of Justice ring detonation over a clustered push at 230e52d]

• Gold Booster (economy support)

  • Nearby towers earn +10–40% extra gold on kills, scaling with Gold Booster level.
  • Fires a single-hit yellow electricity projectile and features 36-frame idle animation (our first tower with a true idle loop).
  • Boosted towers glow yellow so it’s obvious what’s benefiting.
  • Gameplay note: drop this behind your main kill lane. You’re trading immediate damage for long-term economy.

  [screenshot: Gold Booster aura with yellow-glow kill lane at 769b4f1]

What Got Fixed

• Projectiles and VFX

  • Electricity projectile duration now respects detonation timing and stays visible for its full lifetime.
  • Proper mesh cleanup for non-instanced projectiles to avoid lingering debris.
  • Fixed projectile VFX triggering for instant detonation bullets (like the god-ray).

• Flamethrower tuning and visuals

  • Restored continuous damage for its stream-style projectile.
  • Reduced AOE and tweaked offsets so coverage matches visuals more closely.
  • Fixed attached bullet animation/positioning for the flamethrower effect.

  [screenshot: Flamethrower lane coverage after offset tweak at 43a6b28]

• Auras and clarity

  • Aura glows only appear on the correct team’s board now.
  • Cleaned up aura visuals when switching views to prevent leftover effects.

• Minion animations and sprites

  • Death animations freeze on the last frame and stop updating during the fade.
  • Custom sprite sheet sizes supported for minions; knight and blacksmith assets look correct now.

• Castle damage fairness

  • Center-to-center distance check for castle collisions.
  • Minions must walk into the castle from any direction before damage applies. This removes corner pokes and weird early chip.

• Rendering correctness

  • Improved shader color space handling so sprites look consistent across effects.

What’s Still Broken

• Balance on the new towers is early. The Ice Tower’s slow windows and God of Justice’s burst may swing fights more than intended in certain comps.
• Gold Booster economy lines can snowball if your lane is already dominant. We’ll watch this and adjust either the radius or numbers if needed.
• With the castle collision change, edge-path corners might create odd pathing in rare layouts. If you see walk-in jitters, send a clip.
• Performance: large stacks of overlapping VFX are mostly fine now, but heavy spam can still dip frames on older GPUs.
• No matchmaking or bot changes today. Still gathering data from recent PvP sessions before we tweak those.

Under the Hood

• TypeScript: moved the Ice Tower and iceball logic over, reducing footguns and making balance data easier to track.
• Per-level attack speed handling is now consistent in the tower pipeline (used first by Ice Tower).
• Per-instance UV offsets in the instanced projectile renderer let multiple VFX share a sheet while animating independently.
• VFX animation system handles scaling with delays correctly now, which is why the God of Justice ring feels clean.
• Non-instanced projectile cleanup reduces memory pressure and visual leftovers during heavy fights.
• Expanded spriteSheetWidth/Height support for assets with non-standard dimensions.

What’s Next

• UI clarity for auras: show affected radius and a small buff tag on boosted towers.
• Balance passes on Ice Tower slow values and God of Justice cost/damage once we see more PvP data.
• Economy readability: make bonus gold events easier to read at a glance.
• Performance pass on instanced projectiles under stress cases.
• Start teaching bots to respect slows and prioritize aura targets so practice matches feel smarter.

Thanks for the bug reports and clips lately. It helps us zero in on the weird edge cases faster. If you run into anything off—especially around castle entry or instant-detonation visuals—drop a note with a screenshot or short video.