Period: October 28, 2025 Total Commits: 25

TowerStorm Daily Dev Update: Community Levels, Campaign QoL, and Smoother Paths

Hey — here’s what we’ve been working on today. The big themes: community levels are now a proper first-class flow in the Reddit app, campaign mode got a few quality-of-life upgrades, and we tightened up minion movement and a bunch of asset/data edge cases. Nothing flashy, just solid progress.

What’s New

• Community levels on Reddit, end to end

  • You can create a map in the editor, share it straight to Reddit, and browse/play community maps from the client.
  • The level browser has a Type dropdown (Campaign/Community), a selection flow, and a detail panel with author, score, and upvote ratio.
  • Titles are cleaned up for readability and we show descriptions/metadata when you select a level.
  • Why: this makes sharing levels actually usable instead of a manual thread hunt.

  [screenshot: community levels browser with detail panel at 3756693]

• Level editor integration and safer UI in Reddit mode

  • Added a Share to Reddit flow with a proper modal (no browser prompts).
  • Replaced alert/prompt calls with in-app modals so feedback works inside Reddit’s sandbox.
  • Success messages now include a clickable link to the post. Exit and test flows are tidy and stay in the same tab.
  • Why: the sandbox blocks native dialogs; this keeps the UX consistent and unbreakable.

  [screenshot: Share to Reddit modal and success confirmation at 3aab084]

• Campaign placement rules: freer where it makes sense

  • In campaign mode, you can place towers anywhere on valid tiles (still not on roads, spawn areas, or castles).
  • The blue map border now resizes dynamically to the actual map size and consistently renders in campaign.
  • Multiple spawn areas are supported across rendering, input, and validation.
  • Why: campaign maps want puzzle-style freedom; adjacency rules stay in PvP where they create good friction.

  [screenshot: campaign map with free tower placement and dynamic border at 5761f3c]

• Deterministic road generation (for testing and future sync)

  • The road generator is now fully seeded. Same seed + config = identical map.
  • We also hardened constraints: no roads inside spawn, no 2x2 blobs, no dead-end roads, and guaranteed castle connectivity.
  • Why: reproducibility is great for debugging and eventual multiplayer map sync without heavy payloads.

What Got Fixed

• Minions move smarter and look cleaner

  • Diagonal movement is enabled; the old step-by-step wiggle is gone.
  • Paths only recalc when a tower actually blocks movement, and they resume forward instead of backtracking.
  • Fixed a target switching bug that sometimes dropped paths at bad moments.
  • Player impact: waves feel smoother and less jittery, especially on busy maps.

  [screenshot: minions moving diagonally along roads at 732bf64]

• Campaign castle initialization order

  • Castles are set up before the initial wave applies, so minions path to the right places from the start.
  • This removes early-wave weirdness where units thought they were in a multiplayer layout.

• Community browser UI polish

  • Proper author names, reliable upvote ratios (fallback to N/A when needed), and cleaner titles (no bracket noise).
  • Level selection is now explicit: pick a level, then hit Start.

• Asset paths and missing textures

  • Patched Three.js texture loading to respect our asset path helper across environments.
  • Fixed road textures and encyclopedic icons breaking in Reddit mode.
  • Added a guard against double-prefixing asset paths so we don’t 404 ourselves.

• Campaign map loading

  • All campaign map files now route through the asset path helper, fixing 404s in web/Reddit/Electron setups.

• Editor navigation cleanup

  • Removed an unnecessary redirect screen and sped up navigation with simpler URL handling.

Under the Hood

• Community level data storage: smaller and more reliable

  • Levels are compressed (gzip+base64) for a 70–80% size reduction (e.g., ~3.8KB → ~1.0KB).
  • Storage rules:
    • Small levels (≤1.5KB compressed): stored in post data for instant reads.
    • Larger levels (>1.5KB, ≤10KB compressed): stored in the first comment.
  • We removed the legacy plain JSON format and unified on compression. This comfortably supports maps around ~7.5KB original JSON.
  • Why: keeps Reddit API calls light and consistent while handling real-world map sizes.

• Single source of truth for validation

  • All campaign map types and validation utilities now live in a shared module used by client, editor, and the Reddit app.
  • Less duplication, fewer “works here, fails there” bugs.

• Logging and bot friendliness

  • The game engine uses a pluggable logger instead of raw console calls.
  • Console now shows warnings/errors by default while full logs still go to files.
  • This keeps dev terminals readable and makes bot runs predictable.

• Dev tooling

  • A new “make dev” command runs auth, server, bots, and client together with prefixed logs and clean shutdown.
  • Helpful when you want everything visible in one place without tmux gymnastics.

Notes

• Campaign placement changes apply to campaign only. Multiplayer keeps adjacency rules for balance and strategy.
• If you see a missing texture in the Reddit app, it’s probably a path edge case we didn’t catch. Send a screenshot and the map you were on.

That’s it for today. It’s getting tighter: smoother waves, cleaner UI, and community maps you can actually share and play without fighting the plumbing. Thanks for the reports and playtests — they directly guided a bunch of these fixes.