Period: October 16, 2025 Total Commits: 33

Daily Dev Update: Faster Loads, Fairer XP, and Cleaner Shots - October 16, 2025

Hey — here’s what we’ve been working on today. The short version: the game loads faster, XP awards are fair and reliable, audio stutters are down, and we cleaned up projectile rendering to make effects easier to improve without breaking everything else. A few rough edges got smoothed out in auth and connection handling too.

What’s New

• Background asset preloading, now actually fast

  • Assets now load by priority and in parallel within each tier. CRITICAL, HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW all go together at their level.
  • Rough numbers: CRITICAL (~3 assets), HIGH (~35), MEDIUM (~48), LOW (~114). Expect a 5–10x speedup versus sequential loading.
  • Practically, this means fewer texture/music hiccups when you hit a match.

• XP in the header

  • Registered users now see their total XP in the app header with a clean gold treatment. It auto-refreshes after you register or finish a game.
  • Helpful if you’re tracking progress across human matches.

• Quick exit during a match

  • The Settings modal in-game now has a red “Leave Game” button. It does what it says and takes you back to the main menu.

• Cleaner projectile visuals (same look, safer code)

  • We split projectile and electricity bolt rendering into its own module. No gameplay change — just less risk when we tweak effects and animations.

What Got Fixed

• XP fairness and reliability

  • Human vs. bot XP is now determined correctly:
    • bot_game: 10 XP (you vs. bots or all bots)
    • human_game: 50 XP (requires 2+ human players)
    • playtest game: 200 XP (unchanged)
  • The client now reports the end of the match properly, so the server can award XP without waiting forever.

• Fewer audio hitches

  • Sound effects reuse pooled audio instances instead of cloning. After the initial load, there are zero extra network requests for SFX.
  • Result: less memory churn and cleaner overlapping sounds.

• Login and session stability

  • The phantom “Invalid token” logouts should be gone. We fixed:
    • Token validation pathing with the auth service
    • Session persistence (the client actually updates its token/username now)
    • Guest sessions on reload
    • Rate limiting only counts failed login attempts
  • Also reduced aggressive server status polling that was spamming requests and desyncing UI indicators.

• UI loops and button states

  • Removed a couple of re-render loops and unified connection state so the server indicator and Create Game button agree with each other.

• Login flow clarity

  • Email login now expects you to have registered first. If the email isn’t found, the UI tells you to start with “Play as Guest,” then register.

  [screenshot: login screen with guest-first flow at 9b41e71]

If you still finish a game and don’t see XP update, let us know what type of match it was (humans vs bots) and your end screen details — that helps us validate the report flow.

Under the Hood

• Rendering organization

  • Projectile and electricity rendering moved into a dedicated module with a shared render context. Same visuals, smaller main renderer, easier maintenance.

• Asset preloading API simplification

  • One call now preloads everything in priority order, with clear logs when each tier starts and finishes.

• Audio pooling internals

  • Pool supports multiple simultaneous instances per sound and resets playback time for instant reuse. No more duplicate element churn.

• Smoother deployments

  • Split client deploys into code-only vs. full (assets) to speed up iteration.
  • Consolidated auth deployment into a single path, added environment boot order fixes, and made DB migrations idempotent.
  • Fixed PostgreSQL setup reliability and eliminated password encoding pitfalls.

• Auth/Routing/DX

  • Moved authentication calls to a dedicated API subdomain to separate static and dynamic traffic.
  • Typed auth responses, cleaned up JWT handling, and documented connection management to avoid the previous infinite refresh loop.

Thanks for the reports on XP not landing and the login/logout weirdness. That feedback made today’s fixes pretty straightforward to target. As always, try it out and send screenshots or clips if something looks off — especially around end-of-match flow and audio overlap.