Daily Dev Update: Smarter Bots, Sharper Stars - September 12, 2025

Period: September 12, 2025
Total Commits: 4

Hey, here’s what we got done today. The headline items are smarter bot tower placement, a full tower upgrading flow with star visuals and quick keys, and a pass on minion economy and health scaling. A few fixes and some monitoring work under the hood too.

What’s New

• Tower upgrading (levels 0–5) with visual stars and UI controls

  • Towers start at level 0 and can go up to level 5.
  • Upgrade via the info panel button or press U when a tower you own is selected.
  • The info panel now shows upgraded stats like damage, attack speed, and AOE.
  • Upgrade costs live per-tower in a levels array, so we can tune each tower independently.
  • Visuals:
    • Level 0: no stars
    • Levels 1–3: 1–3 gold stars
    • Level 4: one larger gold star
    • Level 5: one larger red star (max)
  • Server checks ownership and level caps before applying upgrades to keep PvP fair.

  [screenshot: tower info panel with new upgrade button and star levels at ca3b573]
  [screenshot: upgraded stats panel showing damage and attack speed changes at ca3b573]

• Smarter bot tower placement using coverage-based positioning

  • Bots now score build spots by balancing two things:
    • How much “gold flow” (value of enemy traffic) passes through tiles
    • How much existing tower coverage those tiles already have
  • Coverage is approximated by summing the gold cost of towers that can reach a tile. Cheap, readable, and it correlates with actual firepower.
  • Result: fewer clumped bot defenses and better attention to under-defended, high-value lanes.

  [screenshot: updated tower placement grid with bots distributing coverage at 9cbc623]

• Visual polish: stronger gold color on star renderer

  • Makes level stars easier to pick out during fights and at a glance.

  [screenshot: max-level tower with red star and updated gold tint at 9cbc623]

What Got Fixed

• Tower upgrade properties are now actually mutable

  • Damage and fire cooldown can be modified per level as intended.
  • Also fixed multiplayer synchronization so upgrades propagate correctly to all clients.

• Logger wrapper reliability

  • The logger now accepts both (message, data) and (data, message) argument orders and swaps as needed.
  • Added a log when a max-level upgrade is attempted, including tower position and team, so we can track edge cases.

Balance Changes

• Minion rebalance around income and survivability
  • Cheaper minions now return more income relative to their cost than before, improving early-game pressure options.
  • More expensive minions scale harder on health, so they’re the go-to for late-game pushes.
  • Faster minions had too much effective health for their speed; they now have significantly less, so speed isn’t doing double duty.
• Expected impact
  • Early waves should feel more active with viable low-cost sends.
  • Speed-centric flood tactics should be riskier and easier to answer with targeted towers.
  • Late-game bosses take more dedicated DPS or AOE to remove, creating cleaner power spikes for big pushes.

Under the Hood

• Monitoring

  • Added RAM usage to our infrastructure monitoring so we can spot spikes during large matches and stress tests.

• Logging and observability

  • The smarter logger wrapper reduces silent failures in data logging and makes it easier to trace upgrade issues and strange match states.

What’s Next

• Upgrades: tune per-level costs and surface clearer stat deltas in the UI.
• Bots: keep iterating on coverage scoring (range weighting, diminishing returns, and AOE awareness).
• PvP balance: watch minion pick rates and adjust speed/health/income combos where they run hot.
• Performance: use the new memory metrics to track spikes and trim allocations in pathing and effects.

Thanks for the feedback, reports, and replays. It’s getting there. If something feels off with minions or upgrade pacing, drop a note and include the match context—helps a lot.