Period: December 3, 2025 Total Commits: 6
Daily Dev Update: Skill Tree Prototype & Level 0 Start - December 3, 2025
Hey, here’s what we’ve been working on. Today’s build focuses on making progression easier to understand and plan for, tightening up some visual layering issues, and cleaning up a couple of rough edges in Test Arena. We also wired up client unit tests to keep regressions down.
What’s New
Interactive Skill Tree in the Encyclopedia
We’ve added an interactive skill tree page to the in-game encyclopedia. It’s a circular layout inspired by PoE-style networks, with ten evenly spaced branches (36° apart) and five color sections. There are 50 skills total—10 per color, split between minion and tower paths.
- Interactive preview: You can allocate and reset points on the page to explore routes and read hover tooltips.
- Better readability: The old black palette was hard to parse on dark UI, so we switched to a purple theme for clarity.
- Quick access: There’s now a Skill Tree tab right in the encyclopedia navigation.
Why this matters: planning. A lot of you theorycraft builds before queuing. This page gives you a clean way to map a path, understand synergies across minions and towers, and talk strategy with teammates—without jumping into a match first.
[screenshot: interactive skill tree encyclopedia page at ec88a3a]
Progression Starts at Level 0
We reworked early progression to be more explicit and consistent. Players now start at level 0.
- First level-up costs 100g and takes you to level 1.
- Initial unit selection happens at level 0 and gives you 3 units to start from.
- From level 1 onward, level-ups grant 1 unit and a bonus selection.
- UI reads cleaner: TabMenu shows just the number (no “Lv.” prefix).
- Income bonuses now match their displayed values.
Why this matters: clarity and pacing. The previous setup confused new players and annoyed veterans. This keeps the early picks meaningful while fixing a few math and display quirks we found along the way.
[screenshot: level 0 unit selection flow at a37a074]
What Got Fixed
Test Arena Visibility and UI Noise
Two quality-of-life fixes for practice sessions:
- Minions now render correctly on your board while still being treated as enemies for targeting logic. No more invisible units during Test Arena runs.
- If the level system is disabled, the level-up button is now hidden entirely instead of showing a disabled state.
Impact: the practice loop is clearer and less distracting, and visual state matches the mode’s rules.
God-Ray Rings Layering
We adjusted how the god-ray ring particles sort in 3D space:
- Rings now use Y-based depth like projectiles, with a small z-offset so they consistently sit behind the main beam at the same position.
- Moved them to the same render order bucket as projectiles to keep layering predictable.
Result: no more “rings in front of beam” moments, smoother visual stacking in chaotic fights.
[screenshot: god-ray beam and rings with correct layering at ff9fbf5]
Under the Hood
Client Unit Testing with Jest
We added a unit testing framework for the client:
- TypeScript support via ts-jest with lightweight mocks for rendering libraries.
- A few baseline tests, including minion health scaling for the castle destruction bonus.
- GitHub Actions runs these on main/release branches.
- We also tightened a couple of existing tests to match current validator behavior and fixed a precision expectation for Q16.16 math.
Impact: faster iteration, more confidence when touching core gameplay math and state sync, and fewer “oops” moments in patches.
That’s it for today. Thanks for the bug reports and visual layering clips—those helped us track down the VFX ordering quickly. If you run into anything weird with the level 0 flow or the encyclopedia’s skill tree interactions, send it our way with a short repro and we’ll dig in.