Daily Dev Update: Board Sync and Castle Stats - October 9, 2025

Period: October 9, 2025 Total Commits: 7

Hey, here’s what we’ve been working on. The big item today is getting the board rules fully synced across server, client, and bots. That knocked out the tower placement desync some of you ran into. We also added a simple but useful UI touch: you can now click castles to see their stats. Plus a bunch of reliability fixes behind the scenes.

What’s New

• Click castles to view stats

  • You can now click either castle in a match to bring up its current status at a glance.
  • This includes health and other essentials you’d usually dig around the UI for. It’s basic, but useful in the heat of PvP.
  • [screenshot: castle stats panel when clicking castles at 1de43f1]

• Red star icons display correctly

  • These were disappearing in some views. They’re now consistent so you can read the field quickly mid-fight.
  • [screenshot: red star icons visible in match HUD at 1de43f1]

What Got Fixed

• Tower placement: server/client agreement restored

  • The server was validating placements against the wrong board size and castle positions. That caused legit placements—especially spikes that build on path—to get rejected.
  • We centralized board data so all parts of the game use the same numbers. Spikes placed on valid path cells are now accepted reliably.
  • [screenshot: tower placement on path now accepted for spikes at 21e4be0]
  • [screenshot: updated tower placement grid at 21e4be0]

• Match stability improvements

  • Fixed production worker process issues that could interrupt or delay match starts.
  • Cleaned up some deployment scripts and certificate problems that were causing flaky connections for a subset of players.

• Misc UI polish

  • General cleanup to keep information visible and consistent during matches. Nothing flashy, just removing distractions.

Under the Hood

• Single source of truth for the board

  • All game layers now read the same board config:
    • Board size is 29 x 15 (server previously assumed 32 x 17).
    • Spawn area is x: 0–4, y: 0–14 (server used a wider range).
    • Castle positions are unified across client, server, and bots.
  • Why this matters: pathfinding and “can I place this here?” checks now produce the same answer everywhere. That means fewer surprises and fairer PvP decisions.

• Pathfinding and validation updated

  • The pathfinder now pulls its bounds and spawn rules from the shared config rather than hardcoded values.
  • Spawn validation and edge checks match the actual board, so edge-case placements won’t get incorrectly blocked or allowed.

• Bots play by the same rules

  • Bot placement and economy logic now reference the same screen data. Their opening placements should look more sane and consistent with what human players can do.

Notes and Thanks

• If you still see a placement get rejected when it clearly should be valid, send a screenshot of the spot and we’ll investigate.
• Thanks to everyone who flagged the placement mismatch and UI oddities. Those reports helped us zero in on the root cause quickly.

That’s it for today. Small surface changes, big impact on consistency.