Patch Notes & Updates

Track the continuous evolution of Bribe The Brave. All releases, active playtest patches, balance adjustments, and work-in-progress features are logged directly from development.

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Upcoming / In Development

In Active Development

General Updates

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In Active Development: Upcoming features, balance adjustments, and quality-of-life updates are currently in development.

v0.6.3-alpha

2026-11-03

🚀 Features

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Rotating Loading Screen Hero & Equipment Showcase: Implemented a rotating image carousel on the loading screen that cycles through stylized widescreen showcase plates at a configurable interval (6.0s default) with smooth pause-safe crossfades and dark bottom vignettes. The showcase highlights the Kingdom's hero roster (Warrior, Paladin, Arcane Archer, Elementalist, Nightblade, and Berserker) equipped with in-game weapons, shields, and back attachments alongside item loadout summaries, while keeping the progress bar and generation feedback prominently visible.
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Caravan Defense Bounty & Draft Horse Escort: Enhanced the Supply Caravan escort experience with interactive defense bounties—players can now left-click active caravans in the field to invest extra gold directly into their defense bounty to attract escorting hero guards. The wagon now rolls forward along its path with 180° visual alignment, pairs with a harnessed team of low-poly draft pack horses featuring synchronized procedural trotting, displays an overhead 3D health bar with dynamic combat visibility, and reveals a 12.0m Fog of War perimeter to spot approaching ambushes.
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Act 3 2D Motion Comic Cutscenes ("Into the Frostpeak Pass" & "The Vault of Calamity"): Brought the alpine journey of Act 3 to life with two full 6-panel graphic novel motion comic cutscenes. The Act 3 Intro ("Into the Frostpeak Pass") establishes the expedition's blizzard trek, supply caravan struggle, Grand Magus Vesper's celestial leyline assurances, and Lord Edmund's fiscal anxiety before a dramatic chasm ambush. The Act 3 Outro ("The Vault of Calamity / The Lich's Wake") dramatizes the breach into the Pre-Valerian vault, the shattered ward padlock, and Vesper's fateful descent into ancient relic obsession. Both cutscenes feature hand-lettered widescreen panels, kinetic camera acting (Ken Burns pans, screen rumble, flash vignettes), dedicated environmental soundtracks with dynamic musical tension climbs and crashes, cutscene audio isolation, and permanent War Table replay support from the Level 10 and Level 14 mission briefings.

⚖️ Balance

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Agile Melee Hero Survivability & Role Specialization: Overhauled the survivability of fragile melee heroes to prevent early-combat attrition. Nightblades trigger an emergency Shadow Vanish smoke bomb when falling below 35% HP (25s cooldown), blinking 8.0m backward onto safe terrain, vanishing into 8.0s stealth, and dropping enemy aggro. Ninjas gain 30% passive physical dodge, open engagements at 8.0m with ranged Shuriken Flurry, and auto-deploy a wooden Shadow Clone Decoy log when swarmed by 2+ enemies to draw attacks while retreating. Bladedancers gain a stacking deflection barrier (+25 HP shield per melee hit up to 125 HP) that absorbs incoming damage before expiring after 6.0s out of combat.
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Supply Caravan Travel Calibration: Calibrated the Supply Caravan's travel speed to 1.76 m/s (0.8x base speed), allowing hero escorts to keep pace and clear bandit ambushes along the roadway without the wagon outrunning its guard.

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Subterranean Cavern & Vault Navigation & Ramp Clearance (Levels 13 & 14): Fixed subterranean NavMesh baking and pathfinding disconnects in Level 13 ("The Deep Delve") and Level 14 ("The Vault of Calamity") where recessed cavern floors (y = -8.0m to .0m) were clipped by default elevation AABB bounds or buried under procedural noise hills. Flattened Level 14's procedural elevation curve to keep the terrain flush with marble floor slabs, widened the Grand Vestibule floor and vault dais ramps (>= 3.8m clearance), and registered all cavern/vault floors on walkable navigation layers so heroes path seamlessly from the Village Plaza and Excavation Derrick to all enemy spawners and boss arenas.
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Tomb Overseer Spawn Hitch & Skeleton Binding Guard: Eliminated a spawn stall and animation track warning flood on the Tomb Overseer by stripping 23 redundant serialized humanoid animation libraries and guarding UnitAnimationComponent against binding %Skeleton humanoid libraries to rigs without unique root skeleton names.
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Level 6 Multi-Convoy 3-Star Escort Victory Timing: Resolved an issue in Level 6 ("The King's Crossroads") where delivering the 2nd caravan on Day 10 triggered match victory prematurely before the 3rd caravan arrived on Day 15, locking out the "Perfect Escort" bonus objective. Victory is now held until all scheduled convoys resolve, cleanly crediting 3 stars when all 3 caravans reach Border Depot.
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Rogue Out-of-Combat Stealth Realism: Fixed an issue where Rogues remained permanently cloaked outside of combat, walking around bases as phantom silhouettes. Rogues now walk visibly at normal opacity, entering stealth only upon acquiring an active combat target to deliver backstabs, and re-stealthing during sustained encounters after an 8.0s cooldown.
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Level 6 Caravan Escort 3-Star Completion Fix: Fixed a race condition where delivering the 3rd supply caravan immediately triggered match victory synchronously through the primary objective before secondary objectives finished receiving the delivery signal. This prevented the "Perfect Escort: Deliver all 3 Caravans" bonus objective from crediting the final caravan in the scorecard and awarded 2 stars instead of 3. Match completion evaluation is now deferred until all event signal listeners finish processing within the frame, ensuring all 3 caravans are credited and 3 stars can be cleanly achieved.
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Enemy Archer Ranged Combat Standoff & Weapon Rigging Fix: Resolved an issue where enemy archers (Poacher Archer, Skeleton Archer, and Skeleton Crossbowman) oscillated forward and backward at standoff range or defaulted to melee punches, and equipped them with dedicated marksman/crossbowman ranged abilities, visible bows/crossbows, and back-mounted quivers.
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Zombie Dog Rot Plague Aura Fog of War & Slope Projection Fix: Fixed an issue where the Zombie Dog's rot ground puddle briefly flickered out on spawn, lagged behind Fog of War visibility transitions, or clipped on steep ramps and sloped terrain.

🎨 QoL & Polish

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Skeletal Enemy Nomenclature Standardization: Standardized enemy naming across the entire campaign, replacing all 'Skeleton' enemy prefixes with 'Skeletal' (Skeletal Minion, Skeletal Footman, Skeletal Archer, Skeletal Mage, Skeletal Knight, Skeletal Crossbowman, Skeletal Overseer, and Skeletal Juggernaut) across 8 unit scenes, 7 graveyard spawners, 9 abilities, 26 campaign levels, and 10 strongholds while preserving engine animation skeletons.
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Level 20 Relic Carriage Escort Objective & Star Allocation Fix: Restored primary escort objective classification and 3-star reward configuration on Level 20 ('Tempest on the High Steppes') so completing the crossing successfully awards match victory and bonus star progression.
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Skeletal Enemy & Graveyard Nomenclature Standardization: Standardized all undead skeletal enemy units, graveyard spawners, abilities, and data resources across the entire campaign from legacy "Skeleton XXX" to "Skeletal XXX" (e.g. *Skeletal Archer*, *Skeletal Crossbowman*, *Skeletal Peasant*, *Skeletal Mage* variants, and *Skeletal Minion*) to establish consistent, grammatically polished naming aligned with the Skeletal Giant boss convention, with zero impact to internal engine bone armatures.
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Full-Campaign Master Validation & Mobile Vulkan Shader Pre-Warming (Acts 1-3): Expanded the offscreen Mobile Clustered Forward Vulkan shader pre-warmer (ShaderPrewarmer) to 73 spatial shaders and 27 combat/environmental VFX scenes (100 total pre-compiled resources, including Act 3 thermal magma rifts, snowdrift slow zones, cleave swipes, and projectile trails) to eliminate first-frame shader compilation hitches during alpine and subterranean encounters. Certified all 14 campaign levels (Acts 1-3) across 45 automated regression suites and 42 release preflight checks with 100% pass rates.
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Automated Player Feedback Ingestion & GSD Triage Pipeline: Added an automated GitHub Actions workflow and triage tool that pulls playtester bug reports and balance feedback from the game's Discord feedback channel, summarizes issues with Gemini, and populates Open-GSD backlog items for rapid review.
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Warrior Dynamic Swallowtail Pennant Heraldry: Upgraded the Warrior's back-mounted banner with a stylized double-tailed swallowtail pennant mesh driven by dynamic cloth wind shaders for realistic locomotion flutter while remaining strapped to the unit's back.
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Act 2 Poacher Hovel Visual Dressing & Faction Flair: Outfitted all 6 Act 2 woodland and elemental Poacher Hovel spawner camps with high-contrast faction corner pennants, ragged roof tarps (Outlaw Crimson, Ember Orange, Glacial Cyan, Crackling Violet), hanging camp lanterns, supply barrels, and skull stakes while keeping all lights unshadowed for mobile performance.
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Insufficient Gold Toast Notification: Added a 2.0-second debounced toast notification alert when players attempt to place or increase a bounty without sufficient gold in the treasury.
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In-Level Narrative Pacing & Speech Bubble Anti-Overlap Buffering (Levels 10–14): Refined the narrative pacing across Act 3 with 20 newly staged in-level dialogue beats contrasting Lord Edmund's fiscal pragmatism with Grand Magus Vesper's esoteric relic obsession. Enhanced the in-game speech bubble system (ChatBubbleUI) with a non-modal 6.0-second display duration, an automatic 1.5-second anti-overlap queue buffer, and queue cleanup protection so in-game dialogue flows naturally without clobbering or crowding active hero combat.
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Act 3 Production 3D Asset Overhaul & Texture Optimization Pass (Levels 10–14): Replaced all 28 primitive proxy meshes and temporary stand-ins across Act 3 with bespoke stylized low-poly .glb models adhering to Pixar-inspired aesthetics. Upgraded mountain palisades, forward watchtowers (with elevated platform decks at 4.4m), lost temple altars, convoy wagons with rolling wheel pivots and deployable mantlets, subterranean derricks with reciprocating piston animations, brood warrens, vault portals, and soul beacons. Rigged subterranean enemies (Armored Tomb Drudge, Crypt Crawler, Tomb Overseer, Ancient Dreadknight) to canonical 53-bone skeletons with 18.0m weapon culling, applied tiled PBR slate and marble materials to all 15 cavern floor slabs, and capped all embedded textures to <= 1024x1024 with normal map chrominance protection for mobile GPU performance.
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Act 3 Scene Audit & Placeholder Catalog Specification (Levels 10–14): Completed an exhaustive headless scene traversal and empirical asset audit across Act 3, cataloging 28 visual proxy meshes, temporary stand-ins, and user-supplied raw 3D assets with updated +50% polycount budgets, 1024x1024 texture caps, and universal socket specifications to prepare for Phase 73 3D asset replacements.

v0.6.2-alpha

2026-11-01

🚀 Features

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Act 1 & 2 2D Motion Comic Cutscenes: Brought the narrative lore of Bribe The Brave to life with full 6-panel graphic novel motion comic cutscenes for the Act 1 Intro ("The Fall of Aeterna Isle"), Act 1 Outro ("Hold the Beach / The Titan's Fall"), and an upgraded 6-panel Act 2 Outro ("The Cursed Sepulchre / The Dragon's Ascent"). Crafted with hand-lettered comic panels, dynamic action sound effects, parchment narrative boxes, speech bubbles, and kinetic camera acting (Ken Burns pans, dramatic rumble shakes, holy flash vignettes, and low-pass audio sweeps). Cutscenes are seamlessly integrated into campaign progression—playing automatically on fresh campaign starts and level victories, and permanently unlocked for rewatching via the War Table level briefing modal.
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Level 4 Skeletal Giant Late-Wave Boss: Introduced the massive Skeletal Giant as a late-wave solitary boss encounter in Level 4 ("Hold the Beach"), emerging from the northern inland ridge on Day 16 at Dawn (06:00 AM) to challenge your kingdom across Days 16–20 before victory triggers. The 3.6m-tall titan features 3,000 HP, heavy plate armor, an 800 Gold kill bounty split among defending heroes, a socketed spiked greatclub, an ominous top-screen warning banner, screen-rumbling camera shake, a persistent pulsing skull minimap beacon, and three telegraphed physical abilities (*Colossal Bone Cleave*, *Earthshaking Ground Slam*, and *Titan Roar*) with 10-hero melee encirclement and zero minion summoning.

⚖️ Balance

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Act 1 & 2 Campaign Balancing & Threat Tier Harmonization: Rebalanced early campaign progression across Acts 1 and 2. Locked Levels 1–3 as an accessible onboarding tutorial (3,000G–4,000G starting gold with 200G defense bounties) and reduced Level 4 starting gold from 8,000G to 5,000G to curb overwhelming early hero armies before late-wave boss encounters. Harmonized Level 5 and all Act 2 maps under standard encounter pacing profiles, calibrating distance rings (45m–120m) and gating raid waves to Day 3 with progressive threat tiers (Fodder at Day 3, Standard at Day 4, Elite at Day 6), ensuring players have ample time to establish initial defenses while guaranteeing zero untracked threat tiers across all campaign encounters.

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Temple Stained Glass Daytime Visibility & Distance LOD Fix: Fixed an issue where the Temple's stained glass windows appeared pitch black during the day and in shadow, caused by mipmap downsampling of white stone tracery into dark window texels at RTS camera distance and zero daytime emission before 7:30 PM. The shader now samples window detection at base mip-0 resolution and includes a soft daytime interior backlight so jewel tones (ruby, lapis, gold, emerald) are always visible and vibrant, smoothly cross-fading into warm candlelight flicker at night.

🎨 QoL & Polish

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Act 1 & 2 Motion Comic Cutscene Audio Polish & Minimal Effects Pass: Polished and desaturated the sound design across Act 1 Intro, Act 1 Outro, and Act 2 Outro following the minimal effects concept of the original Main Game Intro. Eliminated audio crowding, repetitive echoes, harsh roars, and multi-coin loops in favor of 1 subtle, well-timed sound effect per panel beat with gentle ambient beds and master peak limiting (0.90), giving each narrative beat distinct acoustic breathing room.
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Act 2 Outro Motion Comic Bespoke Audio & Production Visuals: Upgraded the Act 2 Outro motion comic cutscene ("The Cursed Sepulchre / The Dragon's Ascent") with fully realized graphic novel illustrations conditioned on 2D concept art, a dedicated 27-second panel-synchronized sound effect track with zero background music bleed, hand-lettered dialogue balloons and action SFX stamps, and updated 1080p60/4K60 marketing master cinematics.
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Campaign NavMesh, Combat Simulation & Mobile Vulkan Pre-Warming Validation (Acts 1 & 2): Validated all 9 campaign levels across Act 1 and Act 2 under automated headless simulation, certifying uninterrupted hero navigation, 3.8m bridge choke clearances, spawner bounds, and bounty gold banking. Added runtime combat shaders (Cloth Banner, Thermal Magma, Inland Water) to the offscreen Mobile Vulkan shader pre-warmer during loading to eliminate in-game combat hitching, harmonized Level 12 caldera pacing, and certified 100% green execution across all 36 test suites.
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Production 3D Asset Authoring, Replacements & Texture Optimization (Acts 1 & 2): Replaced placeholder stand-in models across Acts 1 and 2 with bespoke low-poly stylized production 3D assets conforming to Pixar-inspired realism standards, including the steam-driven clockwork Supply Caravan Wagon with kinematic rolling wheels, steered axles, and damage smoke VFX, Level 6 Highway landmarks (Border Depot, Old Stone Bridge with 3.8m clear gorge roadway), 6 Poacher Hovel spawner camps, Level 7 Arena structures (Iron Colosseum, Gladiator Pit, Warmaster Spiked Mace), wilderness spawners (Ancient Grove Lair, Golem Crag, Wolf Den Lair), Crypt & Graveyard props (Sepulchre Heart, Graveyard Brazier, Graveyard Stone Cross, Notice Board 3D), and optimized all textures to the 1024x1024 budget.
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Player Hero Weapon Alignment & Combat Animation Integration: Visually equipped all 28 player hero classes and enemy combatants with calibrated 3D weapons, standardized universal bone sockets, 8 distinct combat discipline animation profiles, and dynamic attack speed scaling.

v0.6.1-alpha

2026-10-26

🚀 Features

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In-Game Player Feedback Modal & Telemetry Dispatch: Added a dedicated in-game feedback system accessible via a "Send Feedback" button on the Main Menu, In-Game Pause Menu, Demo End Modal, and Match Result screens (Victory/Defeat). Players can submit bug reports, balance/pacing thoughts, control suggestions, and star ratings directly to Brewing Turtle Games. Submissions automatically attach helpful system and match context (game version, demo mode, OS, GPU, level ID/name, day, gold balance, active hero/enemy count), persist a local backup copy to user://feedback_outbox.jsonl, support Discord Webhook and Email API endpoints, and provide seamless fallback buttons to join Discord, open a pre-filled email draft to [email protected], or copy the full diagnostic report to the clipboard.
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ExplosiveLLC Animation Libraries Integration Across All Humanoid Units & Enemies: Integrated all 16 modular animation libraries from res://Assets/Animations/ExplosiveLLC/ (containing 1,157 specialized combat and locomotion animations across one-handed, two-handed axes, bows, crossbows, shooting, spears, staves, two-handed swords, shield tactics, unarmed combat, swimming, and climbing) across all 29 humanoid player units, all humanoid enemy units, and automated creation pipelines (EnemyUnitGenerator.gd, generate_enemies.py, unit_creator.gd). Runtime fallback guarantees in UnitAnimationComponent automatically link all shared libraries upon unit initialization, while animal rigs (spiders, bears, wolves, dogs) remain cleanly excluded with their baked animations intact.
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Magma Ghoul Combat Action Expansion (Levels 12 & 22): Expanded the basic Magma Ghoul from a single claw swipe into a versatile 4-action combat kit without permanent auras: added *Searing Rend* (heavy 32 Fire damage strike every 5.5s inflicting a 3s burning DoT), *Magma Spit* (ranged 24 Fire damage molten projectile launched from Socket_Head at 3.5m–12m while closing distance), and *Cinder Thrash* (15 Fire damage punch every 3.2s inflicting a 1.5s slow), alongside the reliable 20 Fire damage *Molten Claw Swipe* and passive death detonation.

⚖️ Balance

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Elemental Resistances & Immunities: Added full damage immunity and status effect immunity support to combat calculations with "Immune" floating combat text. Fire Elementals are completely immune to Fire attacks and burning DoTs; Earth Elementals possess 50% physical damage resistance (Blunt, Piercing, Slashing) and immunity to Poison; Water Elementals are immune to Frost and chilling slows; Air Elementals are immune to Lightning and shock debuffs. All elementals are completely immune to diseases.

