Period: November 12, 2025 Total Commits: 12

TowerStorm Dev Update: Roads, Co‑op, and Smarter Spawns

Hey, here’s what we’ve been working on. Today’s changes focus on clearer pathing on road maps, better co‑op support for custom maps, smarter auto‑spawning, and a bunch of UI and placement fixes. Nothing flashy, just steady improvements that clean up rough edges and tighten PvP balance a bit.

What’s New

Road-first pathfinding on road maps

Minions now route in two stages on maps with roads: first to the nearest road entrance from their spawn, then along the roads to the castle. This makes lanes more predictable and reduces weird side-wandering. Non-road (mazing) maps still use direct routing, so your maze designs behave as expected.

• More consistent lanes for tower coverage planning
• Less path jitter near spawn zones on road maps
• Flow fields are disabled on road maps; we use classic A* for tighter control

Single‑team co‑op support for custom multiplayer maps

Custom maps can now enforce a single-team co‑op setup. The lobby and client UI adapt automatically:

• Auto-assigns players to Team A when a map is set to one team
• Disables team switching in the lobby with a clear tooltip
• Hides the view toggle/minimap controls in-game for co‑op maps
• Creates a single shared board and prevents swapping to an empty team view

This is already wired up for maps like “Protect The King.”

Endless mode survival screen

When an endless multiplayer run ends in defeat, a new survival modal shows your survival time, player count, and the map. The default game over overlay stays hidden so the focus is on your run stats.

Smarter auto‑spawners under pressure

Auto‑spawners now get decisive when spawn zones are full:

• They identify the lowest-value minion (base cost + upgrades) and can replace it
• There’s a 50% replace vs. upgrade choice when space is tight, which keeps pressure dynamic
• This should reduce deadlocks where spawners sit idle in capped lanes

Map-aware unlocks and role clarity

The Level Up unlock menu now respects each map’s allowed towers and minions. On road maps, the wall tower is excluded by design since it doesn’t do anything there. You’ll see less noise and fewer trap picks, especially when learning new maps.

Income scaling tools for creators

We added two knobs that help custom multiplayer maps scale cleanly:

• scaleWithPlayers: starting gold and income scale with total players
• incomeIncrease: income can increase gradually each second for escalating difficulty

Both options are configurable in the level editor and preserved properly by validation.

What Got Fixed

Tower placement near castles on mazing maps

Fixed a long-standing issue where the castle position wasn’t registered on random (no-road) maps. The result was the placement grid going red when trying to place adjacent to the castle. That’s now corrected and placements behave normally.

Co‑op view quirks

• The renderer no longer builds a phantom second board for single‑team games
• The R key won’t switch to an empty team view in co‑op
• Team detection logic now only returns teams that actually have players

Spawn point visual cleanup

Removed stray spawn point visuals that lingered after replacing or destroying a spawn. Old markers now despawn correctly when spawners upgrade/replace or when you clear them manually.

High-speed minion tuning

We shaved down the top-end of the fastest minions to reduce early burst-throughs and give mid-tier towers a fairer window. Expect fast lanes to be a touch more manageable without removing the “speed line” identity.

Under the Hood

• Pathfinding pipeline: On road maps we moved from flow fields to A* and routed gold/flow logic through the same pathfinding layer for consistency across modes (including bots). This reduces divergence between systems and makes debugging easier.
• Map validation and config: The map loader now cleanly preserves scaleWithPlayers and incomeIncrease fields and correctly accepts a boolean or config object for multiplayer. We also added clearer logs during auto-spawn initialization to make tuning easier.
• Server cleanup: We removed the old bot server code and stopped game/auth servers from re‑spawning themselves when user data changes. Fewer moving parts, fewer surprises.

---

That’s the lot for today. Thanks for the reports on tower placement and the co‑op view toggles—those made the fixes pretty straightforward. If you notice oddities with road routing or the new auto‑spawner behavior, ping us with a map name and a short description of what you saw.