Optimization Update Plus Bugfixes: December 24th 2022

December 24th 2022 Update

The game launched four days ago and it has been fantastic to receive feedback, comments, questions and bug reports from all of the players who were kind enough to take to the forums! Here are some quick changes for you with bigger ones to follow after a brief break for the holidays.

This update comes after four straight days of working on better optimizing the code to provide a smoother experience at higher levels - there's still more work to do, but it felt important to get an update out for folks sooner rather than later that would offer some performance improvements.

New Features

• Pressing the T key now recenters the camera on your tower!

Optimization

• Sound effects have been made smarter - if there are already five instances of the same sound currently playing, the game will not play more on top of that

• The piece of code that fired to check and see if the player has finished killing all the enemies now fires on a regular interval instead of every single time an enemy dies, which was causing lag when dozens of enemies were dying every second

• The turret enemy tracking function has been optimized to cause less lag when there are loads of turrets on screen all turning to look at enemies

Bugfixes

• The Mountain tile slow against Cavalry units should be more effective now

• Fixed a bug that was stopping some players from being able to unlock Achievements

• Fixed a bug sometimes causing Dragons and Frostwyrms to keep emitting fire or frost particles after they'd finished firing

• (Hopefully) fixed an especially weird bug that sometimes caused a normal-looking unit to spawn during wave 100 with the health, stats and tower instakill ability of the Godking boss unit

• Unlocking the upgrade that replaces all Junkmongers with Altars now correctly applies to the guaranteed Junkmonger that spawns once during first five shops out of any run

Balance Adjustments

• Enemies now have an upper speed limit, preventing a big unlucky stack of Bards from rushing units directly to your tower in the blink of an eye in a way that would be impossible to defend against

• The level 50 Hero boss has had his HP slightly increased

• The level 75 King boss has had his HP slightly decreased

Known Bugs and Future Fixes These are bugs we're aware of and actively working on identifying the cause of and resolving!

• It seems like occasionally the safeguard that stops you from being killed while a potion is actively healing you isn't working

• There's a glitch where sometimes Hobgoblins fire endlessly instead of three shots in quick succession followed by a cooldown

• There are lots of fun ways to break the tutorial if you play in a way that it doesn't expect you to - work will definitely be done to make the tutorial more robust and player-proof

• Folks have asked for a way to quit a run and keep the Crowns they've won - we're looking at implementing both a way to save your game mid-run in case of crashes or just needing a break from the game, as well as providing a way to surrender and collect half of your collected Crowns instead of playing the run out to the natural conclusion and collecting all of your earned Crowns

• Another common request has been a way to reset or refund your upgrades - we're working on getting that implemented in a future update

• Better clarity on controls: a simple information panel that tells you the basics (WASD moves camera) as well as the less obvious things (1, 2, and 3 toggle through the game speeds and T resets the camera to the tower)

If you have any suggestions, please drop them into the discussion forums! And if you encounter any bugs, please write up a bug report into the Bug Report forum so that we can get it fixed as fast as possible for you and other players! Unless there are critical game-breaking bugs that need to be addressed asap, this solo dev will be taking a couple days off for the holidays, but all your feedback is extremely valuable and taken seriously.

Happy Holidays, everyone!