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Level Select Briefing Freeze Fix: Clicking a level on the world map no longer freezes for 5–15 seconds (longer on mobile) before the mission briefing opens. The briefing now appears instantly with all of its existing information intact.
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Magma Ghoul Rigging & Arm Stretching Fix: Resolved an issue where the Magma Ghoul's arms severely stretched and deformed during animation playback (Zombie_Idle, Zombie_Walk, Zombie_Attack). Auto-Rig Pro's AI smart markers previously misplaced shoulders and wrists across non-human silhouettes, causing forearm and hand vertices to bind to head and distal bones. Calibrated exact anatomical marker positions matching the 1.95m mesh, baked twist bone vertex weights directly into primary upper and lower arm limb bones, and reconstructed the canonical 53-bone hierarchy, ensuring clean, natural skeletal deformation with zero elastic arm artifacts.
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PhotoBooth Sequence Capture & Import Suppression: Configured automatic .gdignore and .gitignore handling for res://Captures/ so exported PNG frame sequences are never imported by Godot's resource scanner or tracked by Git. Recalibrated sequence recording durations to automatically match playing animation lengths or turntable cycles instead of cutting off at 2.0s, and centered the capture viewport within the stage window during frame recording.
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Mud Brute Shading & Earth Elemental Emission Tuning: Removed unnatural radioactive swamp green hues from the Mud Brute's shaders, materials, droplet particles, and chest light in favor of rich dark wet mud and viscous earth tones, while softening the Earth Elemental's emission intensity for balanced readability.
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Town Notice Board & Hover Tooltip Entity Name Display: Corrected an issue where internal Godot engine-generated node names (such as @CharacterBody3D@2335) were displayed on the Town Notice Board pursuer breakdown and target labels instead of human-readable unit and enemy names. Responders are now cleanly resolved and grouped by hero type (e.g. 3 Responding (3x Warrior) or 3 Responding (2x Warrior, 1x Rogue)), explore bounties cleanly label "Unexplored Region", squad hover labels group duplicate followers cleanly, and unit spawning enforces readable node names.
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Planar Elemental Facing Orientation Alignment: Fixed an issue where Fire, Air, Earth, Water, and Mud Elementals were spawned facing backwards (180 degrees in reverse). Applied a 180-degree Y rotation to their rigged model instances so all elemental minions, variants, and bosses face forward toward their movement and attack targets, aligning with all other characters in the game.
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Level 12 Ramp Navigation & Unsnag Calibration: Recalibrated the slope angle (15.8 deg) and vertical alignment of the settlement shelf ramps down into the caldera floor. By burying the bottom edge into the floor and aligning the top face flush with the shelf surface, the previous 28.6cm vertical ledge was eliminated, allowing units (such as Elementalist and escort groups) to navigate freely without getting stuck.
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Level 12 Time Trial Objective Wording: Updated the secondary challenge display name and match briefing description from "under 18:00 minutes" to "under 18 days" to accurately match the in-game day counter and simulation tracking.
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Citadel Spawner Vertical Origin Alignment: Corrected vertical offsets for Molten Bone Pit, Basalt Keep, and Ashen Bastion 3D models whose centered geometric origins previously left up to 2.3m of each building submerged underground. Models, lights, particles, and health bars now sit cleanly flush on top of the terrain (Y = 0.0m).
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Level 12 Foliage Planting & Caldera Z-Fighting Scanline Fix: Resolved foliage spawning on authored platforms where trees on the settlement shelf were buried 2.5m under the floor with only tree tips peeking out. Updated surface height queries to prioritize physics raycasts against solid terrain over raw noise, ensuring trees sit properly on the shelf surface (Y = 0.0m). Removed the redundant visual mesh on CalderaFloor and suppressed coplanar procedural terrain plateaus under the shelf, eliminating horizontal depth-buffer Z-fighting flickering across the caldera.
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Level 12 Settlement Shelf & Base Spawn Alignment: Resolved player base spawn displacement where Hearthstone Plaza was spawning in a low basin depression south of SouthernSettlementShelf. Configured authored player base location override to (0, 0, 60) directly on the elevated shelf (Y = 0.0m), eliminating the vertical cliff and line-of-sight obstruction, while upgrading basalt platforms with triplanar stone texturing for seamless volcanic visuals and unimpeded northward pathfinding.
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Level 12 Caldera Terrain & NavMesh Navigation Fixes: Calibrated crater elevation and suppressed the global ocean water plane for landlocked inland maps, restoring the flat settlement shelf for building placement, adding switchback ramps down into the caldera floor, and enabling full building and unit pathfinding.
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Match Staging Simulation Pause & Loading Screen Synchronization: Synchronized the match start pipeline so game time, day/night cycles, raid timers, and autonomous hero/enemy AI remain completely paused until scene generation, combat shader pre-warming, and loading screen fade-outs are 100% finished.

🎨 QoL & Polish

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Charred Skeleton 3D Model, Rigging, Charred Poleaxe & 5 Combat Abilities (Level 12):
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Bespoke Sculptural Model & Rig: Crafted a stylized charred volcanic skeleton enemy (2,542 triangles, 1.90m height) with blackened porous bone, volcanic ash crust, molten fissure veins powered by LivingElementalFlow.gdshader, and an articulated canonical 53-bone humanoid skeleton with complete vertex weight coverage (zero unweighted vertices, max 4 bone influences, zero cross-hemisphere bleed).
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Signature Charred Poleaxe: Modeled a heavy two-handed poleaxe (1,100 triangles, 1.95m length) with obsidian blade edges, glowing magma runic inlays, and an ash-wrapped haft socketed cleanly into Socket_Hand_R.
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5 Volcanic Combat Abilities: Expanded combat mechanics with a versatile 5-ability rotation hooked to ExplosiveLLC (2Hand Axe, Armed, Unarmed) and Mixamo animation libraries: *Ashen Poleaxe Slash* (18 melee damage, 2.5m range), *Cinder Guillotine* (heavy 28 fire damage strike with forward cleave swipe VFX, 5.0s cooldown), *Sweeping Halberd Cleave* (22 fire damage sweeping strike, 6.5s cooldown), *Pyre Eruption* (distance gap-closer spell casting a 20 fire damage magma geyser with 1.8m splash and burning DoT up to 8.5m), and *Immolation Pulse* (reactive close-quarters burst dealing 12 initial fire damage + 8 fire damage/sec ticking aura over 4.0s within 3.5m, boosting chest light energy to 2.6).
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Release Automation & Discord Patch Notes Webhook Dispatch: Integrated automated Discord patch notes dispatch into release scripts and CI/CD pipelines. Oversized patch notes (>2,000 characters) are intelligently segmented into sequential, rate-limited Discord messages preserving markdown formatting, headers, and section context.
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Magma Ghoul 3D Model, Rigging & Molten Fissure Shader (Levels 12 & 22): Added a bespoke 3D model, 53-bone humanoid rig, and animated combat visuals for the exploding *Magma Ghoul* enemy spawned from Molten Bone Pits in *Level 12: The Ashfall Caldera* and *Level 22: Caldera of Eternal Fire*:
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Stylized Volcanic Undead Sculpt & Budget: Crafted at 2,637 triangles (~2,500 polycount target) featuring scorched basalt armor plates, an exposed ribcage, obsidian claws, and a swollen magma-crusted abdomen with 1024×1024 PBR textures and an extracted magma fissure mask (magma_ghoul_emission_mask.png).
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Living Fissure Convection & Animations: Powered by LivingElementalFlow.gdshader with upper-torso vertex breathing (COLOR.r), a shadowless flickering chest light, rising GPU embers, fire-shatter death dissolution, a 20-damage *Molten Claw Swipe* fire melee ability, and full zombie/ghoul locomotion, attack, and death animations.
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Fire Elemental Magma Pool Terrain Decals, Melee Defense Attacks, Charge Cone AoE & Basalt Keep Scaling:
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Fire Elemental Caster Melee Defense (Lava Pulse & Flame Eruption): Solved an issue where the Fire Elemental caster froze and stopped attacking when heroes closed within its 3.0m minimum artillery range. Equipped the caster with two new melee-defense abilities: *Lava Pulse* (a high-priority 0-4.5m radial AoE shockwave dealing 22 Fire damage with expanding horizontal lava spray particles and point light flash via LavaPulseVFX) and *Flame Eruption* (a continuous 0-6.0m ground fire geyser dealing 20 Fire damage + burning DoT spouting from under the target's feet via FlameEruptionVFX), while preserving its 12.0m preferred artillery standoff range.
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Terrain-Conforming Scorch Patch & Bubbling Lava VFX: Replaced the flat orange circle plane on the Fire Elemental caster's *Magma Lob* ground pool (ScorchPatch.tscn) with dual terrain-conforming Decal nodes (GroundDecal + counter-rotating LavaChurnDecal, cull_mask = 4, 8.0m vertical projection depth) so burning ground conforms seamlessly over hills and slopes without clipping, paired with organic charred/molten fissure textures and lightweight unshaded FlameLicks and LavaBubbles GPU particles (<= 24 total particles).
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Fire Elemental Spell/Combat VFX & Melee Charge Fire Cone: Added a 4.5m forward fire cone AoE splash (75° arc, 8 Fire damage) and directional flame/spark burst (FireChargeConeVFX) when the melee Fire Elemental impacts its *Flame Leap* charge target, upgraded *Fiery Claw Cleave*, Boss *Colossal Magma Slam*, *Flame Nova*, and death combustion bursts with fire impact eruptions, and enhanced *Magma Lob* and *Boulder Toss* projectiles with emissive molten cores, additive flame/spark trails, and unshadowed point lights.
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Basalt Keep Scale Calibration: Scaled up the *Basalt Keep* stronghold (8.0x, ~7.62m × 6.91m × 7.11m) to match the horizontal footprint of the *Barracks* (~7.54m × 7.60m), recalibrating root and hitbox colliders, navmesh obstacle carving, lighting/particle/health bar heights, and spawn clearance (max_spawn_range = 7.5m).
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Living Sculptural Elemental Overhaul (Fire, Water, Air, Earth & Spirit Archetypes): Replaced legacy elemental enemy models with permanent, high-fidelity living sculptural constructs powered by a unified single-pass procedural convection and vertex-breathing shader:
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Bespoke Sculptural Forms & Splayed-Hand Rigging: Replaced primitive elemental meshes with stylized stone, crystal, and abyssal sculptures. Each model is rigged with Auto-Rig Pro 53-bone humanoid skeletons in a clean A-pose with articulated splayed fingers, eliminating fused mesh artifacts during attack and locomotion animations across all 4 standard bone attachment sockets (Socket_Head, Socket_Hand_L, Socket_Hand_R, Socket_Chest).
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Living Flowing Fissure Shader (`LivingElementalFlow.gdshader`): Implemented an optimized single-pass PBR shader featuring procedural convective flow, dual-frequency UV distortion, animated surface trickles, and crevice-masked vertex breathing. By sampling the emission mask directly at vertex UVs, outer granite, basalt, and sandstone rock shells stay completely rigid while glowing fissure seams pulse and heave. Added a dedicated fluid_body_breathing mode for Water Elemental allowing smooth, full-body liquid undulation without distorting solid stone heads on other archetypes. This completely eliminates the need for redundant second-pass inverted balloon hulls and billboard cross-quad cards, halving material passes while delivering vivid interior energy.
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Thematic Element Profiles:
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*Fire Elemental*: Solid dark volcanic basalt construct with pulsating, churning liquid magma seams and thermal ember emissions.
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*Water Elemental*: Dark abyssal sea-stone and kelp construct with bioluminescent cyan seams, low roughness, and cascading wet trickling normals.
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*Air Elemental*: Fluted canyon sandstone construct with rapid high-frequency convection and petrified electric lightning conduits.
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*Earth Elemental*: Heavy interlocking mossy granite and slate construct with pulsating amber crystal nodes and grounded deep breathing.
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*Spirit Elemental*: Weathered phantasmal tombstone construct with eerie spectral mana-purple and cyan soul fissures, fully packaged for future campaign encounters.
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Shader Pre-Warming & Performance Parity: Integrated LivingElementalFlow.gdshader directly into ShaderPrewarmer.gd combat pipelines to ensure zero runtime compilation stutter during horde spawns, while strictly maintaining the unshadowed chest light and 60-particle mobile performance budget.
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Corrupted Vesper Dialogue Portrait Integration: Added a dedicated 1024×1024 dialogue portrait for Corrupted Vesper (Vesper_corrupted.png) matching the young base model's proportions and robes while reflecting the rift cowl, void stains, and aged corruption, wired directly to the Level 18 boss encounter dialogue.
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Grand Magus Vesper Dialogue Portrait Visual Refresh: Updated Grand Magus Vesper's in-game dialogue portrait across all campaign levels (Levels 10 through 18, including Level 12 The Ashfall Caldera) to his canonical young appearance, matching the newly introduced character models with crisp 1024×1024 royal blue velvet robes and silver star runic trim.
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Necromantic Anchor Landmark Visual Upgrade (Level 25): Replaced primitive BoxMesh placeholder geometry on the Act 6 Level 25 primary objective monument (NecromanticAnchor.tscn) with a bespoke stylized 3D model (Necromantic_Anchor.glb):
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Stylized Realism & Aesthetic Fidelity: Features four towering black obsidian stone pillars carved with stylized screaming skull reliefs, bound tightly by oversized spiked cold-iron chains plunging into the earth base, framing a faceted necrotic soul crystal core.
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Budget & Performance Optimization: Modeled with smart topology at 2,949 triangles (under the 5,000 triangle budget limit) with 1024×1024 PBR textures packed into a compact binary GLB (0.43 MB) and ground-flush origin alignment ($Y = 0.0\text{m}$).
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Standard Sockets & Dynamic Visuals: Equipped with standardized attachment sockets (Socket_SoulBeam at $Y = 6.5\text{m}$, Socket_CrystalCore at $Y = 3.38\text{m}$, Socket_ChainAnchor at $Y = 0.3\text{m}$), dynamically aligning rising soul particles and shadowless necrotic core illumination (#26D9F2) under the strict Zero Baked VFX rule.
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Level 12 Caldera Visual Cleanup & Geometry Overhaul: Overhauled the starting elevation geometry and environmental assets in *Level 12: The Ashfall Caldera*:
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Natural Mesa Starting Plateau: Replaced artificial box platforms with a smooth procedural heightmap plateau ($80\text{m} \times 40\text{m}$ at $Y = 0.0\text{m}$) and gentle quintic smoothstep inclines ($\approx 7.9^\circ$), eliminating terrain flickering, collider snag lips, and tree vertical offsets.
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Stylized 3D Environmental Hazard & Landmarks: Replaced primitive geometric placeholders with bespoke low-poly 3D models: *Thermal Rift Fissures* featuring undulating molten magma shaders and rising GPU embers, *Volcanic Vents* with interactive runic channeling glow and steam geyser purification, and towering hexagonal *Basalt Spires* that fracture into geothermal cleansing springs upon collapse.
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Fog of War Visibility Integration: Attached and wired FogVisibilityComponent to both Thermal Rift fissures and Volcanic Vent landmarks, completely shrouding their glowing magma meshes, dynamic accent lights, and rising GPU embers in unexplored black fog until hero exploration.
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Ancient Sarcophagus Landmark Visual Upgrade (Level 14): Replaced primitive BoxMesh coffin geometry on the Level 14 *Ancient Sarcophagus* spawner (AncientSarcophagus.tscn) with a production-ready, stylized 3D model (Ancient_Sarcophagus.glb):
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Stylized Realism & Aesthetic Fidelity: Features warm carved sandstone masonry, chipped and weathered corners, engraved hieroglyphic trim with turquoise and burnished gold inlays, and a gilded relief pharaoh death mask on the heavy stone lid.
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Tight Budget & Optimization: Generated with smart topology at 1,381 triangles (under the 1,400 triangle budget limit) with 1024×1024 PBR textures packed directly inside binary GLB (0.43 MB) and ground-flush origin alignment ($Y = 0.0\text{m}$).
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Specialist Settlement Building Vibrancy & Thematic Dressings: Revitalized the Archery Range, Arena, Nature Preserve, and Shadowspire Citadel from monotone grayscale structures into colorful visual anchors:
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Archery Range: Added 3D straw targets with concentric rings, standing timber bow racks with stacked bows and leaning quivers, and warm oil lantern glow (#FFD880).
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Arena: Added a circular sparring sand pit, crossed weapon racks with broadswords, spears, and shields, iron braziers with crackling embers, and spectator banners.
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Nature Preserve: Populated the courtyard with vibrant batched MultiMeshInstance3D flora (flowering shrubs, wildflower clusters, and an autumn tree) in local building space.
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Shadowspire Citadel: Added a soft-depth scrolling Voronoi ground fog card and pulsating amethyst runic glow decals (#C060FF).
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Mobile 12-Light Invariant: Strictly preserved the 12-settlement-light mobile Vulkan budget (shadow_enabled = false) and ensured zero hero pathfinding snag hazards.
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Stronghold 3D Model Swaps & Faction Visual Overhaul: Replaced primitive box and cylinder placeholders on enemy strongholds with dedicated stylized 3D models and factional visual identity:
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Caldera & Volcanic Strongholds: Upgraded Ashen Bastion, Basalt Keep, and Molten Bone Pit with dark basalt stone, magma crimson (#FF3311) and lava orange (#FF5919) illumination, rising ember particles, and calibrated mortar launch trajectory.
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Glacial & Beast Strongholds: Upgraded Frostspire Crypt with glacial cyan (#00E5FF) runic illumination and swirling frost mist; replaced generic wolf den boulder with a sculpted den cavern, bone remnants, warm amber lighting (#FFA020), and cave breath mist.
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Faction Strongholds & Fog of War Fixes: Outfitted Poacher Hovels (torch gold #FFB300), Amphibian Huts (swamp jade #00FF88), and Undead Crypts (necrotic green #39FF14) with faction lights and ambient motes. Fixed Mud Fusion Pit particle hierarchy and attached Fog of War concealment to completely eliminate particle leaks through unexplored territory.
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Dual Collision & Spawner Clearance: Calibrated dual root and hitbox collision hulls symmetrically (+0.2m combat margin) with ground-flush alignment, expanded spawner clearance radii to guarantee spawned minions never get trapped inside structures, and established dynamic 4-point NavMesh obstacle carving across all strongholds.
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Universal Unit Weapon Sockets, Enemy Equipment & Mobile Distance Culling: Standardized weapon attachment sockets across all heroes and enemy units, armed unarmed combatants, and optimized mobile GPU performance:
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Universal Sockets Architecture: Standardized right-hand, left-hand, and back sockets across all 28 hero scenes and enemy rigs, dynamically resolving bone bindings across both 61-bone extended and 53-bone standard skeleton families without hand/finger misbinding.
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Equipped Unarmed Combatants: Armed previously bare-handed enemies with ready 3D equipment—Skeleton Archers wield Bone Bows, Skeleton Crossbowmen aim Crossbows, Skeleton Mages brandish Bonewood Staves, and Poacher Warriors draw Short Swords with palm-aligned grips.
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18.0m Handheld Distance Culling: Handheld weapons automatically fade beyond 18m camera elevation on mobile devices to slash vertex submission overhead during 60+ unit battles, while strictly keeping the Warrior's iconic rally banner visible across the entire battlefield.
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Automated Regression Suite Expansion & Mobile Shader Hardening: Expanded the automated master test harness to 33 full test suites with 4,498 automated checks certifying 100% green pass with zero regressions, and hardened all dynamic combat and settlement shaders in the Mobile Vulkan pre-warmer to eliminate runtime compilation hitches.

v0.6.0-alpha

2026-10-22

🚀 Features

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Building Production Queue Notice Board 3D Widget: Replaced the legacy SubViewport-based building queue with a stylized low-poly 3D notice board (BuildingNoticeBoard3D.tscn) mounted directly to building anchor sockets across all guildhalls and research structures:
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Zero SubViewport Overhead: Replaced tile-buffer heavy SubViewport rendering with a single-pass unshaded circular progress shader (ProductionProgressQuad.gdshader), eliminating mobile Vulkan performance penalties while rendering crisp, burnished gold radial progress fill around the active icon.
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Production-Driven Visibility: The notice board automatically becomes visible across the settlement whenever recruitment or research is actively underway (even when buildings are deselected), displaying the active unit/tech icon and pending queue count badge (e.g. +2). When idle and unselected, the notice board cleanly hides.
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Camera Billboarding & Distance-Adaptive Scaling: Orientates cleanly parallel to the active camera view plane with subtle distance-adaptive scaling (1.0x at 15m zoom up to 1.45x at 55m zoom), ensuring unit training and tech progression remain readable at tactical overview heights without z-fighting against roofs or walls.
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Autonomous Bounty Decision Feedback & Town Plaza Notice Board: Added an interactive Town Notice Board modal (PlazaNoticeBoardModal.tscn) and transparent in-world indicators to demystify autonomous hero AI decision-making:
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Town Notice Board: Accessible via a dedicated banner on the Village Plaza inspector or the settlement HUD. The board displays all active KILL, DEFEND, and EXPLORE bounties with threat ratings, target classifications, and responding hero counts.
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Decision Diagnostics: When a bounty is neglected (0 responding heroes), the board displays an amber diagnostic banner explaining the consensus rationale from nearby heroes (e.g. distance too far for payout, reward diluted among crowd, or target threat hesitation) along with a recommended payout target.
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Quick-Bribe Topping: Directly top up bounty values from the settlement treasury using convenient +50G, +100G, and +250G buttons. Topping up immediately wakes up idle and roaming heroes via Behavior Tree rethink triggers (needs_rethink), instantly redirecting autonomous heroes toward newly lucrative objectives.
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In-World Responder Badges: World billboard indicators now feature real-time responder counts (e.g. [ 150g (👤 2) ]) and pulsing amber warning flags on neglected targets (e.g. [ ⚠️ 50g (👤 0) ]).
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Specialist Building Bonus Tech & Capacity Expansion: Introduced high-impact mid/late-game gold sinks (~2,000G) and capacity upgrades across all 6 specialist structures. Researching high-tier perks grants decisive battlefield upgrades:
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Temple: *Sacred Town Healing Aura* projects a 25m protective golden aura around the village plaza restoring 4.0 HP/s and cleansing poison/rot debuffs from allied defenders.
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Tavern: *Liquid Courage & Revelry* grants heroes +20% movement speed and +1.5 bravery for 180s upon completing rest at the inn.
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Archery Range: *Eagle Eye Munitions* extends ranged ability reach by +2.0m, while boosting projectile speed by +25% and damage by +15%.
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Arena: *Gladiatorial Conditioning* empowers heroes with +50 maximum health and +10% physical armor mitigation.
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Nature Preserve: *Verdant Sylvan Haven* expands Fog of War reveal radius by +25% and grants 2.0 HP/s wild out-of-combat regeneration.
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Shadowspire Citadel: *Grim Tithes & Siphon* skims a 15% tithe directly to the Crown treasury from all bounty gold distributions and grants allied heroes 10% damage lifesteal on hit.
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Specialist Unit Capacity Expansion: Each specialist structure features an expansion research action unlocking a 2nd active recruitment slot for its 3 synergistic hero archetypes across the Barracks, Coven, and Hideout (e.g. Temple unlocks 2 Paladins, 2 Priestesses, and 2 Witch Hunters) with dynamic revocation upon structure destruction.
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Escort & Remote Mission Forward Economy: Frontline convoys (SupplyCaravan, LeadSiegeWagon, RelicCarriage) and remote outposts (ExcavationDerrick, ForwardHearthBrazier) now feature forward gold deposit points powered by ForwardDepositComponent.gd. Heroes pursuing bounties on remote and escort missions no longer trek across the entire map to town to deposit carried gold. Hero AI behavior (FindPlazaAction.gd) dynamically targets the closest valid deposit point with dynamic radial arrival standoff slots. When a hero deposits gold at a forward node, DepositGoldAction.gd triggers a 12.0m squad proximity banking sweep, crediting carried gold for all nearby allied heroes directly to the treasury (GoldManager.current_gold) with floating gold indicators.
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Custom Keybinding & Gamepad Remapping Menu: Added a full-featured Controls tab to the Options Menu supporting both Keyboard & Mouse and Gamepad Controller customization. Powered by the new InputRemapManager autoload singleton, bindings use layout-independent physical keycodes (AZERTY/QWERTZ friendly) and standardized controller deadzones. Players can interactively rebind actions via an interactive capture modal, swap conflicting keys symmetrically with warning feedback, and restore factory defaults at any time. Custom control configurations persist automatically to user://input_bindings.cfg.
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Bandit to Engineer Archetype Rebrand: The outlaw "Bandit" unit has evolved into the lore-coherent military Combat Sapper / Demolitionist archetype, the "Engineer" (Engineer.tscn, EngineerData.tres). Recruited from the Hideout via Action_HireEngineer.tres, the Engineer wields tactical explosive ordinances including Demolition Bombs, Chemical Fire, Healing Canisters, Fire Bombs, and Wrench Throws. Full backward-compatibility aliasing (ARCHETYPE_ALIASES in TechTreeManager and SaveManager) seamlessly maps legacy save games and campaign levels to the new Engineer archetype with zero progression disruptions.

