Period: November 13, 2025 Total Commits: 13

TowerStorm Dev Update: Spawn-Safe Targeting, Smarter Paths

Hey, here’s what we’ve been working on today. Mostly fixing edge cases that impact PvP fairness, minion routing on road maps, and a few UI snags that made small screens tougher than they needed to be.

What’s New

• Arrow keys for camera movement

  • You can now pan the camera with ↑ ↓ ← → in addition to WASD. Nothing fancy, just more ways to move around comfortably.

• Wave preview clarity upgrades

  • Wave preview now shows all minion types correctly, including IDs with hyphens (e.g., healer-drone). No more missing or mislabeled icons.
  • Added level indicators next to minion icons:
    • Level 0: No stars
    • Levels 1–3: Small gold stars (★, ★★, ★★★)
    • Level 4: One big gold star
    • Level 5: One big red star
  • Count is right-aligned for cleaner scanning.
  • Impact: faster reads and better planning before you hit Send Wave.

[screenshot: wave preview showing level stars and right-aligned counts at 6207132]

What Got Fixed

• No more spawn “pre-firing”

  • Towers now reliably ignore minions in spawn areas across all targeting paths (batch, beam, AOE). This was inconsistently enforced before. PvP feels cleaner and less cheesy at spawn edges.

• Road-map retargeting jitters

  • Minions that were already on a road sometimes glitched after their target castle died. We now detect when they’re on the road and path directly to the new castle without redoing the spawn-to-road step. Movement is smooth instead of stuttery.

• Keep minions out of spawn zones once they leave

  • During road-to-castle routing, spawn tiles are excluded so units don’t backtrack into spawns. This keeps flow forward and prevents odd detours.

• Soul Eater ghost overshooting at fast speeds

  • At high game speeds (e.g., 200%), ghosts could oscillate around the tower and never get consumed. We now check against the actual per-frame move distance, so it lands cleanly at any speed.

• Duplicate gold popups in multiplayer

  • Fixed duplicate +gold popups caused by multiple event listeners stacking during simulation swaps. Only one listener now, so one popup per kill as intended.

• Reconnections show up properly

  • When someone refreshes and comes back, everyone else now sees them reconnected. Previously they could look disconnected for the rest of the match.

• UI on small screens plays nice

  • Send Wave button is now reliably clickable on short landscape screens. The hidden top bar was still intercepting clicks; we tightened the visibility rules so it truly gets out of the way when hidden.
  • Lobby sidebar and campaign browser now scroll correctly on small-height displays. Headers don’t compress; content scrolls as expected.

• Projectiles no longer linger between matches

  • We clear instance counts before disposing instanced renderers. No more brief appearances of old projectiles or VFX when starting a new game.

Under the Hood

• Targeting consistency in batches

  • The batch targeting pass used by most towers now includes spawn checks just like the other targeting paths. This aligns performance-friendly targeting with the rules players expect.

• Pathfinding clarity for devs

  • Documented the minion path system (spawn → road → castle; normal maps; flow fields vs A*; and when we exclude spawns). Makes future fixes faster and reduces regressions.

• Smaller quality-of-life tweaks

  • Singleplayer text is clearer: “Waiting for player to start wave.”
  • Count alignment and minion ID parsing in the wave preview are corrected so hyphenated IDs aren’t truncated.

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Thanks for the reports and clips that pointed us to these edge cases. Keep sending them—especially anything around pathing and spawn boundaries. It’s getting tighter.