Period: December 31, 2025 Total Commits: 6

Daily Dev Update: Lasers, Stuns, and Clearer HUD - December 31, 2025

Hey, here’s what we worked on today. Main focus was getting laser AOE to behave correctly, improving combat clarity in Survivors mode, and giving you a simple debug view when you want to peek under the hood. A few UI and performance wins landed along the way. It’s getting steadier.

What’s New

• Debug mode (H to toggle)

  • Shows red box outlines for laser-beam tower AOE areas
  • Bright red = enemies inside, dark red = empty
  • Boxes rotate with the island so what you see is what’s actually calculated
  • Good for testing placements and verifying coverage

• FPS counter in Survivors

  • Top-left display with simple colors: Green 50+, Yellow 30–50, Red <30
  • Adds a small “DEBUG” tag when debug mode is on, so you know why frames might dip

• Combat clarity and control in Survivors

  • Damage effectiveness colors: damage numbers now show green/red based on tower-vs-minion color matchups
  • Stun mechanics: enemies can be stunned; there’s a clear particle effect while they’re locked
  • AOE projectiles with stun: e.g., boulders can now stun small groups on impact
  • Restart from You Died!: quick reset path from the game over screen
  • Level-up menu filtering: skills filter to match the colors of towers you own, reducing noise
  • Boulder impact VFX: increased particle size so hits read better

• Gold progress bar under the shop

  • Single bar shows total gold centered, with a golden gradient and a subtle glow
  • The fill aligns against each item’s price, making it obvious what’s affordable at a glance
  • Removed the extra gold number from the top-right HUD to cut duplicate info

What Got Fixed

• Laser-beam tower AOE hit detection

  • Now measures from the tower’s actual center rather than assuming a 0,0 origin
  • Uses the enemy’s visual center for checks (less “it looked like it hit but didn’t” moments)
  • Adds a small collision radius so grazes count: 0.4 units for standard enemies, 0.6 for elites
  • Result: edge cases (literally) behave more predictably, fewer misses on the border

• Laser visual and timing issues

  • Cleaned up particle effects so color and size behaviors are consistent again
  • Fixed a cooldown reset case where lasers would prematurely stop if no enemies were in range
  • Particle emitters now scale with island width (6 laser lines per tile), so visuals match the actual footprint

• Debug visualization reliability

  • Switched the AOE overlay to a more stable line rendering approach
  • Boxes match what the server-side logic expects, reducing “overlay says hit, logic says no” moments

Under the Hood

• Particle system reuse

  • Laser effects now reuse particle systems instead of recreating them each tick
  • Cuts allocation churn and reduces the occasional micro-stutter during busy waves

• Centralized laser tuning

  • All laser particle settings moved into a single config, so we can adjust colors, sizes, lifetimes, and cleanup timing without hunting
  • Makes visual iteration a lot faster and less error-prone

• Upgrades and skills pass

  • Refactored upgrades to pull from a shared skills config and added unlock tracking
  • Tightens up the level-up flow and keeps the skill filters consistent with what you already own

• Enemy and spawner groundwork

  • Added variant support and tuned spawn wave mechanics
  • Gives us cleaner knobs for pacing and variety without rebuilding encounter logic