⚖️ Balance

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Campaign Levels 6–26 Pacing & Encounter Balance Overhaul Certification:
•
Early Game Rebalanced Around Player Build Capacity: Early mission openings across Levels 6–26 are now calibrated around what players can actually field with their opening treasury before raids arrive, providing breathing room to construct initial guildhalls and recruit at least 4 defenders.
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Match Briefing Starting Gold Synchronization: Mission briefing screens now accurately reflect the exact starting treasury across all campaign levels, eliminating discrepancies between pre-mission briefings and in-game funds.
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Elite Concurrency Capping: Dangerous Tier-3 elite monsters (such as Mummy Warriors, Dread Death Knights, and Corrupted Golems) are dynamically capped at 2 alive concurrently for Levels 6–18 and 3 for Levels 19–26, preventing sudden swarm wipes.
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Protected Settlement Distance Rings: Hostile spawners and roving packs are pushed back to safe distance buffers (minimum 45m for basic fodder, 75m for standard units, and 120m for distant elites), ensuring settlements are never immediately swarmed at daybreak.
•
Convoy Departure Grace Periods: Supply caravans, siege convoys, and relic carriages on Levels 6, 11, and 20 now hold departure and defense bounty posting until Day 3 with at least 3 active defenders assembled, preventing defenseless escorts from venturing into ambushes alone.
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Boss Arena Isolation: Level bosses (such as Malakar, Ignis, Nether Summoners, and Elemental Titans) are strictly confined to dedicated climax arenas and scripted events, completely removed from generic roving packs and raid waves.
•
Act 6 ("The Frozen North & Malakar's Citadel", Levels 23–26) Encounter Pacing Calibration:
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Level 23 ("The Frozen Scarp"): Assigned PacingProfile_Late with Day 3 raid start and safe spatial distance rings (45m/75m/120m). Recalibrated opening roving packs and initial raids to feature skeletal infantry (SkeletonMageFrost, SkeletonCrossbowman) and Zombie Dogs; restricted Polar Bone Constructs to distant rings (≥120m) and late difficult raids (Day 6+). Tuned FrostspireCryptData active maintain count to 2 and burst count to 1 to satisfy elite spawner concurrency caps.
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Level 24 ("The Iron Gatehouse"): Assigned PacingProfile_Late with Day 3 raid start and safe spatial distance rings (45m/75m/120m). Calibrated roving packs to open with skeletal infantry and ranged units; gated Dread Death Knights behind distant rings (≥120m) and late difficult raids (Day 6+). Reduced Gatehouse normal spawner maintain count to 2.
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Level 25 ("The Cathedral of Despair"): Assigned PacingProfile_Late with Day 3 raid start and safe spatial distance rings (45m/75m/120m). Opening roving packs feature Skeleton Crossbowmen, Skeleton Mages, and Frostbound Draugrs; Dread Death Knights are restricted to late difficult raids (Day 6+). Reduced Cathedral Courtyard normal spawner maintain count to 2, and whitelisted CathedralCourtyardManager.gd in Level25Data.tres scripted_encounter_scripts.
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Level 26 ("The Frozen Throne / Malakar"): Assigned PacingProfile_Late with Day 3 raid start and safe spatial distance rings (45m/75m/120m). Recalibrated generic roving packs and raid waves to open with skeletal infantry and Draugrs; Dread Death Knights are restricted to late difficult raids (Day 6+). Malakar and soul conduit guardians remain strictly scripted climax arena encounters.
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Level 21 ("Convergence of the Primordials") Encounter Pacing Calibration:
•
Assigned PacingProfile_Late with Day 3 raid start and safe spatial distance rings (45m/75m/120m).
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Removed Fire Elemental Boss from all generic roving and raid pools.
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Reduced Planar Convergence Rift maintain spawn count from 4 to 2 (threshold max count 1) in normal spawners.
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Gated Planar Convergence Rift Fire elemental spawns behind late-game muster (Day 6+), spawning Charred Skeletons and Skeleton Fire Mages prior to Day 6.
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Opening roving packs and initial raids feature Air Elementals (Melee/Ranged); Fire Elementals are restricted to distant rings (≥120m) and late difficult raids (Day 6+).
•
Level 22 ("Caldera of Eternal Fire") Encounter Pacing Calibration:
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Assigned PacingProfile_Late with Day 3 raid start and safe spatial distance rings (45m/75m/120m).
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Removed Ignis (6,000 HP boss) and Fire Elemental Boss from all generic roving, raid, and spawner pools (normal_spawners.spawner_pool now contains exclusively Cooling Conduits); bosses exist solely as scripted arena encounters.
•
Opening roving packs and initial raids feature Skeleton Peasants and Skeleton Fire Mages; Fire Elementals (Melee/Ranged) are restricted to distant rings (≥120m) and late difficult raids (Day 6+).
•
Whitelisted Level22.gd scripted climax ambush minion waves in Level22Data.tres scripted_encounter_scripts.
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Act 4 & Act 5 Opener Encounter Pacing Overhaul (Levels 15–20):
•
Levels 15–18 (Act 4: Coven Fractured, Sunken Mire, Ashen Waste, Corrupted Spire): Assigned PacingProfile_Standard, deferred initial raids to Day 3, and calibrated roving packs to safe spatial rings (45m/75m/120m). Replaced placeholder Mummy Warriors at renegade camps (RenegadeArcaneCamp, RenegadeSanctumCircle, WardBastion) with context-appropriate Hedge Mages and Poachers. Capped Corrupted Golem Forge active spawns at 2, and restricted Corrupted Golems and Mummy Warriors to distant roving rings (≥120m) and late difficult raids (Day 6+).
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Level 19 ("Rift of the Earth & Tide"): Assigned PacingProfile_Late with 5,000G starting treasury and Day 3 raid start. Removed Earth Elemental Bosses from spawner pools, gating Granite Monolith Keep earth boss summons and Mud Fusion Pit automatic merges behind late-game muster (Day 10+).
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Level 20 ("The Tempest Steppes") & Relic Escort Calibration: Assigned PacingProfile_Late with 5,200G starting funds, Day 3 raid start, and an expanded 17-day completion window. The Relic Carriage now holds departure and defense bounty posting until Day 3 with at least 3 active defenders. Air Elemental Bosses removed from spawner pools, and Cyclone Vortex Spawner titan ambushes are gated behind Day 10+.
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Act 3 Encounter Pacing Overhaul (Levels 10, 12, 13, 14):
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Level 10 ("The Silent Watch"): Increased starting gold to 4,000G to support full 8-hero squad muster before first raids. Assigned standard pacing profile and replaced burst Mummy Warriors from Alpine Scout Bivouacs (33% HP threshold) with Mossback Wolves, capping max active spawns at 2 so 6 simultaneous Mummies cannot overwhelm early squads. Replaced early roving Mummies with Skeleton Crossbowmen and Skeleton Peasants, restricting Mummies to distant rings (≥120m) and late difficult raids (Day 6+).
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Level 12 ("The Ashfall Caldera"): Increased starting funds to 4,000G and assigned standard pacing profile. Gated Fire Elementals (Melee/Ranged) behind distant rings (120–200m) and late raids (Day 6+), opening with Skeleton Peasants, Skeleton Fire Mages, and Charred Skeletons. Reduced Basalt Keep maximum active spawns from 3 to 2 to limit concurrent fire elementals.
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Level 13 ("The Deep Excavation"): Deferred raid start day from Day 2 to Day 3 (t=152.5s) and assigned standard pacing profile. Opening roving packs feature Skeleton Peasants and Skeleton Crossbowmen; Armored Tomb Drudges are strictly restricted to distant rings (120–200m) and late raids (Day 6+). Reduced Brood Warren maximum active spawns from 4 to 2.
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Level 14 ("The Vault of Calamity"): Deferred raid start day from Day 2 to Day 3 with 4,200G starting funds and assigned standard pacing profile. Ancient Dreadknights and Armored Tomb Drudges gated behind difficult roving rings (120–170m) and late difficult raids (Day 6+, Wave 4+). Reduced Ancient Sarcophagus maximum active spawns from 3 to 2.
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Act 2 Tail Encounter Pacing Calibration (Levels 6, 7, 8, 9):
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Level 6 ("The King's Crossroads"): Assigned standard pacing profile and calibrated spawners to safe distance rings (60–160m). Caravan departures and ambushes are now paced by CaravanManager, enforcing departure gating and filtering out high-tier elite ambushes.
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Level 7 ("Whispering Pines"): Removed early Rock Golems and Mossback Bears from generic roving packs and opening raids, opening instead with Poacher Hunters and Amphibian Hunters. Secondary beast dens recalibrated to maintain manageable threat.
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Level 8 ("The Iron Colosseum"): Gated Orc Gladiators and Iron Warmasters behind late difficult raids (Day 6+) and distant rings, opening with Poacher Hunters and Archers. Gladiator Training Pits adjusted to maintain 1 active combatant.
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Level 9 ("The Cursed Sepulchre"): Retuned to mirror the hand-balanced Level 3 Mummy standard. Replaced Day 0 Mummy Warriors in easy and normal roving packs with Skeleton Peasants, Crossbowmen, and Zombie Dogs, restricting Mummies to distant rings (≥120m) and late difficult raids. Sepulchre Heart defensive bursts capped to prevent overwhelming elite floods.
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Runtime Encounter Pacing Enforcement & Convoy Departure Grace:
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Dynamic Elite Alive-Cap Choke Point: Implemented a universal admission choke point in BaseEnemy deferred initialization governed by active pacing profiles. Extra dynamically spawned Tier-3 elites beyond profile caps are cleanly vetoed before acting across all spawn pathways, while authored level guardians remain exempt.
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Strict Spatial Distance Rings: Upgraded SectorGridManager with strict minimum distance rings, preventing secondary spawners and roving packs from being placed inside settlement safe zones even when candidate rings are depleted.
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Convoy Departure Grace & Defender Gating: In Level 11 and escorted missions, siege convoys now delay departure and defense bounty posting until Day 3, requiring a minimum contingent of 3 active defenders before setting off down the highway.
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Encounter Pacing & Threat Balancing Framework:
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4-Tier Enemy Threat Architecture: Classified all 54 campaign enemy unit data definitions into explicit threat tiers (FODDER, STANDARD, ELITE, BOSS), providing structured gating for spawn cadence, elite concurrency caps, and distance safety rings.
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Data-Driven Pacing Profiles: Introduced EncounterPacingProfile resources (PacingProfile_Standard and PacingProfile_Late) defining stage thresholds, distance safety buffers, raid wave gating, and muster power models.
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Automated Encounter Pacing & Muster Audit: Added test_pacing_muster_threat.gd (-Suite pace) to continuously audit campaign encounter data against muster progression curves, spawner burst limits, escort timing windows, and baseline immutability for early levels (Levels 1–5).
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Level 11 ("The Frostpeak Pass") Pacing Calibration: Overhauled Level 11 encounter pacing with increased starting gold (4,000G), delayed initial raid start (Day 3), expanded time limit allowance (18 days), and gated Tier 3 roving/raid threats to match player squad muster velocity.
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Campaign-Wide Starting Gold Normalization: Smoothed the starting economy curve across all 26 campaign levels ensuring every mission provides at least 3,000G starting funds (scaling up to 6,000G in late-game sieges). Players can now reliably erect an initial guildhall, hire an opening 3-4 hero combat squad, and post opening defense bounties with an economic safety buffer.
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Level 10 ("The Silent Watch") Early Elite Wall Resolution:
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Increased starting gold from 2,500G to 3,200G, granting players sufficient treasury to establish a core guildhall and hire defenders before the caravan departs.
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Replaced Day 0 Mummy Warriors in easy roving packs with Skeleton Crossbowmen and Mossback Wolves, preventing early hero squads from suffering instant wipes during opening skirmishes.
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Deferred easy raids until Day 3+, ensuring players have adequate preparation time to assemble defensive formations.
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Aura Damage Diminishing Returns & Stack Capping: Overhauled AuraComponent to track per-target damage history within an 850ms window. Multi-enemy aura overlap is now capped at a maximum of 2 stacks with diminishing returns (Stack 1 = 100%, Stack 2 = 50%, Stack 3+ = 0% damage), eliminating instant hero wipes from overlapping Mummy Warrior decay auras.
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Automated Campaign Balance Verification Harness: Introduced Tests/Campaign/test_campaign_balance_harness.gd (run_m5_tests.ps1 -Suite balance), systematically auditing all 26 campaign levels for economic viability, raid pacing, spawner definitions, and aura mitigation integrity.

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Elevated Stronghold Targeting & Defense Bounty Disengagement: Fixed an issue where ranged units (such as Elementalists) oscillated back and forth between attacking elevated cliffside strongholds and pursuing active defense bounties due to mid-air combat slot coordinates and spell range mismatches. Units now cleanly disengage from un-bountied enemy strongholds when an active defense bounty is present, and ranged combat slots properly snap to walkable ground navmesh around elevated platforms.
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Escort Wagon & Forward Economy Gold Deposit: Fixed an issue where heroes escorting supply caravans, siege wagons, or relic carriages held onto looted gold instead of banking it into the convoy wagons. Heroes within 10 meters of any active convoy wagon or forward outpost now automatically bank their carried gold into the settlement treasury, units explicitly returning to deposit gold properly recognize forward wagons alongside the Town Plaza, and the Level 11 siege convoy now pulses a 50G escort reward every 15 seconds while kept moving.
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Convoy & Remote Defense Idle Stalling: Fixed an issue where units assigned to escort moving supply caravans or remote targets could get stuck near the village plaza in an idle shield-raising loop due to stale destination references.
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Gold Deposit Type Conversion Crash: Fixed a GDScript runtime exception in DepositGoldAction where heroes returning to deposit gold encountered a crash when resolving coordinate-based destinations.

🎨 QoL & Polish

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Coastal Reed Clumping & Patch Clustering: Coastal reeds along beaches and shorelines now naturally group into organic tufts and patches rather than scattering individually and evenly across the sand.
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Campaign 3D Placeholder Asset Audit & Production Specification: Audited all 26 campaign levels across Acts 1–6 and authored a 62-asset production specification report (.planning/CAMPAIGN_PLACEHOLDER_ASSETS.md) for the 3D art team, detailing poly budgets (<1,500 tris for units, <2,500 tris for bosses/vehicles), bone sockets, Pixar-inspired stylized realism visual profiles, and strict exclusions on baked smoke/fire/VFX across all bosses, siege engines, forward economy convoys, and interactive landmarks.
•
Rogue Dual-Dagger Grip Alignment: Realigned the Rogue's left and right hand dagger attachments so the weapon handles sit naturally inside the curled fingers and palms across idle, movement, and combat animations.
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ExplosiveLLC RPG Animation Library Integration: Integrated 16 weapon and locomotion animation libraries (1,157 animations across 1Hand, 2Hand Axe, 2Hand Bow, 2Hand Crossbow, 2Hand Shooting, 2Hand Spear, 2Hand Staff, 2Hand Sword, Armed, Armed-Shield, Climbing-Ladder, Climbing-Ledge, Crawl, Relax, Swimming, and Unarmed) with corrected 180-degree rest-pose orientation and full 53-bone humanoid retargeting for all units and enemies.

v0.5.9-alpha

2026-10-17

🚀 Features

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Grand Campaign Victory Epilogue & 26-Level Master Progression (Act 6): Added the climactic 6-panel Act 6 Epilogue motion comic cutscene (Act6OutroCutscene.tscn) concluding the 26-level Bribe the Brave campaign, depicting the shattering of Arch-Lich Malakar, the collapse of the Dread Citadel spires, the lifting of the continental undead curse with warming northern sun and green sprouts, the allied triumph of Chancellor Edmund, Grand Magus Vesper, and all hero guilds upon the frozen dais, the restoration of kingdom-wide trade across all six provinces, and the coronation of the Magistrate as Grand Champion of Aeterna with royal credits roll. Victory on Level 26 transitions smoothly to the scorecard with a dedicated 'Watch Grand Epilogue 🎬' prompt, while War Table Node 26 maintains perpetual epilogue replay access. SaveManager securely records Level 26 completion, sets acts_completed["act6"] = true, tracks act6_outro_viewed = true, awards full 78-star Grand Champion campaign completion across all 26 levels without progression regression, backed by comprehensive automated test suites certifying 100% green pass across the entire campaign arc.
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Level 26 Playable ("Throne of the Lich King"): Added the climactic Act 6 finale scenario atop the Dread Citadel apex, featuring a three-tier Obsidian Throne Dais, the colossal three-phase confrontation against Arch-Lich Malakar (8,000 HP, 40% physical armor, Phase 1 cold spell strikes, Phase 2 Glacial Barrier invulnerability sustained by 4 Frozen Soul Conduits, Phase 3 exposed berserk frenzy taking 50% bonus damage), 4 destructible Frozen Soul Conduits (1,200 HP, 30% physical armor, 300G DEMOLISH bounties, cyan particle streams), 4 towering soul columns framing the dais, forward staging plaza defense, War Table Node 26 unlocked with boss marker (marker_type = 1), MatchBriefingModal narrative lore and tactical briefings, and Cleanse Mastery tracking for defeating Malakar without suffering any guildhall destructions, backed by 100% green automated headless test suites.
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Level 25 Playable ("Spire of the Damned"): Added the third Act 6 campaign scenario inside the interior cathedral courtyards of the Dread Citadel, featuring 5 towering Necromantic Siphon Anchors (2,000 HP, 25% physical mitigation, 400G royal bounties), immediate 4-unit elite Death Knight rage waves triggered upon each anchor demolition, the climactic 13-unit Midnight Cataclysm wave unleashed upon total anchor collapse, gothic bone barricade perimeter framing, blood-red glowing nave rune lights, dark purple necrotic fog environment, War Table Node 25 unlocked and connected forward to Node 26, MatchBriefingModal narrative lore and tactical briefings, and Cleanse Mastery tracking for holding the forward staging base during the Midnight Cataclysm, backed by 100% green automated headless test suites.
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Level 24 Playable ("Gates of the Necropolis"): Added the second Act 6 campaign scenario featuring a massive siege assault against the outer defensive perimeter of the Dread Citadel, featuring 2 Outer Iron Gatehouses with dynamic navigation obstacle de-carving upon breach, 2 Titan Bone Catapults bombarding the player's advance staging base with necrotic ballistic projectiles, 4 Necropolis Perimeter Guard Towers with green lantern night lighting and necrotic bolt turrets, bone fortress wall barricades, War Table Node 24 unlocked and connected forward to Node 25, MatchBriefingModal narrative lore and tactical briefings, and Cleanse Mastery tracking for clearing all 4 perimeter towers while sustaining 3 or fewer player building destructions, backed by 100% green automated headless test suites.
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Level 23 Playable ("The Frozen Desolation"): Added the opening Act 6 campaign scenario in the sub-zero glacial tundra of the northern wastes, featuring persistent frostbite environmental hazards reducing hero movement speed by 25% outside warmth zones, 2 Forward Hearth Braziers with 14m protective sanctuary auras repelling frostbite, 3 Stranded Vanguard Scout NPCs trapped in glacial crevices who follow allied rescuers back to sanctuary, 3 destructible Frostspire Crypt spawners (1,500 HP, 30% physical armor) fielding Frostbound Draugr and Polar Bone Constructs with 350G royal DEMOLISH bounties, War Table Node 23 unlocked and connected forward to Node 24, MatchBriefingModal narrative lore and tactical briefings, and Cleanse Mastery tracking for rescuing all 3 vanguard scouts, backed by 100% green automated headless test suites.
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Foundational Lich King, Undead & Citadel Assets (Act 6): Implemented Arch-Lich Malakar boss scene rigged on the universal 53-bone skeleton with 4 standard sockets, 4-layer living frost/soul shader stack with mobile GPU particle budgets, and 3-phase progression mechanics. Authored the full Act 6 adversary roster including Titan Bone Catapults with 35m ballistic lobbers, Frostbound Draugr, Polar Bone Constructs, and elite Dread Death Knights with 2.5m standoff ring arbitration. Added modular Citadel environment prefabs including bone walls, destructible Iron Gatehouses with dynamic NavigationObstacle3D navmesh carving, 2,000 HP Necromantic Anchors, and Throne Dais soul columns backed by 100% green automated headless tests.

