Period: December 22, 2025 Total Commits: 5

Daily Dev Update: Hoppers Mode and Clearer Castles - December 22, 2025

Hey, here’s what we’ve been working on today. The big thing is Hoppers, a territory-control mode centered on capturing neutral castles. We also tightened up visuals so ownership is obvious, fixed several Hoppers-specific bugs, and made a couple of small balance tweaks to keep PvP positioning cleaner.

What’s New

• Hoppers mode is in and playable

  • Neutral castles can be captured on hit and immediately switch to the new owner.
  • Spawns are created dynamically on roads near your owned castles, so expansion actually changes how you attack.
  • This shifts the flow from “defend one base” to “chain captures and push fronts,” which fits TowerStorm’s PvP tempo.

• Clearer ownership visuals

  • All castles now use a neutral base sprite tinted to the owning team. No mixing of sprite sets anymore.
  • Increased team color strength to 0.65 so ownership reads at a glance, even during busy fights.
  • The goal here is readability under pressure. You should be able to glance at the map and know who holds what.

• UI clarity in Hoppers

  • Info panel now shows “+N Castles Owned” and explains the ownership-based bonus.
  • This replaces the previous “destroyed” language, which didn’t match how the mode actually works.

• Level editor support

  • Hoppers is selectable in Map Settings, and castles can be flagged as neutral for capture.
  • This helps creators build and test territory layouts without hacks.

What Got Fixed

• Castle capture flow

  • Capture is instant and skips destruction/rubble to avoid misleading states. Ownership flips right away and the tint updates correctly.
  • Fixed cases where the UI showed the original team instead of the current owner.
  • You can now click neutral castles to view their health like any other structure.

• Pathfinding on Hoppers maps

  • Units can path through castle tiles for all teams, which removes the “Failed to find path” errors on certain layouts.
  • This was causing edge cases where units got confused by neutral territory.

• Spawn selection in Hoppers

  • Fixed minion spawn selection to use the mode’s road-based logic. We no longer run the traditional spawn-area check that doesn’t apply here.

• Rendering stability

  • Fixed a bug where tint was getting overwritten each frame. Ownership visuals now stay consistent.

Under the Hood

• Unified castle indexing across modes

  • We now use a consistent global index for castles everywhere. This removes a bunch of brittle lookups and weird cross-mode edge cases.

• New helpers and validation

  • Added helpers for finding castles at positions, counting team-owned castles, and detecting roads for spawns.
  • Client and server both validate Hoppers spawns with the same rules to keep matches honest.

• Mode settings and rendering tweaks

  • Hoppers has a dedicated config, and rendering logic was adjusted so tint updates don’t thrash each frame.