Period: September 2, 2025 Total Commits: 10

Daily Dev Update: Smarter Bots, Clearer Starts, and a Greener Battlefield

Hey, here’s what we’ve been working on today. The big themes: bots now make smarter economy choices, match starts are clearer and fairer, the battlefield got a visual pass, and we added on-chain usernames so lobbies feel more human. Also fixed a handful of stability and polish issues.

What’s New

On-chain usernames and bot names

• Usernames are now stored on-chain and show up in the lobby and HUD.
• New users get a username modal with random suggestions. It sticks between sessions.
• Bots now pull from a curated list of names instead of generic labels.
• Practical impact: it’s easier to identify teammates/opponents at a glance, and lobbies feel less like wallets and more like people.

[screenshot: multiplayer HUD with usernames and Waiting countdown at d3e0411]

A greener battlefield and clearer units

• New grass background that extends beyond the board edges for a cleaner frame.
• Lighter, semi-transparent grid lines improve placement readability.
• Minion sprites are 20% larger, with crisper edges and better depth sorting.
• Configurable oval shadows (with a performance toggle). Flying minions sit higher and drop shadows lower for better height cues.
• Shadows render in a single instanced draw call, so it looks better without hurting performance much.

[screenshot: updated battlefield grass and lighter grid at 3956ddb] [screenshot: minion shadows and flying unit depth at 3956ddb]

VFX and animation polish for towers

• Added ShootVFX hooks to tower configs so towers feel responsive when they fire.
• Towers now keep their last rotation when they lose target instead of snapping to zero. Looks steadier and helps telegraph intent.

[screenshot: new shoot VFX on towers at be69ffe] [screenshot: towers maintain rotation when idle at 1231d68]

Bots that think in gold-per-minute, not impulses

• Leveling priorities now scale with your minion spawns:
  • 10+ spawns: heavy leveling priority (70%).
  • 5–9 spawns: medium priority (50%).
• Level goals track cumulative gold correctly and look at income rate before committing.
• Bots are more patient, with a much lower chance to abandon a save for level (5% vs 20%).
• Mid/late game puts more weight on levels to unlock stronger rosters.
• Result: bots save, level, and transition power spikes more like experienced players.

What Got Fixed

Match start flow and HUD

• Player initialization pulls from the fetched player list again, so the HUD populates correctly.
• The game waits for everyone to pick initial units before starting.
• The wave countdown shows “Waiting…” instead of a giant placeholder number.
• Late-joining players now trigger the right events and slot into the HUD.

What you’ll notice:

• Players appear with gold/income/level right away.
• No more surprise early starts while you’re still choosing units.
• Clear status while the lobby gets ready.

Bot reliability under load

• Player tracking: bots now detect all joined players by replaying from lobby creation and listening to the factory contract. This fixes bounty split math.
• No more negative gold: the AI loop is async/await driven and blocks overlapping transactions. Actions complete before new ones begin.
• Cleaner exits: bots store and release keys correctly; repeated joins are handled gracefully; guardrails prevent negative block numbers.

Tower animation edge cases

• Idle frames now respect last rotation, so turrets don’t snap back when targets disappear. Smooths out jitter and micro-stutters in visuals.

Backend startup issues

• Fixed a set of issues that made the chain backend occasionally fail to start. Less fiddling to get matches running.

What’s Still Broken

• We’re still tuning the bot leveling heuristic for edge cases (e.g., very low-income turtle strategies). If you see bots over-saving when they should stabilize, let us know.
• Shadows are configurable, but on some low-end machines the new visuals may cost a few FPS. Toggle shadows off if you need a smoother ride.
• Late join handling is better, but we’re watching for rare cases where the HUD might lag a player behind. If you notice mismatch between players in match vs HUD, ping us.

Under the Hood

• Event sourcing got an upgrade: bots now source from both match and factory events and filter to the correct match. The goal is consistent, up-to-date player lists for fair bounty and economy calculations.
• Concurrency guards: all bot transactions carry an “in progress” flag. Decisions won’t overlap, which eliminates negative gold and race conditions in unit selection flows.
• Rendering performance: minion shadows use instanced rendering (single draw call), and sprite sorting rules were tightened to reduce popping at path intersections.
• UX flow: username collection now sits cleanly in the initialization sequence and removes extra wallet UI from the lobby. Fewer steps before you play.

What’s Next

• More economic smarts for bots: factoring damage taken and leak risk into level timing, and learning better pivot points from income to board strength in PvP.
• Balance pass on early minion spawn income vs tower scaling. Goal is to keep early pressure viable without making greedy leveling too safe.
• VFX iteration: impact hits, trail clarity, and per-tower shoot effects.
• Continued HUD quality-of-life: clearer ready states and team info during pre-wave.

That’s it for today. If you run into oddities with the new start flow, late joins, or bot saving behavior, send a note with what happened and roughly when. It helps a lot.