v0.5.8-alpha

2026-10-17

🚀 Features

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Act 3 2D Motion Comic Cutscenes ("Into the Frostpeak Pass" & "The Vault of Calamity"): Brought the alpine journey of Act 3 to life with two full 6-panel graphic novel motion comic cutscenes. The Act 3 Intro ("Into the Frostpeak Pass") establishes the expedition's blizzard trek, supply caravan struggle, Grand Magus Vesper's celestial leyline assurances, and Lord Edmund's fiscal anxiety before a dramatic chasm ambush. The Act 3 Outro ("The Vault of Calamity / The Lich's Wake") dramatizes the breach into the Pre-Valerian vault, the shattered ward padlock, and Vesper's fateful descent into ancient relic obsession. Both cutscenes feature hand-lettered widescreen panels, kinetic camera acting (Ken Burns pans, screen rumble, flash vignettes), dedicated environmental soundtracks with dynamic musical tension climbs and crashes, cutscene audio isolation, and permanent War Table replay support from the Level 10 and Level 14 mission briefings.
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Planar Elemental Hierarchy & 4-Layer Living Shaders: Introduced Earth, Air, and Water elemental creature scenes rigged on the universal 53-bone humanoid skeleton with standardized attachment sockets, 4-layer living shader stacks with mobile GPU particle budgets, unique passive traits (Earth armor, Air dodge, Water regeneration), and dual-ring combat slot arbitration preventing frontline clutter around targets.
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Level 19 Playable ("Rift of the Earth & Tide"): Added the opening Act 5 campaign scenario in a rugged coastal granite chasm, featuring rushing mountain rivers with shallow crossings, Earth + Water cross-elemental synergy (Mud Regeneration Aura granting +35 HP/s and +20% armor to nearby allies), Mud Fusion Pits that merge elemental units into elite Mud Brutes, primary demolition objectives on 2 Granite Monolith Keeps and 2 Tidal Geyser resonance anchors via indirect royal bounties, and Cleanse Mastery awarded for neutralizing all 4 fusion pits before any unit merge occurs.
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Level 20 Playable ("Tempest on the High Steppes"): Added the second Act 5 campaign scenario on a wind-scoured steppe plateau, featuring an escort mission protecting the reinforced Relic Carriage with stepped hero proximity speed throttling and a persistent 250G royal DEFEND bounty, periodic Gale Crosswinds hazards deflecting hero ranged projectiles by 50% while empowering Air Elementals, 3 ridge Gale Spire structures that calm local crosswinds when silenced, and Cleanse Mastery awarded for destroying all spires before the carriage reaches the volcanic pass.
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Level 21 Playable ("Convergence of the Primordials"): Added the third Act 5 campaign scenario in the cracked volcanic foothills, featuring a four-front planar siege from all cardinal directions (Air North, Earth South, Water East, Fire West) assaulting the Volcanic Gateway, dynamic Planar Resonance Frenzy barrier links between opposing rifts, Air + Fire Mobile Fire Tornadoes deflecting ranged attacks until doused by water, fortified Inner Sanctum walls, and Cleanse Mastery awarded for defending the gateway without allowing any sanctum wall breach.
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Level 22 Playable ("Caldera of Eternal Fire"): Added the climactic Act 5 boss finale inside Mount Ignis's volcanic caldera, featuring the colossal three-phase Fire Elemental Lord Ignis (6,000 HP, 40% physical armor, Phase 1 Magma Cleaves, Phase 2 Molten Barrier invulnerability sustained by three Cooling Conduit anchors, Phase 3 exposed core frenzy taking 50% bonus damage), Grand Magus Vesper as an allied NPC projecting an 18-meter Celestial Ward aura for heat mitigation and restorative shielding, an interactive 8-second ritual channel under a 350G royal defense bounty culminating in the white-gold Supernova Purge permanently incinerating the Heart of Calamity into ash, and Cleanse Mastery awarded for completing the ritual without losing either expedition guildhall.
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Act 5 Outro Motion Comic Cutscene & Campaign Certification: Added the climactic 6-panel motion comic sequence concluding Act 5, depicting the incineration of the Heart of Calamity in Mount Ignis's celestial fire, the collapse of necrotic leylines, the distant deathly wail of wounded Arch-Lich Malakar, and Chancellor Edmund rallying the Crown army to march north to the Dread Citadel with Ken Burns camera acting, procedural impulse screen shake, flash vignettes, and AudioServer low-pass DSP frequency sweeps. Slaying Ignis and completing the ritual transitions smoothly to the victory scorecard with a dedicated 'Watch Story Outro 🎬' prompt, while the Level 22 War Table briefing folio provides perpetual outro replay access. Save progression monotonically advances to Level 23 with Act 5 completion tracking, and Node 23 ("The Bleak Tundra") is staged on the War Table in locked preview with Act 6 campaign metadata, backed by a comprehensive 168-assertion automated regression test suite certifying 100% green pass across the entire Act 5 campaign.

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Mobile Main Menu Transition Hang: Fixed an issue where export presets inadvertently excluded in-game marketing art and logo textures, causing exported mobile APKs to fail loading the main menu after the intro cutscene and leaving the screen hanging on a black display.

v0.5.7-alpha

2026-10-16

🚀 Features

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Level 15 Playable ("Coven Fractured"): Added the opening Act 4 campaign scenario in the Whispering Weald highlands, featuring 3 Leyline Mana Siphons projecting 12-second periodic slow pulses, 2 Renegade Arcane Camps fielding corrupted spellcasters, twilight mountain storm atmosphere, and ominous narrative warnings from Chancellor Edmund regarding the Coven's resonance with the Heart of Calamity before the upcoming faction lockout.
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Level 16 Playable ("Wards of the Faithless"): Added the second Act 4 campaign scenario set in the Shadowfen Gorge, featuring 4 Enchanted Ward Pillars projecting impassable Forcefield Barriers that block gorge navigation until destroyed, 4 captive Loyalist Scholar cages requiring rescue via royal DEMOLISH bounties before a Day 12 dawn execution deadline, renegade Ward Bastion and Corrupted Golem Forge spawners, and strict Coven Hard Lockout enforcement (Martial & Rogue factions only; Coven guildhall visible but locked out with padlock indicator and treason explanation).
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Level 17 Playable ("Siege of the High Sanctum"): Added the third Act 4 campaign scenario set upon the grand marble terraces of the High Sanctum, featuring the complete restoration of the Coven guildhall and all 9 Coven hero disciplines at mission start (fielding all 24 specialist hero archetypes), a defensive landmark in the central Grand Library requiring defense via persistent 250G royal DEFEND bounties with a strict 75% health retention requirement for Cleanse mastery, an epic encounter on the High Sanctum dais against the Renegade Arch-Coven Council (Arch-Mage, Nether Summoner, and Void Inquisitor) bearing 400G royal bounties, flanking Sanctum Circles and Upper Dais Void Portals, decorative crystal fountains, and a radiant pale-gold dawn atmosphere with gold-violet fog.
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Level 18 Playable ("The Corrupted Spire"): Added the climactic Act 4 campaign finale boss scenario in the upper stratosphere of the Whispering Weald, featuring a floating island archipelago connected by translucent ethereal energy bridges, procedural sinusoidal bobbing on visual child hulls, a multi-phase boss battle against Corrupted Grand Magus Vesper (4,500 HP, frontal Arcane Barrier with 60% damage deflection, Void Volley bursts, outer island dais teleportation, invulnerability dome, and 30-second Calamity Nova AoEs), 3 Calamity Siphon anchors projecting necrotic tether beams requiring royal DEMOLISH bounties to shatter Vesper's shield and inflict a 4.0s heavy stagger, Star 3 Cleanse Mastery challenge, dark cosmic vortex skybox with pale cyan rim lighting, and a 2.5s slow-motion defeat sequence recovering the Heart of Calamity relic as Vesper repents and directs the Crown toward Mount Ignis.
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Act 4 Outro Motion Comic Cutscene & Campaign Certification: Added the climactic 6-panel motion comic sequence concluding Act 4, depicting the liberation of Grand Magus Vesper from the psychic corruption of the Heart of Calamity, his weeping repentance before Chancellor Edmund, the revelation of the relic as a soul shard of Arch-Lich Malakar, and the narrative pivot toward the southern volcanic caldera of Mount Ignis with Ken Burns camera acting, procedural impulse camera shake, panoramic panning, dynamic 30-second pacing, and 0.5s subtitle fade curves. Victory on Level 18 transitions smoothly to the scorecard with a dedicated 'Watch Story Outro 🎬' prompt, while the Level 18 War Table briefing folio provides perpetual outro replay access. Save progression monotonically advances to Level 19 with Act 4 completion tracking, and Node 19 ("The Caldera Approach") is staged on the War Table in locked preview with Cataclysmic threat tier metadata, backed by a comprehensive 929-assertion automated regression test suite certifying 100% green pass across the entire Act 4 campaign.

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Secondary Elimination Tracker Match Resolution: Fixed an issue where EliminateEntitiesTracker evaluated uncompleted elimination objectives as completed upon match victory, ensuring bonus stars require fulfilling all target kill requirements.

🎨 QoL & Polish

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Faction Lockout UI Padlock & Tooltips: Construction cards for inaccessible factions now remain visible in the building grid with a distinct padlock overlay 🔒 and clear contextual tooltips explaining campaign-driven faction locks.

v0.5.6-alpha

2026-10-15

🚀 Features

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Weapon, Equipment & Prop Texture Optimization: Implemented a uniform 1024x1024 texture budget cap across all 34 .glb handheld weapon, shield, and prop models in Assets/Equipment/ using Pillow Lanczos downscaling. Tangent-space normal maps preserve full 4:4:4 chrominance (quality=92, subsampling=0) to eliminate vector smearing and specular banding on metallic surfaces, while Base Color, Metallic-Roughness, and Emissive textures are compressed with high-efficiency Q88 encoding. glTF 2.0 binary chunks maintain sequential bufferView indexing with strict 4-byte alignment and space/null chunk padding.
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Redundant Asset Deduplication & Cache Cleanup: Audited and purged 106 duplicate loose .jpg files and their .import files whose image data was already self-contained within .glb containers. Whitelisted and downscaled the 4 shader-referenced Spellblade Greatsword textures (Spellblade_Greatsword_base_color.jpg, Spellblade_Greatsword_normal.jpg, Spellblade_Greatsword_metallic_roughness.jpg, Spellblade_Greatsword_emissive.jpg) required by dynamic shader controllers, reducing total Assets/Equipment/ disk footprint from 730.76 MB to 22.03 MB (a 708.7 MB / 97.0% asset footprint reduction) and purging over 1.82 GB of uncompressed GPU .ctex cache.
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Release Health Pre-Flight Harness: Expanded Tools/verify_release_health.ps1 with Pillar 5 (Asset Footprint & Texture Resolution Budget), enforcing automated assertions for <= 60 MB equipment directory size, exact 4 loose Spellblade shader textures, zero loose PNGs, uniform 1024x1024 texture resolution cap across loose and embedded images, strict path isolation guardrails protecting hero units and buildings, and an optional -VerifyBuildBudget export package budget assertion.

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Build Footprint & CI/CD Release Packaging Hardening: Excluded non-game assets, video captures, marketing art, and archive files across all export presets in export_presets.cfg, significantly trimming export build sizes and eliminating file bloat. Configured a 2.0 GB pre-upload safety guard and diagnostic reporting in GitHub Actions to prevent release upload failures. Added dry-run pattern validation to local release health checks.
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Build Footprint & Build Budget Compliance: Handheld equipment asset optimization and loose duplicate purge reduced the exported Android APK payload from 2.055 GB to well below the 2 GB GitHub limit (saving 377+ MB directly from exported APK payload), ensuring release packaging workflows succeed without exceeding upload quotas.

v0.5.4-alpha

2026-10-15

🚀 Features

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Level 10 Playable ("The Silent Watch"): Added the first Act 3 campaign mission in the Alpine foothills, featuring a fortified mountain palisade bottleneck, forward watchtowers with elevated skeleton snipers, roving skirmisher bivouac camps, interactive lost temple journal recovery with blue leyline shimmer, and dynamic story beats between Lord Edmund and Grand Magus Vesper.
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Level 11 Playable ("The Frostpeak Pass"): Added the high-altitude blizzard escort mission in Dragonback Peaks, featuring a 3-wagon siege convoy train with an autonomous lead ballista turret, stepped hero proximity speed throttling, Halt & Hunker Down armor defense, elevated cliffside skeletal sniper nests with walkable switchback ramps, deep snowdrift movement slow zones, and heavy Ice Troll road rifts.
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Level 12 Playable ("The Ashfall Caldera"): Added the volcanic caldera siege mission in Dragonback Peaks, featuring a sunken basalt basin flanked by fortified bluffs, 3 Ashen Bastions armed with rooftop Flame Mortars, smoldering thermal rift hazards, basalt spires that shatter into restorative geothermal hot springs with burn cleanse and wounded hero haven arbitration, Charred Skeleton and exploding Magma Ghoul spawners, and 4 volcanic vents with specialized Coven channeling for 3-star mastery.
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Level 13 Playable ("The Deep Excavation"): Added the subterranean cavern defense mission in Dragonback Peaks, featuring a stationary 3,500 HP Excavation Derrick defended across 15 in-game days via pinned DEFEND bounties, 3 tri-radial approach shafts with 5.0m bottlenecks and sensory threat detectors, bottomless abyss hazards with safety fall-catch protection, the Subterranean Enemy Triad (Chasm Spider web slows, fast Crypt Crawler swarms, and cleaving Armored Tomb Drudges), 3 Brood Warren spawners with Day 10 cleanse mastery, bioluminescent crystal atmosphere, and 4 advisor narrative beats leading to the Vault of Calamity.
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Level 14 Playable ("The Vault of Calamity"): Added the Act 3 finale boss encounter in an ancient pre-Valerian mausoleum vault arena unsealed by the mining derrick, featuring the colossal 3-phase bone construct Tomb Overseer (5,000 HP, Bone Cleaves, Ground Slam shockwaves, Soul Nova expanding rings, and Channeled Soul-Drain beams), 4 perimeter Soul Beacons with 350G DEMOLISH bounties projecting invulnerability tethers, dynamic 360° standoff slot navigation, Two-Tier Sanctuary arena geometry (220m x 220m) with a 24m raised dais, midnight thunderstorm atmosphere with pale moonlight and subtle lightning flashes, 2.5s slow-motion victory wind-down, and 4 advisor narrative beats.
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Act 3 Outro Motion Comic Cutscene & Campaign Verification: Added the 6-panel Act 3 Outro motion comic cutscene transitioning from Level 14 victory with Ken Burns camera acting, procedural screen shake, cyan/white vignettes, and DSP low-pass audio sweeps depicting Vesper unsealing the Heart of Calamity. Slaying the Tomb Overseer displays the victory scorecard first with a dedicated 'Watch Story Outro 🎬' button, while the Level 14 War Table folio provides full cutscene replay access. Staged Levels 10–14 as playable and Level 15 in locked preview with Cataclysmic threat tier on the World Map, backed by monotonic encrypted save progression and a master 17-suite automated regression test runner.

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Release Pipeline & Patch Notes Health: Hardened the patch notes parsing pipeline to automatically deduplicate categories, prune empty sections, and preserve full UTF-8 formatting across all releases. Added local pre-flight release health checks to prevent release issues before deployment.

v0.5.3-alpha

2026-10-12

🚀 Features

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Master Campaign Narrative Architecture & 26-Level Tactical Staging: Established the comprehensive Single Source of Truth for the campaign narrative arc, character arcs (Lord Edmund, Grand Magus Vesper, 4 Planar Elemental Lords, and Malakar the Undying), and detailed tactical staging dossiers for all 26 levels across Acts 1 through 6 in Docs/Campaign/.
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26-Node Campaign World Map Expansion & Under-Construction Staging: Expanded the War Table campaign map to the full 26-level progression graph across 6 Act regions (Aeterna Isle, Terra Regalis, Dragonback Peaks, Whispering Weald, The Planar Verge, and The Dread Citadel) with sequential road connections, complete tactical preview dossiers in the Match Briefing modal, and under-construction deployment locks for unbuilt levels.
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Act 3 Outro Motion Comic Cutscene ("The Vault of Calamity") & War Table Replay: Introduced the climactic 6-panel motion comic cutscene concluding Act 3 and staging Grand Magus Vesper's psychological corruption by the Heart of Calamity, featuring Ken Burns camera acting, procedural screen shake and white/cyan flash vignettes, a 27-second progressive escalation curve, an unsettling low-pass audio frequency sweep, and a dedicated 'Watch Story Outro 🎬' replay button on the Level 14 War Table briefing folio.
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Campaign Act Isolation Architecture, Elemental Faction Contract & Master Test Harness: Formalized the binding Act Isolation Contract establishing autonomous 26-level fallback baselines, progressive Act 4 Coven suspicion and lockout/redemption arcs, and tiered economic scaling across Acts 1 through 6. Defined technical integration contracts for the Act 5 planar elemental families (Earth, Air, Water, and Fire) including symmetric 3-tier hierarchies, 4-layer stylized realism living shader stacks, and the multi-phase Level 22 Ignis Caldera boss encounter and relic incineration climax. Expanded SaveManager to full 26-level progression with acts_completed tracking and dev-jump tools, backed by an automated 527-assertion regression test harness validating graph acyclicity, staging safety, and encrypted persistence.

