Period: September 17, 2025 Total Commits: 9

Daily Dev Update: Dual-Barrel Turret, Super Laser, and the Balancer — September 17, 2025

Quick one today. We added two new towers, cleaned up electricity visuals, and stood up a balancing tool to help us keep matchups fair. Also nailed a couple of bugs that caused odd tower rotations and lobby host swaps.

What’s New

• Turret (Dual-Barrel, Precision Tracking)

  • Fires 2 lasers per attack at 2 attacks/second, with 36 rotation frames for smooth tracking.
  • Each shot uses separate barrel offsets that shift every 10 degrees for clean muzzle alignment.
  • Damage scales per bullet across 6 levels: 4.2 → 145.
  • Why it matters: consistent burst pressure that rewards good angles and slows. Strong lane anchor, but positioning and timing still decide trades.

  [screenshot: Turret tower dual lasers tracking targets at 138b13b]

• Super Laser (AOE Pulse + Heavy Slow)

  • Energy pulse hits in a 2.5 radius, dealing 200 → 6700 and applying a 40–90% slow for 2 seconds.
  • Long cycle: attacks once every 10 seconds. 7-frame attack sequence; 40-frame energy-circle effect.
  • Why it matters: zone control for PvP standoffs and wave denial. It won’t delete a push alone, but it sets up everything else to do the job.

  [screenshot: Super Laser pulse with slow aura at fd1eec9]

• Spikes (On-Path Damage)

  • Builds directly on the path and hits ground units rapidly (10 attacks/sec).
  • Pathfinding now understands “buildsOnPath,” so minions walk through it cleanly.
  • Pairs well with slows and short-range towers that need time to chew through HP.

• Wind (On-Path AOE Slow + Damage)

  • Applies a 10–35% slow in an area and damages both ground and air units.
  • 16-frame idle whirlwind adds clear readability on lane control.
  • Good for setting up Spikes/Turrets or buying time for longer cooldowns like Super Laser.

  [screenshot: Spikes and Wind towers placed on-path controlling a lane at 2f40969]

• Electricity Visuals Pass

  • Standardized all electricity sprites to 768x32 for better stretching and less warping.
  • Fixed speed-electricity parameters to match gold/damage variants.
  • Cleaned bullet spawn offsets and normalized detonation/instanced flags for consistency.

  [screenshot: updated electricity beam stretching along targets at fa46292]

What Got Fixed

• Rotation snapping/jitter on rotating towers
  • Attack frames are now relative to current rotation. Tracks targets without that weird frame pop.
• Lobby host switching when changing teams
  • Team swaps no longer reassign the lobby host. Less chaos mid-lobby.
• AOE slows not always applying
  • Projectiles correctly apply slow effects now, which makes Wind and other control tools behave as intended.
• Electricity config mismatches
  • Fixed offsets and parameters so beams look and feel the same across boosters and damage types.

What’s Still Broken (or likely rough)

• We’re watching slow stacking interactions (Wind + Super Laser + other slows). Expect tuning if the stack locks lanes too hard.
• On-path placement (Spikes/Wind) has new path checks. Corner cases might still surface on tight maps.
• Turret barrel offsets are angle-mapped every 10 degrees; there may be minor visual misalignments at fringe angles. If you spot any, screenshots help.

Under the Hood

• Multi-projectile support in the Tower base

  • The Tower class now supports spawning multiple projectiles in one attack with per-barrel offsets. There’s also a helper for offset spawns.
  • Renderer uses rotation-relative attack frames so visuals line up across all directions.
  • Why: enables dual-barrel (and future multi-muzzle) towers without bespoke hacks, and reduces animation desync under load.

• Tower Balancer Tool

  • Interactive DPS grid across minion counts (1–20) and HP tiers (500 → 50k).
  • Efficiency metric updated from DPS/gold to (DPS × range)/gold to better reflect map control value.
  • Handles special mechanics: AOE scaling, percent damage, continuous damage, piercing, stuns, and Soul Eater’s soul math with clear thresholds.
  • Why: gives us (and eventually you) a shared lens on PvP balance. Helps spot outliers, pricing issues, and weird edge cases before they snowball into meta problems.

What’s Next

• Balance passes using the new tool: price/range tweaks for Turret, slow values and cycle timing for Super Laser, and slow stacking rules across Wind/other sources.

Thanks for the reports and replays—especially the ones showing lane freezes and lobby host weirdness. Keep them coming.