Period: October 8, 2025 Total Commits: 11

Daily Dev Update: Mobile HUD, Touch Controls, and Reliable Connections

Hey, here’s what we’ve been working on. Today was mostly about making matches feel better on phones in landscape: trimmed HUD, clearer buttons, smoother gestures, and fewer connection headaches on the same Wi‑Fi. We also tightened up some infrastructure so servers start cleanly with working certs. It’s not flashy, but it makes playing a match on mobile a lot less fiddly.

What’s New

Mobile HUD tuned for actual play

We cut a lot of UI bulk on phones so you see more of the board and spend less time wrestling menus.

• Top HUD shrunk from 120px to 60px and the bottom bar from 80px to 40px on mobile landscape.
• Bars are now transparent on mobile landscape to give more map visibility.
• Always-on placement indicators when you have a tower or minion selected:
  • Spawn tile hints for minions
  • Adjacency/range hints for towers
• Dedicated mobile buttons for core actions:
  • Deselect (bottom-left, red X), Switch View (bottom-right, team-colored)
  • Both are 40x40 px with improved spacing (positioned ~32px from edges)
• Level-up flow is trimmed for space:
  • Scaled to ~70%, header and category chrome hidden, 2-column stats grid, scrollable unit list with a fixed footer
  • Gold font down to 16px, level-up button text at 9px with a darker background to read against combat scenes

[screenshot: streamlined mobile HUD in landscape at 0bb6a64] [screenshot: bottom bar with larger deselect/switch buttons at 9b2d8fb]

Touch controls that don’t fight you

You can pan and zoom without surprising zoom pops or ghost taps.

• Pinch-to-zoom and single-finger pan are standard now
• We auto-deselect when you pan or zoom, so you don’t accidentally drop a unit
• Touch-only quirks like hover effects are disabled; text selection is blocked
• After placing, the game won’t re-select the same unit automatically

[screenshot: tower placement with adjacency indicators at 170364b]

Match readability

A few tweaks to make the “what’s happening” pieces more obvious at a glance.

• Wave counter stays centered and readable between teams in landscape
• HUD center section is kept tight so the bottom bar doesn’t expand

[screenshot: centered wave counter during a match at 62dea7f]

What Got Fixed

Local-network connectivity on mobile

If you’ve been trying to connect from your phone to a machine on the same Wi‑Fi and getting blocked, this should be a lot better.

• The client now detects the host from the URL so local IPs work
• CORS and WebSocket connections are allowed for typical private network ranges
• Net result: fewer “can’t connect” screens when testing from a phone on your LAN

Fewer accidental zooms and stuck selections

• Browser-level zoom pops are suppressed so pinch/pan feels consistent
• Interactions after placement won’t auto-select and steal focus
• Fixed an issue where the Info Panel stats could get smashed by modal styles

Audio

• Ice Tower shot volume nudged down from 0.1 to 0.075. Less piercing in big wave spam.

Minor cleanup

• A bunch of unused variables and an old time-ago helper were removed to cut noise in the build

Under the Hood

Menu and lobby structure

We split the front-end menus into Main Menu and Lobby components. This makes it easier to give mobile their own layouts: tighter fonts, side-by-side Ready/Start on phones, and less header chrome chewing screen space.

Deployment and naming cleanup

• There’s a single make deploy-terraform command now that brings up the load balancer, game/bot servers, monitor, Redis, networks, and firewall rules in one run
• We standardized our environment naming to alpha across configs and production setup. Mostly internal bookkeeping so deployments are less error-prone

Small UI polish that adds up

• Touch defaults: no hover, no user text selection, no user scaling
• The bottom bar center width is capped and button alignment is consistent so it doesn’t stretch on odd aspect ratios

Why this matters in PvP

• Faster camera pan/zoom with auto-deselect means quicker reactions during rushes and counter-builds
• Clearer bottom bar and always-on placement hints reduce fat-finger misplays
• Reliable connections and fewer SSL/connect errors mean less lobby churn and more time in matches

Thanks to everyone sending clips of mis-taps and weird zoom behavior—that guided most of today’s changes. If you still hit issues on mobile landscape (overlapping HUD, stuck selections, or touch jitter), send a short video and device details and we’ll dig in.