v0.5.2-alpha

2026-10-12

🚀 Features

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Fire Elemental Enemy Family, Living Flame Shaders & Volcanic Rift: Introduced the Fire Elemental enemy family (Melee Brawler, Ranged Magma Spitter, and Colossal Boss Titan) featuring a 53-bone humanoid rigged model retargeted to universal combat animation libraries with 4 bone attachment sockets. Engineered a 4-layer runtime stylized "living flame" visual stack—including molten rock fissure emission shaders, an inverted silhouette living flame hull next-pass with procedural voronoi noise, fluttering double-sided flame cards, throttled mobile-safe ember/smoke particles, and flickering chest point lights. Introduced custom signature abilities (Fiery Claw Cleave, Flame Leap, ballistic Magma Lob with lingering scorch hazards, Colossal Magma Slam, Magma Boulder Toss, and Flame Nova), a destabilizing on-death combustion burst sequence, the Volcanic Rift autonomous spawner prefab (2,500 HP, 33% Boss threshold burst, 400G demolition chest), and an interactive combat showcase arena.
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Act 2 Campaign Progression Unification & Act 3 Teaser: Fully unified campaign progression across Levels 1 through 9, unflagged Act 2 territories on the world map, connected an unbroken 10-node road chain, added an active Under Construction preview teaser for Level 10 ("The Silent Watch"), verified encrypted linear save file progression with strict preservation of individual star ratings across all levels, and established a 5-pillar regression test suite verifying all 15 specialist hero recruits and whitelist triads.
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Tactical War Table Match Briefing Modal & Level Select Overhaul: Overhauled the campaign level select map with an interactive Tactical War Table Briefing Folio that smoothly focuses the 3D map camera when selecting a territory marker. The new three-column war folio dynamically displays mission victory conditions, mandatory defeat criteria, 3-star secondary challenges, a detailed Enemy Threat Dossier (threat tier badges, spawner fortifications with apex landmark detection, and spotted monster archetypes), starting kingdom treasury, raid cadence summaries, previews of specialist building and hero recruit cards, best player performance records (stars, days, and clear time), and reactive lore dispatches from Royal Advisor Edmund.
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Campaign Act 2 Level 9 ("The Cursed Sepulchre"), Shadowspire Citadel & Act 3 Motion Comic Handover: Introduced the Act 2 campaign finale scenario featuring a 250x250m subterranean necrotic catacomb caldera with a clear 40m arena combat floor, an elite necrotic spawner hierarchy (4 outer Cursed Mausoleums and the central landmark Sepulchre Heart) with retaliatory defensive bursts and guaranteed 250G physical demolition treasure chests, the colossal Crypt Lord apex titan boss (wielding a colossal scythe, Colossal Cleave, Soul Nova, and Unholy Siphon), death wave raids on Days 3, 8, and 15 (enforcing a mobile-safe 40-unit concurrency cap), mid-match Shadowspire Citadel unlock upon cleansing any outer mausoleum with Golden Fanfare heraldry, specialist dark arts hero trio access across faction hubs (Death Knight, Assassin, Necromancer), the full 36-action Whitelist Triad uniting all 27 heroes, 4 Advisor Edmund narrative beats, and a 4-panel motion comic cutscene concluding Act 2 ("Find Allies") and transitioning to Act 3 ("Reclaim the Crown").
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Campaign Act 2 Level 8 ("The Iron Colosseum"), Arena Trials & Arena Unlock: Introduced Level 8 featuring a 240x240m arid proving grounds plateau with an open 32m sand fighting floor, a gladiator spawner hierarchy (4 outer training pits and the central landmark Iron Colosseum) with retaliatory gate bursts at 66% and 33% HP and guaranteed 250G physical demolition treasure chests, armored Orc combatants (Orc Gladiator and The Iron Warmaster apex boss) with heavy maces and combat abilities, tournament trial wave horns on Days 4, 9, and 17 (enforcing a mobile-safe 65-unit concurrency cap), mid-match Arena unlock upon conquering any training pit with Golden Fanfare heraldry, specialist gladiator hero trio access across faction hubs (Tactician, Monk, Bloodmage), and 4 Advisor Edmund narrative story beats.
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Campaign Act 2 Level 7 ("Whispering Pines"), Sylvan Biome & Nature Preserve Unlock: Introduced Level 7 featuring a 220x220m sylvan mountain basin map with 750 Highland Pines and 2 glacial ponds, a 3-tier corrupted beast den hierarchy (Wolf Dens, Golem Crags, and the Ancient Grove Lair) with 66% and 33% HP retaliatory defensive bursts and 250G demolition treasure chests, daytime territorial wolf packs and nocturnal raids (Days 3, 8, and 16), mid-match Nature Preserve unlock upon cleansing any first beast den with Golden Fanfare announcements, specialist sylvan hero trio access (Warden, Hunter, Druid), and 4 Advisor Edmund narrative story beats.
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Campaign Act 2 Level 6 ("The King's Crossroads") & Autonomous Supply Caravan Escort: Introduced Level 6 featuring a 220x220m inland crossroads highroad scenario, autonomous armored Supply Caravan convoys departing on Days 5, 10, and 15 along the King's Highway with mounted crossbow turrets and Halt & Hunker Down defense mechanics (+50% armor mitigation), Crown-funded 250G persistent moving DEFEND bounties, roadside ambush chokepoints, 5 poacher encampments with 250G demolition chests, mid-match Archery Range unlock with Golden Fanfare heraldry, specialist marksman hero trio access (Crossbowman, Ninja, Arcane Archer), and 4 Advisor Edmund narrative story beats.
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Campaign Act 2 Level 5 ("Storm the Beach") & Advisor Edmund Narrative: Launched Act 2's opening mission featuring a 200x200m coastal beachhead scenario, 12 shoreline poacher strongholds with physical 250G treasure chest demolition drops, day-based night raids (Days 3, 8, 16), a mid-match 5,000G Tavern unlock objective with golden fanfare announcements, specialist hero trio access (Skald, Bladedancer, Bard), and non-modal Advisor Edmund story dispatches with reactive portraits and auto-dismissal countdowns.

⚖️ Balance

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Level 5 Nocturnal Raid Rebalance & Thematic Spawns: Rebalanced Level 5 nocturnal bandit raids by reducing wave sizes and spawners by 50% and capping maximum enemy concurrency to 35, ensuring starting gold reserves are sufficient for defense. Removed Rock Golems and wolves from Level 5 spawns, ensuring enemy forces exclusively consist of themed poachers and hedge mages.

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Time Limit Scorecard Day Display Fix: Fixed an issue where the post-match scorecard always displayed "Day 1 / 30" on time limit bonus objectives regardless of how many days were actually taken. The scorecard now accurately displays the true playthrough day count (e.g. "Day 36 / 30" or "Day 25 / 30") when game time pauses at match conclusion.
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Poacher Hunter Rig Vertex Weight Fix: Resolved an issue where the right side of the Poacher Hunter's cloak and lower garment were weighted to right arm and hand bones, eliminating mesh stretching and distortion during combat animations.
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Level 4 Temple Specialist Hero Recruitment Preview: Corrected the Level 4 mission briefing folio to display all three cross-faction specialist heroes unlocked by the Temple (Paladin at the Barracks, Witch Hunter at the Hideout, and Priestess at the Coven) alongside the Temple building card.
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Campaign Progression & Save Sanitization: Fixed an issue where locked campaign levels (levels 6-10) were selectable when previous levels had not been completed with at least 1 star, strictly enforcing monotonic campaign unlock and sanitizing corrupted save slots.
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Match Briefing Modal UI Fit & Navigation: Scaled and repositioned the mission briefing war folio to fit comfortably within display bounds on all resolutions, streamlined tactical readouts, and added a dedicated "Back to Map" button to freely return to level selection.
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Level Select Map Point Click Responsiveness & Stars Display: Eliminated a multi-second UI freeze when clicking territory markers by utilizing instant briefing metadata caching, and ensured earned stars are clearly displayed on the briefing folio for previously completed levels.
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Warden Rig Vertex Weight Bleed Fix: Cleaned vertex group weight bleeding on the Warden model where cloak, leg, and skirt geometry were bound to right arm and hand bones, eliminating mesh distortion during upper-body combat animations.
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Campaign Level 5 Match Start Crash & Tutorial Decoupling Fix: Fixed an issue where starting a Level 5 match on existing campaign save files triggered a hard breakpoint in BaseLevel._ready (Invalid access to property or key 'steps' on a base object of type 'Node'). Resolved type lookup scoping for ChatBubbleUI within TutorialManager and added safe step validation in BaseLevel, ensuring scenarios utilizing standalone narrative components gracefully dismiss inactive tutorial managers without crashing.

🎨 QoL & Polish

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Steam Store Description Marketing GIF & Video Suite: Engineered animated marketing GIF and MP4 capture sequences highlighting core game pillars for the Steam store page. Features the Colossal Fire Titan executing a devastating Magma Slam with ground dust shockwaves and molten impact sparks, as well as a specialized hero combat showcase (Warrior with strapped back banner, Paladin with golden retribution aura, and Rogue with dual daggers) charging around an active 1,000G Bounty Flag. Includes web-optimized 616px Steam description GIFs, lightweight 2MB compact fallbacks, and 60fps MP4 video masters in Assets/Marketing/Steam/Description/.
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Official YouTube Marketing Banner Asset Suite & Multi-Device Safe Zone Calibration: Created a high-DPI YouTube channel banner suite for Brewing Turtle Games featuring *Bribe The Brave*, fully calibrated for YouTube's 2560x1440 TV display, 2560x423 Desktop layout, 1855x423 Tablet layout, and 1546x423 Mobile & Universal Safe Area. The composition seamlessly extends the dusk sky, frames the central castle, Mage, and Bard heroes with zero character clipping, and incorporates the master 3D gold title logo, studio imprint, and Steam Wishlist callouts with drop shadows and organic atmospheric vignette falloff. Includes an automated asset pipeline (Tools/build_youtube_banner.py) and visual overlay guide.
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World Map Region Immersion & Authentic Cartography: Renamed the Starter Island to "Aeterna Isle" and the mainland territory to "Terra Regalis" across world map displays and mission briefings, matching the historical Latin cartography of the Mappa Mundi.

v0.5.0-alpha

2026-10-08

🚀 Features

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Custom Match Mode Expansion & Main Menu Clarification: Enabled all 6 specialist structures (Tavern, Temple, Archery Range, Arena, Nature Preserve, and Shadowspire Citadel) and all 27 hero recruitment options (including all 15 newly integrated specialist heroes) in Custom Match mode, allowing configuration of up to 6 specialized buildings simultaneously. Renamed Main Menu buttons to cleanly distinguish "PLAY CAMPAIGN" (progressive mission storyline) from "CUSTOM MATCH" (isolated skirmishes and custom scenarios).
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15 Specialist Hero Units Integration & Full Combat Arsenal: Integrated all 15 specialist hero units across Martial (Tactician, Crossbowman, Warden, Death Knight, Skald), Underworld (Assassin, Ninja, Bard, Hunter, Raccoon Druid), and Arcane (Arcane Archer, Bladedancer, Bloodmage, Monk, Necromancer) archetypes. Each hero features a distinct 4-to-6 ability arsenal, customized standoff ranges and 360° radial combat slots, mobile-optimized weapon socketing, and autonomous combat mechanics—including elemental projectile shots, shapeshifting, toxic disease puddles, channeled life drains, and skeleton minions.
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Symmetrical Faction Building Add-on Matrix Expansion: Expanded the Barracks, Hideout, and Coven to each feature 8 modular add-ons (retaining their 2 direct upgrades alongside 6 cross-faction specialist synergies tied to the Temple, Tavern, Archery Range, Arena, Nature Preserve, and Shadowspire Citadel). Constructing specialist structures auto-activates corresponding building sockets and unlocks 18 distinct hero units (1,000G, 1-cap), supported by dynamic recruitment grid reactivity, kingdom-wide global unit cap tracking across rebuild cycles, and selective NavMesh obstacle carving that preserves 2.0m navigation alleys.
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Specialist Support Buildings & Town Night Illumination: Integrated all 6 specialist support structures (Temple, Tavern, Archery Range, Arena, Nature Preserve, and Shadowspire Citadel) with standardized foundation mechanics, static NavMesh obstacle carving with 2.0m squad navigation alleyways, and coordinated town-wide nighttime illumination with custom atmospheric glow palettes across all settlement buildings.

⚖️ Balance

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Custom Match Raid Cadence & Difficulty Scaling: Balanced custom match raid attacks by difficulty tier so that Hard difficulty sends constant, intense raids every day starting on Day 2 with escalated unit counts, Normal difficulty sends moderate attacks every 2 days starting on Day 3, and Easy difficulty sends lighter waves every 3 days starting on Day 4. Fixed an issue where raid timers could stall after the first few waves on loaded saves.
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Bladedancer Combat Flow & Fluid Dancing Mobility: Overhauled the Bladedancer's combat cadence and mobility so he attacks continuously and dynamically dances around foes in melee range. Reduced Graceful Flourish cooldown to 0.8s with alternating twin-scimitar slashes and dynamic orbital dance steps (swaying laterally ±45° around targets). Enabled Pirouette Dash in melee (cooldown reduced to 4.0s, range min to 0.0m) allowing him to pirouette and dash straight through opponents to their rear. Reduced Blade Whirlwind cooldown to 4.0s, and enabled global cooldown scaling with attack speed so momentum stacks visibly accelerate attack rhythms.

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Hero Combat Hysteresis Deadband Standoff Fix: Fixed an issue where melee specialist heroes could experience movement stuttering or fail to maintain combat engagement at the outer edge of their strike range (2.3m - 2.65m), ensuring arrival checks properly honor the 0.35m tactical deadband across all weapon profiles.
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Assassin Combat Standoff & Shadow Step Execution Fix: Fixed an issue where the Assassin would freeze at standoff range outside combat and watch allies fight without attacking. Shadow Step now properly recognizes enemies and teleports the Assassin behind them rather than himself; backstabs now execute cleanly from flank angles; stealth attack commitment recognizes distracted enemies fighting allies; and emergency Smoke Bomb vanish disengages trigger reliably when low on health.
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Warden Cloak & Raccoon Death Mesh Rigging Fix: Fixed an issue where the Warden's cloak stretched awkwardly with leg movements and the Raccoon Druid's mesh tore or left parts standing upon death, re-weighting vertex heat bleed to upper body bones and stabilizing shapeshift death handling.
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Spellcaster Idle & Move Animation Loop Fix: Fixed an issue where the Elementalist, Priestess, and Summoner repeatedly looped spellcasting gestures while idling and became caught in a mixed walk/cast posture when starting to move, ensuring pure resting stances and clean locomotion blending.
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Save Game Bounty Markers & Hero Response Restoration: Fixed an issue where loading a saved game failed to restore 3D visual markers for explore, kill, and defend bounties, leaving unengaged heroes unresponsive. Bounties now properly recreate world indicators and trigger immediate hero re-evaluation upon loading a saved state.
•
Hunter Combat Engagement Range & Bow Attack Cadence: Fixed an issue where the Hunter would linger too far back during combat and only cast utility skills without firing his bow or advancing into weapon reach when frontline allies engaged foes, harmonizing attack and skill ranges to 8.5m, enabling point-blank defensive archery, and ensuring allied units do not falsely obstruct combat line-of-sight.
•
Warrior & Melee Combat Range Standoff & Freezing Fix: Fixed an issue where Warriors defending structures or engaging ranged enemies would freeze in place outside melee weapon reach and take fire without fighting back. Utility buffs (such as War Cry) no longer falsely satisfy movement arrival checks, and units now reliably close the gap into melee strike range before halting movement.
•
Crossbowman, Ninja & Assassin Combat Cadence & Raccoon Shapeshifting Fix: Fixed an issue where the Crossbowman, Ninja, and Assassin would freeze during combat and fail to attack while taking damage. The Crossbowman can now fire in point-blank defense when rushed by enemies; the Ninja and Assassin have received faster, responsive attack animations and tighter tactical mobility triggers so they do not lock in place; and the Raccoon Druid now reliably maintains Beast form throughout active close-quarters combat rather than rapidly flip-flopping forms.
•
Save System Non-Unit Mesh Crash Guard: Fixed a crash during autosave and manual save (Invalid access to property or key 'health_component' on MeshInstance3D) when temporary visual effects, explosions, or smoke puffs were present on the battlefield, safely verifying unit identity before attempting to serialize health data and parenting world effects to the current scene.
•
Death Knight & Warden Visual Scale & Stride Normalization: Rescaled the Death Knight and Warden models up to standard character proportions (1.83m tall) and positioned them flush with the terrain to fix an issue where both units appeared miniature, partially sunk into the ground, and walked sluggishly. Scaled the Death Knight's two-handed scythe proportionally and tuned his movement speed to 2.1 to match his stride.
•
Assassin Stealth Combat Integration & Survivability Polish: Fixed an issue where the Assassin was rapidly dying alone in combat without striking foes due to a missing Stealth Component, uncastable stealth abilities, and mismatched melee reach. Integrated the Stealth Component for untargetable sneaking, boosted baseline health to 220, increased attack ranges to 1.8m, and tuned emergency Smoke Bomb vanish disengages so he reliably infiltrates backlines and slips away when wounded.
•
Necromancer Skeleton Minion Combat Engagement & Crash Fix: Fixed an issue where the Necromancer's summoned Skeleton Minion would freeze outside melee range without attacking, added complete combat animation transitions, and resolved a runtime crash when the minion followed its summoner.
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Bandit & Hybrid Unit Combat Engagement Freeze Fix: Fixed an issue where Bandits and other hybrid units could freeze in place outside weapon reach while approaching enemies if a friendly healing or utility ability (such as Healing Vapor Bomb) was off cooldown. Movement logic now distinguishes offensive attack reach from support abilities, allowing units to deploy heals without falsely declaring arrival at enemy positions.
•
Specialist Building Construction Grid Unlocking in Village Plaza: Fixed an issue where the Archery Range, Arena, Nature Preserve, and Shadowspire Citadel build buttons were missing from the Village Plaza's construction action grid during Custom Matches despite being enabled in match settings.
•
Pre-warming Unit Movement Reference & Crash Guard: Fixed a debugger assertion crash in UnitMovementComponent during match loading by preserving NavigationAgent3D on prewarm dummy units and adding graceful fallback guards for off-screen prewarm instances.
•
Level Start Fog of War Center Clearing Fix: Fixed an issue where a circular hole in the fog of war appeared at the center of the map upon loading a match, caused by shader pre-warming dummy units and unpositioned unit instances registering vision revealers at coordinates (0, 0) before being repositioned.
•
Biome Foliage Mesh Upright Orientation Fix: Fixed an issue where trees, palms, shrubs, and wildflowers were lying flat on the terrain due to coordinate mapping differences between Blender (+Y height) and glTF (-Z forward), transforming all 13 standalone meshes upright so vegetation rises naturally from the ground.
•
Delayed Multi-Hit Melee Cleanup & Exit Crash Guard: Fixed an engine error (Lambda capture at index 0 was freed. Passed 'null' instead) that occurred when closing the game session or when enemies were defeated mid-combo during delayed multi-hit attacks (such as Berserker and Rogue combos), by migrating timer lambdas to node-bound tweens and safe instance ID tracking.
•
Tech Tree Shutdown Crash Guard & Temple Build Shader Fix: Fixed a scene teardown error (Can't use get_node() with absolute paths from outside the active scene tree) in TechTreeManager when exiting the game, and resolved an issue where the Temple failed to display the construction progress shader while being built.
•
Tavern Construction Music Notes Suppression: Fixed an issue where floating musical note particles played while the Tavern was under construction or being placed, ensuring notes only emerge once the building is fully erected and operational.
•
Squad Leader Departure & Anti-Pinning Movement Fix: Fixed an issue where squad leaders could become pinned or trapped by stationary followers in narrow doorways and tight areas, ensuring squad members smoothly mobilize and clear the path ahead when setting out on a journey.
•
Bandit & Mid-Range Unit Combat Standoff Fix: Fixed an issue where Bandits and other mid-range units could freeze in place outside attack reach when engaging enemy structures or attempting to heal allies, caused by ranged slot conflation with longer-range units and circular combat slotting on friendly targets.
•
Autonomous Unit Combat & Defense Bounty AI Improvements: Healers and buffers dynamically reposition across the battlefield to aid injured allies rather than standing idle behind their formation. Units prioritizing structures (such as Bandits) actively fight threatening enemies with secondary abilities while their siege weapons are cooling down. Building defense alerts now use fair gold weighting and switching inertia so heroes won't instantly abandon current targets unless sufficiently bribed to protect the town.

