Daily Dev Update: Speed Dials & Smooth Paths - October 21, 2025

Period: October 21, 2025
Total Commits: 6

Hey, here’s what we’ve been working on. Today is mostly about pacing and feel: speeding up or slowing down the entire match when you want to, smoothing out minion movement so it doesn’t stutter, and shaving a few clicks off common actions in the lobby and during placement. We also cleaned up a UI element that wasn’t ready, and brought back our Jobs page.

What’s New

• Game speed controls

  • Added selectable game speeds in the lobby: Very Fast (200%), Fast (150%), Normal (100%), Slow (75%), Very Slow (50%). There’s also an Ultra Slow (10%) mode used for development/testing.
  • Speeds apply across the match: minion movement, projectile travel, tower attack cadence, wave countdowns, and gold ticks all scale together. The goal is consistent pacing without weird desync between systems.
  • Practical impact: want brisk, high-pressure rounds? Bump it to 150–200%. Want to study openings or teach a friend? Drop to 50–75%.
  • [screenshot: wave countdown and unit motion at 2x speed at e7ddd54]

• Smarter camera switching during placement

  • Selecting a tower jumps the camera to your board. Selecting a minion jumps to your opponent’s board. This removes the extra step of manual view toggling before placing.
  • You can still manually flip views if you prefer; this just makes the default flow faster.
  • [screenshot: automatic board focus after selecting a minion at 0b456b5]

• One-click “Quick Add Bot” in the lobby

  • Hosts now get a robot icon with a green + badge on empty player slots. Click once to fill with a bot—no dropdown needed.
  • Has a hover state (blue glow), shows a loading/disabled state while adding, and only appears in modes that allow bots.
  • This is aimed at faster practice setups and quick 1vAI starts.
  • [screenshot: quick-add bot button on an empty slot at 4ce80e0]

• Small UX cleanup

  • We hid the Matchmaking button for now to avoid confusion. Lobbies and direct matches continue to work as usual.

• Jobs page is back

  • We’ve restored the Jobs page using the same Markdown system as the blog for easier updates. The first listing is for a Head of Growth (part-time, remote).
  • You can find it under the site navigation: Jobs.

What Got Fixed

• Smoother minion pathing

  • Minions no longer “pause” at each waypoint. They now consume their whole movement distance each tick, flowing across multiple tiles when needed.
  • This removes the stop-start feel and produces continuous, readable motion through the path.
  • [screenshot: minions flowing smoothly through turns at 012b9db]

• Interpolation under network variance

  • We loosened the client-side smoothing so units keep moving even if a server tick lands late, reducing visible freezes during hiccups.
  • Animations now stay consistent at faster speeds too, thanks to raising the interpolation window and removing frame skipping that fought the effect.

Net effect: movement and animation should feel more stable, especially at 150–200% speeds or when latency wobbles. If you still catch stutters in specific maps or at high round counts, let us know where you saw it.

Under the Hood

• Unified time scaling

  • The simulation scales delta time by the selected game speed. Waves, income, movement, projectile travel, and tower fire rates all read from the same timing source.
  • Bots now read the server-provided speed so their pacing matches humans rather than defaulting to normal speed.

• Interpolation budget tuned for faster matches

  • The smoothing window was increased to handle 2x speed without snapping, and we removed level-of-detail frame skipping that made some effects appear uneven at high speeds.

• Asset loading coverage

  • Added particle effect textures to the preloader to reduce the chance of first-time VFX “pop-in” when combat starts.

• Lobby ergonomics

  • The quick-add bot button is only visible to hosts where bots are allowed, with clear hover/disabled states and a tooltip so it’s hard to misclick.

Thanks to everyone who flagged the jerky minion behavior—those reports helped us narrow it down quickly. Keep the clips and repro steps coming; they’re useful for tracking edge cases like late-tick bursts or map-specific choke points.

That’s it for today. Steadier movement, speed dials for the whole match, fewer clicks in the lobby, and a small cleanup pass on UI. Try it out and tell us how it feels at 200% vs. 75%—which pace suits your playstyle?