Period: October 31, 2025 Total Commits: 3
Hey, here’s what we’ve been working on. Today’s focus was making shared TowerStorm levels read clearly on Reddit and making the whole share flow more reliable. We simplified the screenshot overlay, added a real preview in the share modal, clamped text lengths to what Reddit actually allows, and fixed a screenshot upload issue.
What’s New
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Share modal now shows a true preview
- When you open Share to Reddit, we capture a screenshot of your level and show exactly how your title and description will sit on it.
- The modal is wider so the preview isn’t crammed; it’s easier to sanity-check before you post.
[screenshot: share modal preview showing title/description placement at ad79dcb]
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Consistent text backdrop for readability
- We standardized the overlay behind the post text to a clean, solid white bar (70% opacity), centered and spanning the full width.
- No fades or soft edges to fight with colorful maps—just reliable contrast so dark text stays readable.
[screenshot: final solid white text bar centered on screenshot at 288548e]
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Built-in character limits and counters
- Title is capped at 300 characters, description at 180.
- You’ll see live counters for each field. They shift to red as you approach the cap, and the submit button disables if you go over.
- Inputs hard-stop at the limits to prevent accidental truncation on publish.
What Got Fixed
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Screenshot upload failures resolved
- The share flow sometimes produced posts without the intended splash image. We moved the screenshot upload into the actual submission step so it has the right context every time.
- Background images on splash screens now consistently use the correct media URL.
[screenshot: Reddit splash screen displaying the level image correctly at 56d703a]
Result: your post should now show the level image reliably instead of a missing visual.
Under the Hood
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More reliable pipeline
- The level editor sends the screenshot as a data URL during submission. The server accepts larger JSON bodies (up to ~5 MB) to accommodate these images, which typically land in the 200–500 KB range.
- We removed the extra upload endpoint to avoid races and “no context” errors.
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Overlay rendering approach
- We render the overlay on a 2D canvas to layer UI elements cleanly over the captured WebGL frame. This keeps the gameplay image intact while making the text panel predictable across levels.
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Form guardrails
- Live counters, disabled-submit states, and input maxLength all work together so you aren’t surprised by rejected posts or clipped text when it goes live.
If you’ve run into unreadable text or empty splash images, this set of changes should make the share flow feel straightforward. Thanks to everyone who flagged contrast issues and upload errors—those reports helped zero in on the fixes quickly.