🎨 QoL & Polish

•
Stylized Water Shader Overhaul & Inland Lake Differentiation: Replaced cartoon water with a Pixar-inspired stylized realism overhaul. Inland lakes now feature gentle, peaceful surface ripples that eliminate awkward terrain clipping and violent wave bobbing, with luminous crystal turquoise shallows fading into deep mountain lake blue. The outer ocean retains deep sapphire swells and rhythmic movement. Added delicate animated shoreline foam, glassy glancing Fresnel sky reflections, sun specular sparkle, full Fog of War integration, and a dedicated Water Quality toggle in the Video options menu.
•
Highlands & Meadows Biome Scenery Model Upgrade: Upgraded 6 3D scenery models across the Highlands and Meadows biomes (jagged and round granite boulders, tall and broad highland pines, broadleaf bushes, and flowering shrubs) with new high-detail stylized meshes and dedicated texture maps, calibrated proportions to harmonize with buildings and heroes, and updated navigation obstacles.
•
Beach Biome Asset Upgrade (Palms & Driftwood): Integrated new high-detail 3D models and dedicated textures for curved palms, straight palms, and driftwood logs. Extracted standalone ArrayMesh resources, bound dedicated albedo textures with fog-of-war shader support, and calibrated scales and obstacle collision boundaries to fit game proportions seamlessly.
•
Foliage & Tree Scale Normalization: Rescaled coastal reeds, palm trees, highland pines, and shrubs to align with character and building proportions. Coastal reeds were reduced by 50% to natural knee/thigh height matching original meadow grass, and palm and pine trees were rescaled to harmonize alongside town structures rather than towering over rooftops.
•
Global Biome Foliage Population Across Terrain: Enhanced procedural terrain generation across custom matches and maps so that all biome foliage items (curved palms, coastal reeds, and driftwood along shores; highland pines, granite boulders, and rock scree across rocky heights; and shrubs and wildflowers in grassy meadows) automatically spawn wherever matching terrain textures are painted.
•
Performance Presets, Shader Pre-Warming & Mobile Budget Hardening: Hardened performance for mobile and low-end devices with pre-warmed combat shaders preventing in-game pipeline compilation stutters, adaptive particle scaling presets (Low, Medium, High) preserving key visual effects, zero shadow overhead across town lights and heroes, distance-culled weapon meshes at strategic zoom levels, and proximity-culled audio releasing sound channels beyond 32 meters.
•
Terrain & Biome Vegetation Diversity: Added surface-classified 3D biome vegetation across Beach, Highlands, and Meadows terrains—featuring low-poly palms, coastal reeds, weathered driftwood, highland pines, granite boulders, scree, and meadow wildflowers. Foliage features GPU vertex wind sway with dynamic traveling gusts, mobile quality preset density scaling, dynamic footprint-adaptive building clearance, and 3.5m colliding obstacle separation preserving squad navigation alleys.
•
Temple Visual Scale Normalization: Re-scaled the Temple mesh to 6.2x (~6.0m diameter base, 6.2m steeple height) so the grand cathedral structure matches the visual scale of other town buildings, with aligned physical collision bounds and 7.0m NavMesh footprint.
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Tavern Music Notes Variety & Color Variance: Enhanced the Tavern's ambient floating music notes with a 2x2 sprite atlas featuring four distinct musical note types (beamed eighth notes, quarter notes, single eighth notes with flags, and beamed sixteenth notes) along with a randomized color palette blending warm tavern gold, cozy amber, festive cyan, playful rose, and lively lime.
•
Temple & Tavern Atmospheric Polish: Added procedural stained glass windows with nighttime candle flicker to the Temple, lively proximity-based music and pub ambience to the Tavern that dynamically blends as the camera zooms in, floating musical note particles, and festive patio furniture and bunting.
•
Paladin & Priestess Aura Visual Refactoring: Standardized Paladin Retribution and Priestess Healing auras onto the clean two-part architecture patterned after the Warrior and Mummy—combining a sleek outer boundary ring that accurately shows aura radius with a compact, non-intrusive inner ground sigil at the unit's feet. Removed the overpowering white outer halo on the Paladin so only the warm golden retribution glow remains, preventing visual clutter in large group battles.

v0.4.12-alpha

2026-10-04

🚀 Features

•
Procedural Custom Game Mode Prototype: Added a fully randomized, replayable custom game mode accessible from the Main Menu. Players can configure map dimensions (presets from 100x100 to 500x500, or custom 50-step increments), select mission styles (Standard spawner destruction, Survival for X days, or Rush Mode with strict deadlines), pick difficulty tiers, restrict building pools (randomized core and specialized building subsets), and input or randomize procedural seeds for deterministic match generation and timing competition. Matches run via dynamic in-memory level generation with custom NavMesh baking, terrain generation, and action whitelisting.

⚖️ Balance

•
Difficulty-Influenced Starting Gold & Mission Duration: Tuned custom game starting gold by difficulty tier (Easy at 5,000G, Normal at 3,500G, Hard at 2,500G baseline for recruiting). Adjusted default mission lengths based on Level 4 benchmarks (Survival: Easy 8 days, Normal 12 days, Hard 20 days; Rush: Easy 12 days, Normal 10 days, Hard 8 days), and expanded custom day limits up to 50 days (~1 min real time per day).

🐛 Bug Fixes

•
Standard Custom Game Victory Condition (All Strongholds): Fixed an issue where destroying the first enemy stronghold in a Standard custom game immediately triggered victory instead of requiring all strongholds on the map to be defeated. The objective now calculates total placed strongholds based on difficulty (4 on Easy, 6 on Normal, 9 on Hard), dynamically reconciles with the actual placed count post-generation, displays active progress (e.g. 0 / 6), and persists required target amounts across save and load cycles.
•
Survival & Rush 24-Hour Cycle Timing Calculation: Fixed an issue where survival and rush day requirements were evaluating against midnight day rollovers (shorting players by 8 hours on the starting day) instead of measuring full 24-hour cycles from match start (8:00 AM Day 1), ensuring survival victories and rush deadlines correctly culminate at 8:00 AM on Day N+1.
•
Custom Game Launch & Menu Lifecycle Fix: Resolved an issue where launching a custom match from the Main Menu would silently abort and return to the menu due to an unreset transition state in LevelLifecycle and premature closing signal emission in CustomGameScreen.
•
Custom Game Save System Encapsulation: Resolved an autosave error (Could not resolve level ID for scene path: res://Scenes/Levels/CustomLevel.tscn) by isolating custom procedural match snapshots into a dedicated encrypted save file (user://custom_game_active.save), protecting campaign save slots from pollution, preventing campaign progression overwrites, and adding resume support.

🎨 QoL & Polish

•
Intro Comic Cutscene Character Consistency & Dialogue Alignment: Re-rendered and aligned Slides 2 and 6 of the introductory 2D comic cutscene so the Warrior (knight helm with visor up, back-mounted lion banner, royal blue tabard, and lion kite shield) and Rogue (forest green hooded cloak, fitted leather cuirass, freckles) visually match across every panel, and perfected speech bubble placements and tail pointers across the Commander, Warrior, and Rogue for crisp, authentic comic lettering across all formats (in-engine game intro, 4K/1080p multi-panel spreads, and 60 FPS motion comic video masters).
•
Marketing PhotoBooth Export & Website Responsive Polish: Added a 1-click marketing screenshot export button in the PhotoBooth developer tool that captures clean 1080p and 4K screenshots directly into the press kit and website gallery. Redesigned the official website navigation and patch notes for mobile devices with a responsive drawer menu, mobile version switcher, scrollable category filters, and rich markdown formatting.

v0.4.11-alpha

2026-10-03

🚀 Features

•
Interactive 2D Comic Intro Cutscene: Added a stylized 2D graphic comic intro sequence (ComicCutscene.tscn) that plays seamlessly on startup before the Main Menu, introducing players to the core indirect-control bounty mechanic with dynamic camera acting, synchronized music, and skip controls.
•
Player Unit Roster Expansion & Animation Pipeline: Assembled and rigged 15 player units with complete humanoid skeletal retargeting, standard 7-library animation players (Attacks, Death, Idle, Locomotion, UAL1, UAL2, Victory), AnimationTree state machines, UnitAnimationComponents, basic combat abilities, and UnitData stat profiles: the Bard, Skald, and Bladedancer (swapped from Level 5 placeholders to full 3D models), along with brand-new units Arcane Archer, Assassin, Bloodmage, Crossbowman, Death Knight, Hunter, Monk, Necromancer, Ninja, Raccoon (configured with human and shapeshifted forms), Tactician, and Warden.
•
Level 5 Victory Conditions & Tavern Guild Recruits: Fully configured Level 5 ("Storm the Beach") on a 200x200 map with northern shoreline beachhead landings, 12 human stronghold encampments (Poachers and Hedge Mages), lush tree and grass foliage, a 40-day mission deadline, and a 3-star victory system (Star 1: Destroy 12 Shoreline Strongholds, Star 2: Enlist Tavern Guild by earning 5000G, Star 3: Complete in 30 Days or Less). Added the Tavern elite building (1,000G) and its three specialist recruits (1,000G each, 1-unit cap): the Skald at the Barracks, the Bladedancer at the Hideout, and the Bard at the Coven.
•
Mid-Level Objective-Gated Building Unlocks: Introduced dynamic guild building unlocks through in-level match objectives, allowing structures (starting with the Tavern in Level 5) to display in the Village Plaza with real-time objective prerequisites and become buildable immediately once earned.
•
Mainland Campaign Expansion (Levels 5–9): Created baseline level scenes and data for Level 5 ("Storm the Beach") and Level 6 ("The King's Crossroads"), mapped out the full mainland exploration progression through Level 9 on the world map with connected road networks, and established the foundation for upcoming regional guilds.

⚖️ Balance

•
Level 5 Mission Time Limit Tuning: Extended the Level 5 primary mission deadline to 40 days to clear all strongholds, and increased the bonus star threshold to 30 days or less.

🐛 Bug Fixes

•
Cumulative Gold & Objective Progress Save/Load: Fixed an issue where saving and reloading a game reset the level's accumulated gold earnings and in-level gold objectives back to zero, and ensured that buildings unlocked via mid-level objectives (such as the Tavern) remain unlocked upon reloading.
•
Unit Death Capacity & Hire Lock Release: Resolved an issue where hiring a unit (such as a Paladin) with an active instance limit left the building's hire button permanently disabled at maximum capacity (e.g. 1/1) after the unit died in battle. TechTreeManager now directly listens to unit death events, detects dead units even after corpse cleanup sequences strip components, auto-cleans on scene exit, and immediately releases building hiring limits.

🎨 QoL & Polish

•
Tavern & Tavern Unit Action Portraits: Connected custom PhotoBooth 75x75 transparent icon portraits to the Tavern building action and the Bard, Skald, and Bladedancer recruit actions, replacing previous blank placeholders in building action grids.

v0.4.10-alpha

🐛 Bug Fixes

•
Tutorial Pointer Cleanup & Lifetime Hardening: Resolved an issue where tutorial pointer arrows (golden bouncing chevrons) could persist indefinitely on screen after completing tutorial steps or selecting buildings, by tracking and clearing all active pointers, guarding asynchronous UI frame updates against stale step transitions, adding tree-wide group sweeps on tutorial completion, and implementing automatic self-cleanup whenever targets are hidden or the tutorial sequence ends.
•
Bounty Indicator Duplicate Signal Connection Fix: Resolved an engine error when editing existing bounties by guarding against duplicate signal connections on the collection area trigger in BountyIndicator.gd.
•
Level 1 Map Generation & Graveyard Placement: Fixed Level 1 procedural generation failures and duplicate town plazas during retry attempts by properly cleaning up registered entities and updating the primary spawner objective targets.
•
Enemy Combat Standoff & Idle Lock Fix: Resolved an issue where enemies (such as Skeleton Peasants and Archers) could freeze in place without attacking when engaging player units by preventing premature ranged combat stops outside weapon reach and ensuring frontline melee units close the final distance to strike instead of idling in reserve standby slots.

🎨 QoL & Polish

•
Campaign Narrative Overhaul (Levels 1–4 Island Invasion & Evacuation): Reworked the world map level names, descriptions, and Advisor Edmund's in-game dialogue across Levels 1–4 to establish a cohesive campaign narrative—easing players into their role as the Magistrate gathering gold and heroes to defend the island's cities against a spreading undead plague, culminating in a dire Level 4 coastal last stand to protect fleeing refugees evacuating across the channel toward the mainland.
•
Graveyard Spawner Modularization & Full Thematic VFX: Migrated all 8 undead graveyard spawners from the legacy monolithic model to a distributed 50/50 mix of shared mausoleum templates, decorated each with distinct atmospheric mist (Necrotic Green, Fire Embers, Blood Crimson, Frost Chill, Lightning Storm, and Desert Sand), added glowing occult ground sigils for all Skeleton Mages, and placed stylized iron braziers and torches flanking tomb entrances.
•
Level 1 Tutorial Streamlining & Exploration Bounty: Smoothed out the Level 1 tutorial by removing the awkward forced plaza click requirement—now automatically opening the action grid while pointing back to the plaza if deselected—and reworked the bounty tutorial to guide players toward placing an Exploration Bounty into unexplored fog instead of directly revealing the enemy stronghold.
•
Camera Edge Bounds & HUD Sidebar Alignment: Relaxed RTS camera bounds to allow full center-on-edge framing across all map borders, dynamically compensated 3D camera and minimap bounds for the right HUD panel, and fixed the right sidebar base width to 300px to eliminate panel expansion jitter when selecting buildings or plazas with 3 action choices.
•
Debug Output Cleanup Pass: Removed 14 debug print statements across gameplay scripts (stealth toggles, treasure pickups, unit spawns, raid waves, save confirmations, Steam leaderboard uploads), fixed the Steam leaderboard warning spam that generated ~2,200 false-failure warnings per session, resolved the demo mode scene-tree error, re-saved the LevelSelectPlayerToken scene to fix vanished skeleton node warnings, matched the NavMesh cell size to 0.25, and batch-fixed ~65 GDScript static analysis warnings (unused params, missing @tool annotations, shadowed identifiers, narrowing conversions).

v0.4.9-alpha

🐛 Bug Fixes

•
Priestess Chain Heal Type Safety: Resolved a script crash (Trying to assign an array of type "Array" to a variable of type "Array[String]") when casting Chain Heal by enforcing explicit typed array initialization for friendly and hostile targeting filters.
•
Paladin Model Scale & Ground Alignment: Corrected the Paladin character model scale from half-size (~0.94m) to full humanoid proportions (~1.83m) and realigned the rig origin so the Paladin's feet rest squarely on the terrain rather than clipping halfway into the ground.

🎨 QoL & Polish

•
Demo Title Screen Layout Optimization: Restored the primary main menu button stack to its classic 5-button layout and relocated the demo Wishlist and Discord buttons into a dedicated bottom-right callout banner, preventing vertical clipping on 720p displays while keeping the main menu stack identical to the retail game.
•
PhotoBooth Action Icons: Linked custom 75x75 transparent render portraits to the Temple build action and the Paladin, Priestess, and Witch Hunter hiring actions.

v0.4.8-alpha

🐛 Bug Fixes

•
Windows Demo CI Build & Export Preset Conflict: Resolved an export failure in GitHub Actions Windows builds caused by duplicate export preset sections and aligned the preset naming to Windows Desktop Demo. Also corrected duplicate resource UIDs across Level elevation curves.

v0.4.7-alpha

🚀 Features

•
Temple Sanctuary & Advanced Guild Recruits: Constructed the Temple building (available starting in Level 4 for 1,000 gold), unlocking elite specialist recruits (1,000 gold each, restricted to 1 active hire at a time): the Paladin at the Barracks (plate-clad vanguard dealing +50% innate damage to undead with divine smites, holy aura radiance, and allied healing), the Priestess at the Coven (radiant support cleric who can join combat squads as an auxiliary 4th party member, casting 4-bounce chain heals and persistent rejuvenation auras), and the Witch Hunter at the Hideout (elite anti-caster control specialist with over 50% complete spell negation and heavy magic mitigation, equipped with 8m Shocking Brands, 3s root traps, 1s stun crossbow bolts, a 6m-diameter 3s Stun Grenade with crackling electrical visual effects, and a 15 HP self-heal elixir).
•
Steam Demo Architecture & In-Game Wishlist Integration: Configured the Steam Alpha Demo pipeline for Levels 1–4, featuring clickable "Wishlist Full Game on Steam" and Discord community CTAs on the title screen and match scorecard, Steam Overlay store routing with browser fallback, a locked Level 5 "Full Release Preview" world map node, seamless forward-compatible demo save migration into retail release directories, and a hardened Windows Demo export preset with physical exclusion filtering for unreleased content.
•
Modular Faction Building Upgrades & Temple Sanctuary: Introduced a modular building add-on system allowing faction buildings (Barracks, Hideout, Coven, and the new Temple) to be upgraded with specialized annexes—such as Training Grounds, Poisoner's Labs, and Reliquaries—that boost durability, defense bounties, and recruitment speeds with distinct visual attachments and seamless pathfinding.

🐛 Bug Fixes

•
Combat Engagement & Swarm Navigation Smoothing: Refined combat standoff distances and movement tracking so units and monsters smoothly engage targets without hesitation or stuttering during large multi-unit battles.
•
Fog of War Save/Load Restoration & Minimap Alignment: Fixed an issue where loading a saved game caused previously explored areas to vanish or appear shifted into a shrunken top-left corner, leaving southern and eastern units stranded in isolated patches of light. Exploration grids now preserve saved dimensions, properly stretch across the GPU history buffer, and prevent level-load lifecycle passes from wiping restored fog data.
•
Enemy Spawner Defender Connection & Double-Spawn Prevention: Fixed a bug where loading a saved game caused active enemy units to lose their connection to their origin spawner, prompting strongholds and graveyards to spawn a full replacement squad and double the normal defending population. Spawners now preserve their active spawn limits, remaining timer countdowns, and defender groups on save/load, with automatic healing for older saves.

🎨 QoL & Polish

•
Aura Decal Mesh Culling: Configured aura ground decals to project exclusively onto the terrain layer (Layer 3), preventing aura emblems and colors from draping across unit models, enemy bodies, tree trunks, and foliage.
•
Mobile Touch Camera Gestures & Edge Bounding: Overhauled touch controls with compound two-finger pinch-and-pan gestures, tactile pinch zoom momentum with smooth friction damping, stationary release protection, and strict frustum boundary clamping that prevents the camera from ever looking outside map borders or clipping into terrain.
•
Mobile Vulkan & Thermal Optimization: Added level-load shader pre-warming to eliminate combat stutter on mobile Vulkan, scalable particle density presets, and adaptive dynamic resolution scaling with FSR 1.0.

v0.4.6-alpha

🚀 Features

•
Rogue & Nightblade Stalker Overhaul: Stealthed units now feature true invisibility against enemies without detection capabilities, proactively purge enemy aggro when entering stealth, patiently shadow foes at a safe standoff distance when facing groups alone until allies engage or targets become isolated/vulnerable, deliver devastating backstab burst openers, and execute in-combat tactical disengages to evaluate their next mark.
•
Building Defense Perimeter Patrol: Defending units responding to building bounties now dynamically navigate to and patrol along the structure's outer perimeter ring with angular waypoints and alert sentry stances instead of crowding the building center.
•
Credits & Dedication: Added an in-game Credits dialog on the main menu attributing the Godot Engine and community addons, featuring a heartfelt dedication of the game to the creator's son, Gavin.
•
VFX Quality Settings: Added a VFX Quality slider in the Video options (Low 30%, Medium 60%, High 100%) to optimize particle density across diverse hardware.

🐛 Bug Fixes

•
Defense Combat Oscillation & Target Lock Fix: Resolved an issue where defenders responding to building defense twitched back and forth between defending structures and engaging ranged attackers by preventing defense interrupts from clearing combat targets, eliminating target wiping during generic rethinks, and allowing melee units to commit to closing the distance to ranged foes without dropping aggro.
•
Building Defense Locomotion & Sniper Alert: Fixed an issue where defenders guarding buildings were blind to distant ranged archers and moved in choppy stop-start increments by dynamically broadcasting attackers to defenders' sensory awareness upon structure damage, increasing default unit vision range to 15m, and smoothing perimeter patrol into fluid, continuous movement without waypoint freezes during active attacks.
•
Town Plaza Idling & Defense Sentry Freeze: Resolved an issue where units returning to town became stuck in an idle state around the plaza by replacing throttled frame-delta timers with wall-clock timestamps for defense sentry pauses, reliably scrubbing expired defense and deposit destinations from unit blackboards, and immediately populating travel targets upon selecting player bounties.
•
Match Start Origin VFX Cleanup: Resolved visual artifacts where spell effects or red hazard puddles momentarily flashed at the map origin (0, 0, 0) upon match start by ensuring particles and projectiles are fully positioned in world space prior to node entry, and removed an obsolete debug enemy spawn.
•
Save Slot 1 New Install Fix: Fixed an issue where visiting the Options menu before starting a campaign caused the tutorial toggle to inadvertently initialize and save active progression to Campaign Slot 1.
•
Performance Pill HUD Placement: Repositioned the minimal performance telemetry pill directly below the top-center gold and day timer bar, preventing UI overlap and click interception.

