Daily Dev Update: Roads, Drops, and Auras - January 7, 2026

Period: January 7, 2026 Total Commits: 14

Hey, here’s what we’ve been working on today. The focus was on making placement feel smoother, making single-board maps read better, and cleaning up a handful of edge cases that affected bots, lobbies, and visibility. Nothing flashy, just tightening the screws so PvP matches feel more consistent.

What’s New

• Drag-and-drop placement for towers and minions

  • You can now grab items directly from the bottom bar and drop them onto valid tiles. The ghost preview follows while you drag and places on release.
  • Normal click-to-select still works, and the game cleans up the selection after a drag so you don’t accidentally drop twice.

• Aura ranges and gold clarity

  • Aura towers now show a distinct blue ring for aura range (attack range stays green). Hovering and ghost previews respect range multipliers.
  • When a gold aura boosts bounty, the popup reflects the boosted amount and the tower info panel shows that it’s getting the bonus.

• Level Up and Skill Tree modals feel more predictable

  • Clearer flow: pick a unit first, then finalize the skill. The “Done” button stays disabled until you actually choose a skill.
  • UI is consistent in size and style (1200px max, red close buttons), with hover-to-preview for units and better scaling on smaller screens.

• Lobby respects custom map sizes

  • The pregame lobby now shows the correct number of player slots based on the selected map’s max players instead of a fixed count.

What Got Fixed

• Single-board pathfinding on bidirectional roads

  • Units now evaluate multiple road entries instead of beelining to the closest one. This resolves cases where they’d pick a path that couldn’t reach the right castles.
  • Side effect: bots stop stalling when planning routes and make more reliable placement decisions.

• Spawn overlap checks in single-board mode

  • Spawns now validate against the right side of the board in single-board mode. This prevents overlapping spawns and mismatched visuals.

• Starting gold now applies correctly per game mode

  • Game modes that specify starting gold (e.g., 50,000) now consistently override map defaults. If the mode doesn’t set it, the map’s value is used.

• Faster deselect

  • Press Escape to clear your current selection, same as right-click. Simple, but it helps during fast placement.

• Better visibility for spawn ownership

  • The spawn ownership highlight renders above roads so you can actually see who owns the tile even when it’s on a road.

• Road cleanup removes dead ends

  • After generation, the system removes road segments that no minion would ever use. Fewer orphan branches, clearer flow, less visual noise.

• Map touch-ups

  • Hunters and Fort Siege maps got small updates to lane clarity and pacing.

Under the Hood

• Smarter single-board map generation

  • Castle placement is corrected toward the far columns to maximize distance and lane clarity.
  • Flip/rotation math got fixed so Team B’s layout mirrors properly, and roads extend cleanly back to the spawn boundary.
  • Only the strongest path per vertical segment gets connected back to spawn to reduce spaghetti roads.
  • The generator now rolls several candidates and picks one with the most useful road coverage, then spreads roads to improve map traversal. Minimum castle spacing was tuned to fit more viable placements.
  • Net effect: maps have better coverage and cleaner lanes, with fewer odd placements and fewer soft locks.

• Mode-specific server behavior for destructible objectives

  • For the hoppers mode, towers and spawns can be taken out mid-match. The server now defers to the client for validation in that mode to avoid desyncs when things get destroyed.

• Survivors deployment and shop tuning

  • Deployment pipeline set up for the Survivors mode and a lighting pass added to its renderer (ambient + directional).
  • Economy tweaks: enemy bounties now follow a 1–6g progression with a 2x multiplier for elites.
  • Shop UI moved below the island and simplified; the gold display is cleaner. The initial tower switches to shadow-bolt for a smoother early curve.

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That’s the day’s progress. If you notice odd path choices on single-board maps, or UI quirks in the new modals, let us know. The drag-and-drop flow should make quick setups easier, especially in PvP rounds where seconds matter. Thanks for the steady stream of reports—several of these fixes came from your notes.