Daily Dev Update: Smoke, Sparks, and Smoother Fights - October 19, 2025

Period: October 19, 2025 Total Commits: 14

Hey, here’s what we’ve been working on. Today’s update leans hard into visual clarity and performance: cleaner particles, better depth sorting, and more readable towers and projectiles. We also chased down a couple of nasty VFX issues that were dragging frames down. It’s getting tighter.

What’s New

• Dynamic tower scaling by level

  • Towers now grow from 1.0x at level 1 up to 1.333x at max. Scaling is linear per upgrade, so size tracks power in a way that’s easy to read at a glance.
  • We adjusted visual placement on a few towers (for example, the ice tower sits 8 pixels higher) so bases line up with tiles more cleanly.
  • Bullet spawn offsets now scale with tower level too, keeping muzzle flashes, lightning, and trails properly aligned as towers grow.
  • Why it matters: clearer board state in PvP, fewer “why did that shot come from there?” moments.

• New projectile VFX pass

  • Booster towers now fire procedural lightning bolts, color-coded by type (blue speed, gold gold, red damage). The electricity projectile itself is invisible; the bolt does the visual lifting.
  • Arrow projectiles leave subtle grey smoke trails, ice projectiles keep their frosty trails, and shadow bolts now streak with purple smoke.
  • Trails emit based on distance traveled rather than frame timing, so fast or slow frames still draw smooth lines.
  • Why it matters: better feedback when you connect, and cleaner reads during busy fights.

  [screenshot: booster towers firing colored lightning at 1f9b5e8] [screenshot: crossbow arrows leaving grey smoke trails at 9621077]

• Visual polish and readability

  • Switched sprites to linear filtering with mipmaps by default for smoother edges. Projectiles can still force “nearest” if they need that crisp pixel look.
  • Added options for blend modes and smooth alpha on projectiles to remove harsh, pixelated edges on effects that should be soft.
  • Depth sorting now respects Y-position, so units higher on the map render behind those lower down. Path towers (like spikes and wind) render on a dedicated layer to avoid occlusion weirdness.

  [screenshot: minions walking behind path towers with proper depth at e747bc4]

• Balance touch-ups (small but noticeable)

  • Path tower ranges are fractional now. Spikes are at 0.6 and wind at 0.5.
  • Corpse explosion only hits ground units. Air pathing stays cleaner.

What Got Fixed

• Particle systems no longer leak or stack up

  • Fixed a bug where empty batches piled up and tanked performance over time.
  • Particle systems auto-clean when they’re finished, and we’re removing batches from the right parent now.
  • Reused shared geometries/materials to cut down on allocation churn.

• Cleaner projectile behavior

  • Final-frame interpolation is back, so projectiles don’t “pop” out of existence right before impact.
  • Removed position snapping that caused awkward jumps on the last step.
  • Added a 0.5-tile hit radius for projectile collisions to make grazing hits consistent with what you see.
  • Turret-laser offsets are centered properly, and general spawn offsets are using the correct scale.

• Status effect cleanup

  • Stun effects follow moving minions and actually clean up when the minion dies. No more flickering or orphaned stars hanging in space.

Under the Hood

• Dedicated renderer for projectile effects

  • Moved all projectile particle logic (ice trails, arrow smoke, lightning) into a single renderer class. The main renderer just calls one function now instead of juggling a pile of effect cases.
  • Result: less code to maintain, fewer edge cases, easier to add new effects.

• Particle system architecture and tools

  • Integrated a particle system library and split our effect configs into focused modules (ice bullets, level-up glow, lightning, arrow smoke, stunned).
  • Emission logic is modular and distance-based, which makes effects stable across frame spikes.
  • Added better logging around particle lifecycles to catch issues early.
  • Built a small visual particle editor to speed up iteration. It matches our in-game camera setup and exports/imports JSON configs we can drop straight into the client.

• Rendering pipeline tweaks

  • Introduced SRGB handling for non-instanced projectile textures so colors look correct.
  • Expanded projectile config with filter type, blend mode, and alpha smoothing so each effect can pick the right look without special-case code.

Thanks for the bug reports and clips. The visual cleanup here came straight from player feedback about occlusion and noisy effects during big pushes. Keep sending those in; it helps us tighten the screws on PvP readability and performance.