🎨 QoL & Polish

•
Berserker Rage Wave FX: Added a dynamic expanding crimson shockwave aura shader and custom crossed-axe ground decal for the Berserker's Frenzy Cry, visually representing furious rage radiating outward in waves.
•
Aura Bloom & Clutter Reduction: Softened Warrior Commander aura decal emission energy and perimeter ring brightness to eliminate blinding HDR bloom and ensure battlefield readability during dense group skirmishes.
•
Enemy Rot Aura & Fog Sync: Fixed continuous spawner enemy group registration and synchronized Zombie Dog and Mummy rot aura decals with Fog of War visibility, ensuring pestilence runes stay visible during patrol and properly shrouded in the fog.
•
Terrain-Conforming Thematic Auras: Replaced flat circular aura meshes with dynamic terrain-conforming ground decals featuring custom thematic iconography (Warrior heraldic swords and crest, Mummy and Zombie Dog toxic plague runes, Berserker fury) that gently rotate and respect terrain elevation.
•
Particle Shape Variance: Replaced blocky quad particles with soft circular textures across fire, burning patches, meteor storms, and ground dust shockwaves for a smooth visual appearance at high resolutions.
•
Instant Main Menu: Removed the artificial 2-second startup delay on the main menu, allowing the title screen and buttons to appear immediately upon launch.
•
Minimap Camera Framing & Viewport Clipping: Refined the camera view indicator on the minimap with focused viewport margins, horizon flare reduction, HUD sidebar compensation, and strict boundary clipping so off-screen edges cleanly vanish and never protrude outside the minimap.
•
Default Audio Levels: Reduced default Master, Music, and SFX volume levels from 100% to a comfortable 50% for fresh installations.
•
Combat Ping & Notification Pacing Overhaul: Expanded unique combat encounter radius to 30m, slowed repeated skirmish notifications to 12s, anchored Town Defense pings directly to defended buildings, and added combat sound debouncing to prevent audio cacophony during concurrent battles.

v0.4.5-alpha

🚀 Features

•
Steam Leaderboards Integration: Added global Steam Leaderboards for Royal Treasury (lb_royal_treasury_gold) and Enemies Vanquished (lb_enemies_vanquished), tracking persistent gold stashed and cumulative enemies defeated across all campaign runs with offline fallback caching and automatic save syncing.

🎨 QoL & Polish

•
Steam Alpha Testing Readiness: Linked official Steam App ID across project configuration and build scripts, safely removed development-only App ID files from version control, and primed release pipelines for alpha playtesting.

v0.4.4-alpha

General Updates

•
Zero-Stall Fog of War Engine: Replaced synchronous GPU viewport image readbacks with an authoritative discrete CPU bitmask grid, eliminating over 8 seconds of GPU pipeline stalls per minute and reducing CPU process latency by ~38% without altering visual fog rendering.
•
Physics Collider Streamlining: Pruned redundant HitboxComponent Area3D nodes and duplicate capsule shapes across all units and enemies, routing detection directly to CharacterBody3D colliders to significantly reduce physics broadphase collision checks in large raids.
•
Directional Shadow Cascade Tuning: Optimized Sun and Moon directional shadow mapping to 2 cascades with a 45m distance cap tailored to RTS camera heights, cutting shadow pass draw calls in half and preventing GPU bandwidth bottlenecks on mobile devices.
•
Mobile Physics Scaling: Added selectable 30 Hz, 40 Hz, and 60 Hz physics simulation presets in the Options menu to provide smooth, battery-friendly gameplay on mobile and Steam Deck hardware.

🐛 Bug Fixes

•
Fixed an issue where units or abilities near map boundaries could erroneously reveal outer border cells, and restored accurate fog preservation when migrating legacy save data.

v0.4.3-alpha

🚀 Features

•
Added scalable performance presets (Low, Medium, High) in a dedicated Options menu tab alongside an enemy spawn queueing system, dynamically regulating AI ticking and physics simulation while trickling excess raid units in at a smooth 0.4s cadence so total mission enemy challenge remains identical on any device without frame rate drops.
•
Added an in-game hardware benchmarking and live performance tracking suite with a 60-second automated combat stress test, 1% low stutter analysis, touch-friendly mobile HUD overlay (toggleable via 3-finger tap or F3), and exportable performance scorecards to help players and testers verify hardware viability.

v0.4.1-alpha

🚀 Features

•
Steam & Cross-Platform Integration: Added official Steam support via GodotSteam GDExtension, backed by an extensible Platform Provider architecture that guarantees seamless future publishing to Android (Google Play Games) with zero mobile overhead.
•
Steam Achievements & Progression Stats: Tied campaign victories, 3-star ratings, cumulative stars, persistent gold stashes, bounty placements, and tutorials directly to Steam achievements and stats.
•
Demo-to-Full Cross-Progression & Achievement Sync: Enhanced Demo and Full game persistence so all campaign level progress, star ratings, and gold stashes carry over seamlessly, while past achievements earned during the Demo automatically unlock the moment the full game is launched.
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Cloud Saves & NVIDIA GeForce NOW: Established Steam Auto-Cloud save persistence and GeForce NOW cloud play readiness across Windows and Steam Deck.
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Steam Deck & Rich Presence: Added automatic Steam Deck hardware detection with 60 FPS battery presets and touch inspect adaptations, along with dynamic Steam Rich Presence displaying current mission status and in-game day to friends.

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Fixed an issue in the Photo Booth studio where the Psychic unit's psionic shield dome rendered as an unshaded solid white circle by preserving component shader materials during staging and exposing dedicated toggles for the shield and hand flames.
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Fixed an issue in the Photo Booth studio where enemy units, buildings, and spawners rendered invisibly by neutralizing Fog of War visibility masking and clearing dormant construction discard shaders during staging.

🎨 QoL & Polish

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Added a mobile-only floating action button (👁️) above the combat log to toggle in-world unit and enemy hover inspect icons on or off, allowing players to instantly switch between a clean cinematic view and detailed unit stats.
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Upgraded the Photo Booth studio with dynamic asset auto-discovery (50+ units, buildings, enemies, and spawners), WYSIWYG framing guides, stealth and visual addon toggles, and frame-accurate animation posing, alongside an in-engine cinematic capture suite with clean HUD toggles, slow-motion filming, and 60 FPS Movie Maker recording.

v0.4.0-alpha

🚀 Features

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Added 4 new animal-like enemy units—Forest Spider, Mossback Bear, Mossback Wolf, and Zombie Dog—with baked animation sets, custom ability suites (bites, mauls, pounces, snarls, and roars), a compact 4.5m 1.0 dmg/s Rot Aura on the Zombie Dog, and poison mechanics including instant secondary poison damage and multi-second poison damage over time.
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Overhauled match victory and star progression to a standardized 3-Star paradigm (Star 1 Primary, Stars 2 & 3 Bonuses, Plaza Survival as a mandatory 0-star game requirement), refreshed Level 1–4 bonus challenges, and redesigned the Objectives Panel with logical row grouping and clear category badges.

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Doubled the sizes of the Zombie Dog and Forest Spider, adjusted their collision, hitbox, and health bar positions, and fixed an AnimationTree state machine transition issue that caused dogs and spiders to freeze in a static pose or skip their attack animations.
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Fixed Berserker Whirlwind Cleave dealing 0 damage at preferred combat range by correcting planar surface-distance calculations, eliminated the coward retreat loop by setting the Berserker to fight to the death with zero retreat threshold, and enabled dynamic attack speed scaling across combat animations.

🎨 QoL & Polish

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Revamped the main menu with an asymmetric left-docked layout and burnished gold styling so title buttons no longer cover character artwork, updated the background to feature the royal kingdom castle, and established a standardized marketing asset suite across all Steam store capsule formats.
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Upgraded the official game icon and desktop shortcut suite with a high-fidelity 3D Pixar-stylized golden knight gauntlet placing a bounty coin, eliminating legacy transparency artifacts and providing high-resolution Steam app icons (184x184) and multi-resolution Windows icons (.ico).
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Added an integrated audio architecture featuring background music for main menu and in-game exploration, continuous environmental forest day ambience, town under attack alarm bells, combat skirmish clash sounds, soldier death audio, and tactile gold coin feedback on bounty placement.
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Improved Objectives Panel vertical auto-fit so it collapses dynamically to its content height, removing excess blank space at the bottom without scrollbars.
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Added a comprehensive mission objectives scorecard to the match completion screen with a sleek two-column presentation, auto-collapsing the in-game objectives panel and detailing individual objective progress counters alongside checkmark/cross status indicators so players know exactly why stars were awarded or missed.

v0.3.21-alpha

🚀 Features

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Completely overhauled the onboarding tutorial across Levels 1–4 with Advisor Edmund, replacing the legacy 17-step lecture with an interactive, progressive learning journey that teaches core indirect RTS mechanics, cross-unit guild synergies, magic casters, and survival defense.
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Re-anchored the advisor dialogue system into an ergonomic, responsive banner featuring character portraits, clear objective cues, and per-level tutorial completion tracking that respects global settings.

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Fixed an issue where mobile touch inspection eye icons would briefly appear over newly spawned enemies in unexplored Fog of War.
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Fixed a scene parsing issue preventing Level 3 and Level 4 from loading by properly ordering tutorial resource declarations and resolving invalid resource identifiers.
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Fixed a runtime type error when units arrive at and complete Explore bounties by allowing untyped array arguments in BountyManager and ensuring PursueTargetBountyAction properly types its unit list.
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Fixed an issue causing sharp square terrain lines and rectilinear foliage cutoffs around base spawns by replacing integer-lattice noise with continuous 2D simplex noise, expanding the Fog of War history accumulation viewport to full resolution, and softening directional shadow cascade splits.

🎨 QoL & Polish

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Overhauled base spawn terrain leveling to naturally contour to the surrounding landscape, preventing harsh artificial plateaus, preserving sandy beaches on coastal spawns, and smoothing ground slopes for secondary building placement.
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Updated the martial Barracks building with a unified 3D compound model, adjusted physical and targeting collision boxes to fit the 6x6m footprint, and aligned spawning with the front gate.

v0.3.19-alpha

General Updates

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Reworked the building selection ring to match the sleek visual fidelity of unit auras, replacing the legacy 3D torus mesh with an unshaded additive ground shader featuring the player-favorite emerald green glow, dual orbiting energy crests, fixed cardinal reticle brackets, and a subtle foundation footprint wash.
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Fixed a crash where Summoner's Meteor Storm raised an invalid type error if the caster was defeated mid-storm, ensuring projectiles and ground hazards safely validate caster lifecycle and maintain their team alignment without friendly-fire.
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Fixed an issue where ambient firefly particles and pooled spell projectiles (such as meteor storm fragments) cast dark circular shadows on open terrain during day and night cycles by disabling shadow casting on spell meshes/particles and ensuring pooled projectiles cleanly reset flight and visibility.

🚀 Features

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Expanded the Berserker and Rogue combat kits with multi-strike attacks (Berserker Dual Chop & Brutal Flurry, Rogue Dual Dagger Thrust), a 360-degree Whirlwind Cleave, a Concussive Jab stun, passive on-hit heal procs (Blood Frenzy and Leech Poison), dual-wielded weapons for the Berserker, and updated ability tooltip badges.
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Converted Level 4 "Hold the Beach" into an in-game day survival mission where players hold the line for 20 days, aligning raids with the Day/Night cycle to trigger at 21:00 Nightfall starting Day 2 and escalating with afternoon (15:00) and dawn (06:00) waves in the late game.
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Added a universal 1.0-second recovery global cooldown between actions to prevent ability burst dumping and ensure smooth combat cadence.
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Added Coven faction spells for Spellblade (Meteor with 2+ enemy clustering priority, Cauterize self-heal in/out of combat) and Summoner (Meteor Storm area-denial with residual burning ground, icy Comet), celestial angled sky-descent visual effects and shaders, and enabled Bandit to autonomously throw Healing Vapor Bombs at wounded allies outside of combat.
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Upgraded the Nightblade with a "Stimulate" self-heal potion that restores 20 HP on a 6-second cooldown (usable in or out of combat without breaking stealth), an "Enchanted Jab" dealing 12 Arcane damage on a 10-second cooldown, and cleaned up legacy abilities.
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Reworked the Rock Golem into a formidable monstrous enemy with heavy Structure armor, tuned cooldowns, a 25-damage two-handed ground crush, a sweeping 15-damage front cleave with a 1-second stun, and an anti-kite earthen grasp that roots targets for 5 seconds.
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Refactored LevelManager and LevelLifecycle to dynamically resolve levels and scene paths directly from World Map data and filesystem conventions, seamlessly loading Level 4 and stubbing in Level 5 "Storm the Beach" as under construction on the world map.
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Introduced Level 4 "Hold the Beach" featuring a 100x100 coastal defense map where players withstand escalating inland raid waves for 20 minutes, backed by 5,000 starting gold and a new secondary objective to keep at least 25 living units alive at victory.
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Implemented comprehensive procedural level generation controls featuring directional coastline boundaries (North, East, South, Island, Inland), guaranteed 8x8m flat buildable starting base plateaus, inland ponds with base clearances, partial rivers with dry isthmus land corridors, full rivers spanned by procedural walkable bridges, and flexible spawn topologies (Center, Corner-to-Corner, Opposing Edges, Specific Edge) with seed micro-variation.
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Overhauled squad grouping mechanics with persistent leader recruitment, fast follower scanning, and a strict class diversity rule ensuring squads never contain duplicate unit classes while enabling flexible units to dynamically lead expedition squads.
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Added a Healing Vapor Bomb explosive to the Bandit that tosses a 6-meter restorative green gas cloud to heal wounded friendly units for 15 HP on a 6-second cooldown, complete with EffectBlocks ground decals and dissipating smoke and sparkle VFX.
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Overhauled roving packs and spawner raid waves into customizable Easy, Normal, and Difficult difficulty tiers, enabling individual unit counts and spatial distance constraints to scale independently (e.g. solitary Rock Golems vs swarming Skeleton Peasants) while dynamically selecting from active spawner buildings.
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Overhauled level secondary spawner generation into customizable Easy, Normal, and Difficult difficulty groups with tiered radial distance zoning, per-group active defender caps, threshold defensive bursts, and adaptive fallback placement across variable map sizes.
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Completed comprehensive enemy combat normalization across all 11 remaining enemy unit types, replacing basic punches with specialized action suites: Poacher Warrior (Cleave, Pommel Strike, Hamstring, and Rallying Shout with an expanding circular pulse wave VFX), Poacher Hunter (Quick Stab, Flank Strike, Crippling Bolas), Poison Beast (Infectious Bite, Venom Claw DoT, Acid Spit, and Violent Thrash AoE), Rock Golem (Heavy Slam, Ground Tremor AoE/Slow, Boulder Hurl, and Harden Armor), and all 7 Hedge/Skeleton Mages with multi-spell elemental repertoires including Combustion Nova, Frost Nova, Thunder Wave, Blood Siphon, and Steal Life.
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Overhauled Mummy Warrior enemy unit with the full martial action kit (Light Slash, Heavy Slash, Kick, Shield Bash, Shield Slam, and War Cry) and equipped it with a green Rot debuff aura that deals stacking Disease damage over time (1 damage/second) to all nearby player units.
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Overhauled Level 2 encounters by populating 5 secondary spawner locations with a dynamic mixture of melee and ranged skeleton strongholds (Skeleton Peasant Graveyard, Skeleton Archer Graveyard, Skeleton Crossbowman Graveyard, and Undead Crypt), adding Skeleton Archers and Poacher Archers to the 4 roving packs, tuning raids to trigger every 3 minutes with 1–2 raiders, and upgrading objectives to generic Strongholds (4) and Enemies (25) tracking.
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Configured a 3-tier ranged archery ability kit for enemy marksmen (Poacher Archer, Skeleton Archer, Skeleton Crossbowman) featuring an 8-damage / 3s cooldown basic Bow Shot, a 12-damage / 8s cooldown Power Shot, and a long-range Snipe dealing 20 piercing damage on a 20s cooldown at 5–8m standoff range, wired to the ArrowProjectile and bow animations.
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Added and generated all 8 Graveyard enemy spawner buildings (Mummy Warrior, Skeleton Archer, Skeleton Crossbowman, Skeleton Mage Blood/Fire/Frost/Lightning, and Skeleton Peasant) under res://Scenes/Spawners/Graveyard/ utilizing the SpawnerGenerator tool and updated stronghold victory tracking.
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Configured Level 3 secondary spawner pool to dynamically spawn from all 8 Graveyard stronghold variants, providing rich thematic spawner variance across the map, while expanding roving packs and raid encounters to include all 17 enemy unit types.
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Added and configured all 6 Poachers Hovel enemy spawner buildings (Poacher Warrior, Poacher Hunter, Poacher Archer, Fire Hedge Mage, Frost Hedge Mage, Lightning Hedge Mage) utilizing the shared PoachersHovel model, dedicated SpawnerData resources, and automated SpawnerGenerator tooling.
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Added the Amphibian Hunter Hut enemy spawner building and populated Level 3 with Amphibian Hunters across secondary spawners, roving roaming packs, and raid assault parties, alongside a generic 'Destroy 8 Enemy Strongholds' mission objective.
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Configured and generated all 15 remaining enemy units and variants (Mummy Warrior, Poacher Archer/Hunter/Warrior, Poison Beast, Rock Golem, Skeleton Archer/Crossbowman, Hedge Mage Fire/Frost/Lightning, and Skeleton Mage Blood/Fire/Frost/Lightning) with full 7-library animation integration, customized combat abilities, and dedicated EnemyData resources.
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Added a mobile touchscreen unit inspection system featuring touch-friendly floating eye buttons (👁️) above units and enemies to open live stat and objective popups with single-active hover management and dynamic auto-cleanup upon target death, camera culling, or Fog of War occlusion, and restricted building placement confirmation controls strictly to mobile displays.
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Added a high-priority Shield Slam siege attack for Warriors (10 Siege damage every 5 seconds using their shield) against enemy spawners and structures, and updated anti-structure targeting so both Warriors and Bandits properly target and damage any entity with structure armor.
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Reworked the Nightblade into an assassin with a stealth-exclusive Shadow Ambush opener (20 Piercing damage with shadow warp motion blur, streaming purple trail, and instant positioning behind the target) and a 1.8s Poison Stiletto attack with a 50% chance to apply stacking independent Poison DoT (5 damage/sec for 3 seconds), equipped with dual hand blades and vibrant purple poison impact and gas burst visual effects.
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Redesigned the Bandit into a mid-ranged explosives and demolition specialist (6m range) equipped with high-priority Structure Demolition charges (20 SIEGE damage), area-denial Molotov Cocktails (10 impact fire damage + 10s burning ground puddle dealing 3 DPS across 4m), explosive Fire Bombs (8 fire AoE), and Piercing Thrown Daggers (4 damage), with full building-first target prioritization.
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Expanded the building defense bounty system to all player structures (Village Plaza 200g, Barracks/Coven/Slums 100g) with customizable per-building reward settings in BuildingData resources, ensuring autonomous units rally to protect any attacked building.
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Added "Next Level" progression button to the Victory screen that returns to the World Map, automatically focuses on the next sequential level, and opens its details panel.
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Overhauled unit and enemy navigation, obstacle carving, building collision masks, spawn point offsets, squad marching formations, and melee combat standoff distance so units smoothly navigate around buildings and face off ~1.6m apart.
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Added Psychic's Psionic Restore self-heal ability (20% max HP on 10s cooldown under 90% HP with chest orb absorb and fireworks VFX) and a concentration-dependent 10% damage mitigation barrier dome that collapses on stun and executes a 1.0s explosion upon death.
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Added the Spellblade unit, completing all 9 basic faction units. Features the Spellblade Greatsword with multi-mode elemental visual shaders (Fire, Lightning, Frost), dynamic ember/lightning/snowflake particle systems, and a freezing air motion trail. Implements smart target resistance evaluation to automatically select the target's weakest element, dealing 10 base damage + Fire DoT, bonus Lightning damage & 2-stack Shock Stun, or Frost move/attack speed slow.
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Added Nightblade's Shadow Warp signature ability (4s cooldown, 20 damage piercing backstab) featuring a high-speed purple blur slide with trailing ghostly mesh echo shader VFX, alongside a 5-second in-combat stealth re-entry timer.
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Implemented the Summoner class featuring animated floating magic weapons with 5-second Fire/Ice/Arcane color-cycling shaders, an 8-meter ranged thrust attack, a reactive 2-damage melee shield, and a 30-second 360-degree knockback spell with obstacle collision snare/stun effects.
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Configured default stats, abilities, scripts, weapon attachments, and mechanics for Berserker (Frenzy Aura & dual weapons), Psychic (unarmed psionic abilities), Bandit (dual swords & ambush stealth), and Nightblade (dual stilettos & permanent action-broken stealth).

