Period: December 30, 2025 Total Commits: 9
Hey, here’s what we’ve been working on. Today’s build adds a new Survivors-style mode, a proper combat/progression loop, a smarter shop that sells upgrades for your existing towers, and difficulty scaling that ramps hard if you live long enough. A few PvP tweaks landed too.
What’s New
Survivors Mode (standalone)
- Control a floating 3x3 island, move with WASD/arrow keys, and kite waves that close in from off-screen.
- Towers auto-fire; enemies damage the island on contact. Basic HUD shows health, gold, XP, level, and time.
- You can rotate the island with Q/E to line up arcs cleanly. It helps with directional towers.
- Starting tower is now the shadow-bolt. It gives better early reach and clearer feedback.
Tileset visuals and feedback
- Swapped the flat grass for chunk-based tiles using a tileset. Weighted grass variants + doodads (about 5% spawn chance) make space readable without clutter.
- The island dynamically shows abyss tiles under towers only, which makes placements pop more during fights.
- Added particle effects for things like flamethrower and lightning to make impact states easier to parse mid-kite.
- Damage numbers are in. Quick pulse, then fade. Helps confirm when builds are actually scaling.
Progression and level-ups
- Leveling now pauses the run and opens a modal with upgrade choices. Keeps decisions calm while the arena stays loud.
- Upgrade pool includes tower stats (damage, range, fire rate), island stats (max health, regen, move speed), and passives (gold/XP multipliers).
- Multipliers apply retroactively to existing towers, so investing early carries through the run.
- New tower placement uses a simple 3x3 grid selector to reduce misclicks under pressure.
Smarter shop with tower upgrades
- The shop now sells upgrades to your existing towers alongside new towers. You’ll see up to five options, including entries like “Crossbow II.”
- Costs come straight from tower level configs, so pricing stays consistent with the main game.
- When you buy an upgrade, it levels the tower in place. No new slot gets consumed.
- If more than five towers are eligible, the shop rotates a random selection. We also ensure five unique-priced items, and we tint upgrade options green with an ↑ badge for clarity.
- When your island is full (9 towers), the shop hides new tower options and prioritizes upgrades. Keeps the economy useful deep into a run.
Combat loop and tuning
- Towers target the nearest enemy in range and play a fire animation with visible projectiles.
- Overkill protection is in: if a target already has lethal damage incoming, towers look for a better option. Less wasted DPS, more consistent clear.
- Early pacing is faster and more readable: enemy HP dropped from 285 to 29; tower range doubled from 3 → 6 units. You now start engaging earlier, which supports kiting lines.
- Gold and XP drop on kill to reinforce movement and sweeping patterns.
Scaling difficulty and elites
- Baseline spawns start at about 1.5 enemies/second and add roughly +0.5 per minute.
- Enemy health scales +50% per minute; speed scales +10% per minute. You’ll feel it around the 3–4 minute mark.
- Elite enemies join the mix: 2% base chance, +2% per minute. They’re 1.5x size with 3x health, 2x damage, and drop 5x gold / 3x XP. They will test whether your upgrades are actually doing work.
What Got Fixed
- AOE towers no longer acquire targets in the spawn area. This reduces cheap pre-spawn clears and keeps PvP waves honest.
- Fixed tower sprite orientation so rotations line up with the sheets (frame 0 now correctly maps to west).
- Cleaned up old maps from the manifest to avoid accidental queues and reduce menu clutter.
Under the Hood
- Tileset rendering is chunk-based with seeded randomness for variants and doodads, so layouts feel alive while staying deterministic between loads.
- Integrated a particle system for flamethrowers, lightning, and other instant-damage effects. Instant-damage towers now have special handling so VFX timing matches their damage window.
- Shop logic got a few guardrails: prioritizing upgrades when slots are full, randomizing from a larger upgrade pool when needed, and enforcing unique price points to avoid noisy duplicates.
- Overkill protection tracks pending damage so multiple towers don’t pile onto a dead unit. Leads to smoother DPS distribution without micromanagement.
Why these changes
- Survivors mode is a fun new take on combining Tower Defense with Vampire Survivors
- The shop upgrade path keeps runs alive when you’re slot-capped and makes your existing layout feel invested-in rather than disposable.
- Early damage/range tweaks plus overkill protection make the first few minutes cleaner. Less whiffing, more decisions.
- Difficulty scaling and elites push builds to adapt instead of coasting on a single spike purchase.
That’s it for today. If you try Survivors mode and run into weird shop rolls, upgrade edge cases, or particle spam tanks your FPS, let us know what you saw and roughly when it happened. Thanks for all the reports and clips—super helpful.