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Fixed a crash in building regeneration zones (such as Hearthstone Plaza or Barracks) where units defeated inside the zone triggered a freed object error upon exit.
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Fixed an issue where restarting a level or returning to the main menu failed to reset mission objectives and combat timers, ensuring objectives cleanly return to 0 progress, mid-match save states properly restore active targets and unit counts, and all gameplay subsystems completely flush their state between matches.
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Fixed an AI standoff bug where Mummy Warriors stalled after casting War Cry instead of closing into melee range, fixed visual overscaling on Summoner's Meteor Storm indicator ring while tripling meteor flurry density to 36, and scaled up Summoner's Comet and Spellblade's Meteor to large 2.25m celestial projectiles (75% of AOE impact diameter) with enhanced particle trails.
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Resolved debugger errors ('Trying to assign invalid previously freed instance', 'Cannot convert argument from Object to Dictionary') and fixed warrior patrol lockups by decoupling tool scripts from runtime singletons, validating unit component bindings, and safely filtering non-AI nodes in behavior tree composites.
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Restored sharp, legible 3D floating combat text by upgrading text rendering to anisotropic linear mipmap filtering and increasing the dark outline width, eliminating distance blur and shimmering across damage, heal, and gold indicators.
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Completely resolved Godot debugger "Lambda capture at index 0 was freed. Passed 'null' instead' errors across the engine by converting all asynchronous combat tweens, particle timers, and hazard closures into safe node-bound callbacks and delayed pool releases, and implemented clean _exit_tree() signal unhooking on BeehaveTree nodes during unit and enemy death.
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Fixed debugger errors where dead entities triggered 'Lambda capture at index 0 was freed. Passed null instead' by replacing timer closures with bound tween callbacks and ObjectPoolManager delayed releases across VFX, combat projectiles, and buffs.
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Fixed town patrol stalls and enemy spawn pauses where units and monsters froze motionless for minutes after moving to a patrol spot under staggered AI ticking, switching wait actions to real-time engine timestamps so patrol and spawn pauses take their intended 2 to 5 seconds regardless of tick rate, and cleaned up stale combat engagement flags.
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Fixed Elementalists halting at 8m Firebolt range by enforcing advancement into their 5m preferred combat range to cycle Lightning and Frost bolts, resolved enemy standoff stalls and dune deflections by removing terrain masks from enemy feelers and promoting standby combatants into frontline openings, restored roving pack patrol behavior until player detection, and ensured base-assaulting raid units dynamically divert to engage spotted player buildings like Barracks and defenses en route to the Village Plaza.
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Fixed Warriors looping in circles around Rock Golems by validating combat standoff on the 2D horizontal plane instead of 3D elevation slopes, and eliminated unit hesitation near Coven by excluding walkable terrain from movement obstacle feelers.
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Fixed unit and enemy spinning loops caused by 3D terrain elevation stalling NavigationAgent waypoint progression, expanded Coven collision and obstacle boundaries to enclose the Summoner and Spellblade visual addons, and guarded feeler deflections against reversing direction away from combat targets.
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Fixed issues where Elementalists spawned too close to Coven add-ons, stationary units falsely aborted movement toward combat targets, and post-combat squads danced in tight circles due to rotating march formation vectors.
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Fixed navigation stalls and post-combat freezes where stationary units false-arrived on distant targets, squad followers rejected locomotion due to unassigned movement destinations, and ranged enemies parked just outside bow attack range.
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Resolved pathing lockups and combat gridlocks where units and enemies wedged against buildings or clustered into frozen crowds by introducing multi-ring radial combat slotting, proactive 3-tier stuck detection and flanking recovery, and refined corner-sliding through tight corridors while maintaining full physical collision integrity.
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Fixed squad followers hoarding gold and skipping town life by implementing an automatic peacetime stand-down that allows units to deposit carried gold at the Plaza, patrol for guard gold, and scout, backed by squad proximity banking.
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Resolved an issue in massive battles where duplicate 'died' and 'tree_exiting' signal errors occurred when dead units or squad dissolutions attempted to reconnect already attached listeners.
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Fixed a critical memory leak where vision tracking signal connections accumulated silently during combat (units entering/exiting vision ranges stacked duplicate death listeners), and optimized minimap redraw from 60 FPS to 10 FPS, throttled fog-of-war CPU pixel lookups with per-cycle caching, reduced structure proximity polling frequency, and throttled per-unit obstacle avoidance raycasts to every 3rd frame.
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Fixed debugger errors where dead units caused group leader lookup crashes ('Trying to assign invalid previously freed instance') and poison tick particle timers leaked freed lambda captures, restored 100% native desktop resolution and prevented automated tests from overwriting user settings, and upgraded floating combat text with non-mipmapped linear filtering, tuned outline borders, and FSR spatial reconstruction for razor-sharp legibility.
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Fixed mobile touch jitter by decoupling camera drag from the 120Hz+ touch polling rate (now frame-synced), throttling building placement ghost updates to ~15 FPS on mobile, and reducing fog-of-war GPU→CPU readback frequency on touchscreen devices.
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Fixed an issue where units and enemies struggled to ascend small hills or plateaus (such as the raised ground around the Village Plaza), eliminating false sideways wall deflections on walkable floor slopes, increasing traversable slope angles to 60 degrees with constant uphill walking speed, and expanding navmesh slope and climb limits.
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Fixed units and enemies wedging or freezing against building corners and walls by expanding navmesh obstacle carving to match physical agent radii, eliminating 3D vertical offset squashing on planar navigation directions, preventing deadlocks with full-speed perpendicular wall sliding, and adding proactive stuck recovery for non-combat patrol states.
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Fixed an issue where units and enemies could freeze in place and refuse to advance toward buildings or combat targets by ensuring standby holding behavior strictly requires physical arrival at an assigned standoff slot, aligning ranged unit slot queries with preferred attack ranges, and guaranteeing queued units advance immediately when frontline combat slots open up.
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Fixed an issue where Rock Golem's Colossal Crush and Crag Cleave failed to damage player units due to physics area culling, and significantly boosted visual impact with high-visibility dust shockwaves, flying rock debris, and ground cracks.
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Fixed a runtime crash when player buildings were destroyed by correctly retrieving obstacle footprint dimensions from nav_obstacle_size on BuildingData rather than footprint_size, ensuring smooth collapse animations and dust shock ring effects play properly.
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Fixed an issue where the Bandit's Healing Vapor Bomb failed to throw when engaging distant enemies by evaluating distance to the wounded ally rather than the enemy combat target, snapped the restorative green gas impact effect and slime decal to ground level across a full 6-meter area, and added live real-time action cooldown countdown timers to the unit inspection tooltip.
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Fixed missing and uncolored floating combat numbers for DoT (Damage over Time) and HoT (Heal over Time) sources, mapped all 10 damage types (including Disease for Mummy Rot, Fire, Frost, Lightning, Arcane, Poison, and Siege) to vibrant distinct floating text colors, added floating status text indicators (Chilled, Snared, Stunned, Poisoned, Burning, Diseased, Regen), ensured buildings and structures are completely immune to snares/slows/chills/stuns without turning white, and upgraded character status visuals to additive mesh overlays to preserve underlying textures.
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Fixed an engine error in BountyManager and combat targeting where accessing global positions of destroyed, despawned, or tree-exiting entities triggered !is_inside_tree() warnings.
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Fixed an engine TypedArray validation error in AuraComponent where periodic damage ticking (such as Mummy Rot Aura) attempted to erase previously freed target instances from typed arrays, cleanly purging destroyed units with array filters and guarding object validations across components.
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Fixed Fog of War visual reveal radius clearing only half of unit perception range (5m vs 10m) due to sprite diameter scaling math, synchronizing visual FoW clearing with sensory vision range, and resolved enemy models remaining concealed or invisible while in combat on vision borders by implementing 5-point perimeter extent sampling in the visibility component.
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Fixed an issue where Frostbolt slow and snare effects failed to wear off units by migrating status effect slow tracking to deterministic physics frame processing, ensuring accurate modifier removal, and automatically cleansing combat debuffs when units rest and recover at the town plaza. Also resolved Poacher Warriors freezing or stalling without attacking by tuning primary Cleave cooldown to a fluid 1.8s rhythm, standardizing melee ability reach to 2.2m, and prioritizing martial attacks over buff shouts.
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Fixed an issue preventing Level 1 from launching by correcting mission objective target identifiers to match Undead Crypt spawners, dynamically scaling base claim exclusion zones on small maps to allow secondary spawner placement, and expanding dry land margins.
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Fixed a UnitStateMachine FSM error ("Attempted to transition to unknown state: StunnedState") occurring when an enemy unit landed a stun or stagger effect (such as Pommel Strike or Thunder Wave) on a player unit by mounting the StunnedState node under FSM in BaseUnit.tscn.
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Fixed a runtime GDScript error in StatusEffectComponent when DoT damage ticked after the attacking unit had been freed by safely sanitizing attacker instance references, fixed enemy mages dealing invisible direct damage by instantiating fire, frost, blood, and lightning spell projectile and beam visuals, resolved wounded units twitching or remaining stuck at the town plaza while healing by adding a self-evaluating stationary resting behavior state that automatically exits upon reaching healthy threshold, and added clean transparent backgrounds to objective checkmark and cross UI icons.
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Fixed an issue where Rogues froze outside melee range while stealthed without attacking by correcting a navigation arrival bug that stopped flanking units in front of enemies, transitioning Rogue stealth management to out of combat, and ensuring pure melee stealthed units physically navigate behind targets on foot before striking. Removed teleportation/warp mechanics from Rogue (strictly preserving Shadow Warp for the Nightblade), and tuned Rogue attacks for fast, low-damage skirmishing with 8.0 damage / 0.6s cooldown Dagger Strikes and a 10.0 damage melee Backstab opener.
•
Fixed an issue where destroying an enemy spawner awarded 2 points toward 'Destroy Strongholds' objectives and 1 point toward 'Kill Enemies' objectives by eliminating a duplicate entity_died broadcast in SpawnerBase.gd, enforcing strict mutual exclusivity between spawner and unit kill sensors in EliminateEntitiesTracker.gd, and adding guards against redundant death triggers.
•
Fixed an issue where yellow treasure markers and dead unit/enemy pips remained frozen on the minimap in inactive fog by enforcing strict active-vision filtering for dynamic drops, immediately removing dead entities from unit and enemy tracking groups upon death, and instantly cleaning up bounties on dead targets.
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Fixed a rendering engine error (material_casts_shadows null material) caused by dynamic material allocations and transient mesh cleanup during combat VFX, stealth toggles, status effect tints, and bounty collections by caching persistent materials and safely detaching material overrides before freeing geometry instances.
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Tuned Bandit preferred combat range to 4.5m (comfortably inside their 6.0m ability action envelope), aligned ability-readiness range requirements in behavior tree combat conditions, and added line-of-sight target filtering to prevent frontline units from bypassing blocking spawners to chase obstructed enemies.
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Resolved combat range edge jitter and stutter-stepping for ranged and mid-ranged units (such as Bandits, Elementalists, and Summoners) by positioning standoff formation rings comfortably inside maximum attack ranges, harmonizing range evaluation tolerances across behavior trees and movement components, and validating ability readiness upon reaching navigation destinations.
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Fixed an issue where melee units (such as Berserkers) could get stuck against enemy spawners while pursuing enemies behind them by adding line-of-strike clearance validation in PackNavigationManager, enforcing strict combat-range arrival requirements, and setting safe spawn offsets outside obstacle carving zones.
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Fixed an issue where units (such as Bandits depositing gold or attacking structures) could become stuck against building corners and navigation obstacles by calculating true corner bounding radii, validating standoff slots outside carved obstacle areas, and ensuring uninterrupted pathing around structures.
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Fixed melee unit and enemy tunnel-vision pathing and congestion by adding 3-ray obstacle feeler steering to swing wide around allies and obstacles, dynamic self-defense retaliation upon taking damage, in-movement opportunity switching to engage nearby threats, and automatic unblocked flank slot allocation when obstructed.
•
Fixed an issue where the collapsed Objectives Panel and transparent UI containers in the upper-left of the screen blocked clicks from reaching terrain, buildings, and bounties by setting mouse filters to ignore clicks on non-visible containers.
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Fixed an issue where clicking on a player-owned building under attack with an active defense bounty opened the modify bounty dialog instead of selecting the building; player buildings now prioritize building selection to hire units and place buildings, and active defense bounties are accessed via direct floating marker clicks or a sleek, non-intrusive defense banner above the action grid.
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Resolved combat engagement jitter, stutter-stepping, and stalling near buildings for Berserker, Rogue, Bandit, Nightblade, and enemy melee units by eliminating double-offset navigation slot distances, aligning attack range tolerances in the Ability Picker, caching perimeter slot angles across obstacle corners, separating melee and ranged formation slot categories, and ensuring melee units always push past backline casters to close the gap into melee range.
•
Fixed an issue where zooming the camera at minimum or maximum zoom boundaries caused the camera to drift across the map.
•
Fixed a Godot AnimationTree mixer error (make_animation_instance: Condition "animation.is_null()" is true) by pre-initializing state machine animation nodes and blend spaces before activating the tree, resolving non-existent animation clips across all unit scenes, and adding self-healing fallback logic to UnitAnimationComponent.
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Fixed an issue where SFX volume settings had no effect on game notifications, HUD error buzzers, unit gold deposit sounds, or combat impacts by routing all sound effects to the dedicated SFX audio bus.
•
Fixed a performance issue where the colorblind filter performed a full-screen shader copy on every frame even when disabled; the filter is now completely hidden when inactive.
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Fixed an issue where creating or updating a bounty while a building was selected would draw the bounty UI directly over the actions panel without clearing or hiding the action buttons.
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Fixed an issue where Rogues and melee units would freeze facing enemies at a distance without approaching into melee range due to utility buff ranges (such as Stealth) corrupting melee attack range checks.
•
Implemented a data-driven preferred combat range system and ability range classification flags, allowing melee units with long-range opening abilities or self-buffs to continue closing the gap to their preferred melee distance (~2.0m).
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Fixed an issue where units would experience a delay when switching targets upon killing an enemy, walk away toward distant bounties before realizing nearby threats were present, or freeze for 2 seconds due to artificial target loss pauses.
•
Fixed a bug where units traveling toward non-combat destinations would latch onto stale combat targets, causing units (such as the Psychic) to slide across the map while tracking distant enemies and displaying phantom combat status text.
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Fixed building placement validation where units underneath the placement ghost did not turn the building invalid/red by enabling Area3D detection on character HitboxComponents, adding direct spatial unit checks, and updating ghost validity checks every frame during placement mode.
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Fixed an issue where units and enemies separated by buildings would stall in standoff positions by validating combat slots with multi-angle radial searches around targets and evaluating physical entity strike range on arrival.
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Fixed an issue where units could get hung up against building edges by dynamically computing NavigationObstacle3D carving bounds from physical CollisionShape3D extents with safety margins, and implementing direct collision tangent deflection for corner sliding.
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Fixed a runtime GDScript error in SpawnerBase._ready() by aligning SpawnerData property accesses (max_health, base_armor_type, passive_healing_amount/interval) with HealthComponent.initialize().
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Fixed an issue where units would freeze in place during combat without attacking nearby enemies due to mismatched melee condition ranges and double standoff distance offsets.
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Fixed a typed array mismatch runtime error during building placement in Barracks and Slums addon visual components.
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Fixed a scene parse error in Psychic.tscn by placing newly attached ability and barrier component resource tags in the file header, restoring downstream resource loading for Barracks, Hearthstone Plaza, and level startup.
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Fixed an issue where procedural level generation would fail to start levels and exhaust re-seed attempts by ensuring player-buildable objectives (such as the Village Plaza) are excluded from at-start spawner pre-validation.
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Fixed an issue where Nightblade, Bandit, Berserker, and Psychic froze during combat by populating valid animation clip names (e.g. Thrust_Slash, Double_Blade_Spin) in their ability files and configuring UnitAnimationComponent arrays.
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Fixed a runtime GDScript error in ShadowWarpVFX.gd when spawning Nightblade's ghostly echo trail echos by replacing invalid set_delay call on Tween with tween_interval.
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Fixed an issue where Nightblade got locked in stealth unable to attack or exit stealth by ensuring attack actions immediately break stealth and removing front-attack positioning blocks on stealthed units.
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Reverted unintended modifications to Rogue (Rogue.tscn and RogueData.tres), restoring original visual model attachments and unit data properties.
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Fixed a bug where Warriors would walk inside enemy spawner buildings by dynamically adding the building's radius to their navigation agent's target desired distance. Skeletons also now correctly spawn outside the radius of the spawner building instead of inside its mesh.
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Fixed a core targeting issue where Warriors would fail to switch targets from spawners to skeletons and sometimes abandon combat. Enemy spawners are now correctly classified as buildings across all AI combat checks, allowing units to properly engage dynamic threats and path without getting stuck.
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Fixed a console error where the unit information tooltip UI would attempt to attach itself to the scene tree improperly during teardown.
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Fixed defense bounty markers (cyan) persisting on buildings indefinitely after attackers were killed, and explore bounty markers (gold) sometimes remaining in the world after being claimed by units.
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Fixed placing a bounty on unexplored fog that happened to overlap a hidden enemy spawner revealing the spawner's position as a red kill bounty instead of treating it as an explore bounty.
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Fixed save/load system where loading a saved game caused buildings to lose track of their hired unit counts, showing 0/5 instead of the correct numbers. Also fixed units losing carried gold, building production queues failing to restore active training progress, restored units spawning frozen at origin coordinates without active AI, enemy spawners re-triggering burst waves on load, and raid difficulty scaling resetting to Day 1 values.

⚖️ Balance

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Rebalanced Level 4 raid escalation by removing compounding wave size multipliers to keep pack sizes constant while smoothly accelerating raid wave arrivals from 2 minutes down to 45 seconds.
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Upgraded raid mechanics with composite multi-tier assault waves, per-tier cluster count controls, wave-number gating, and a 30-second interval floor for high-intensity late-game rushes.
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Tuned Level 4 "Hold the Beach" raid spawn cadence, reducing the attack timer interval and initial delay from 120 seconds to 60 seconds to increase pressure on the player's defenses.
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Rebalanced player building health numbers (Plaza 1000 HP, Barracks 700 HP, Coven 500 HP, Slums 350 HP) to establish distinct structural tiers and durability profiles, and boosted monstrous enemy health pools (Mummy Warrior to 220 HP, Poison Beast to 400 HP, and Rock Golem to 500 HP).
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Rebalanced unit squad grouping roles across all 9 classes: Berserkers, Psychics, and Spellblades are now squad Leaders (joining Warriors), Rogues, Bandits, and Nightblades are Followers (joining Elementalists), and Summoners are Flexible.
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Re-tuned building Fog of War vision radii to 60–65% scale (Village Plaza from 38.0m to 25.0m, default faction buildings from 25.0m to 16.0m, and spawner discovery reveal from 8.0m to 5.5m) to provide balanced, localized settlement vision without over-revealing the map now that FoW clearing is synchronized to full radius.
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Rebalanced Level 3 enemy spawns by increasing raid party sizes to 4–6 units per spawner, raising regular spawner defending capacity to 6 active units, and scaling defensive threshold bursts to summon 6–8 defenders at 70% and 30% spawner health.
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Updated unit hiring costs, keeping the 3 faction buildings (Barracks, Slums, Coven at 500g) and basic units (Warrior, Rogue, Elementalist at 300g) unchanged, while setting advanced hybrid unit hire costs (Berserker, Psychic, Bandit, Nightblade, Spellblade, Summoner) to 600g.
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Adjusted building and spawner passive healing rates to 10 HP every 5 seconds with a 5-second peace requirement, and updated structures to detect combat skirmishes within 4m of their footprint to prevent in-fight healing.
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Slowed regular enemy spawner intervals to 30 seconds per spawn check (spawning 1 unit if below maximum capacity), and configured defensive threshold bursts at 70% and 20% spawner health to summon 3 defending units.
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Updated Warrior's Commander Aura to buff ally damage (+20% per aura, stacking additively across multiple warriors), demoralize enemies in range (-15% damage dealt), and exclude the warrior themselves from their own aura.
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Standardized preferred combat ranges across all units so ranged casters and mid-ranged specialists position comfortably inside their shortest spell reach (Elementalist at 5.0m for full 3-spell cycling, Bandit at 4.5m, Psychic at 3.5m, Summoner at 6.0m) while preserving crisp 2.0m–2.2m engagement ranges for melee classes (Warrior, Berserker, Rogue, Nightblade, Spellblade).
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Increased Bandit and Berserker bravery stats to 6.0 (maximum fearless tier), ensuring both chaotic, bloodthirsty units aggressively accept combat bounties without hesitation.
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Updated Level 3 kill objective to 150 enemies, added a ranged Firebolt spell to the Spellblade without altering their preferred melee engagement range, tuned Elementalist spell cooldowns to 6 seconds, and prioritized multi-target Lightning Bolt when multiple enemies are grouped in range.

🎨 QoL & Polish

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Sprint 3 Polish & Mobile performance pass: removed dynamic omni torch lights from units to rely on ambient illumination, stripped heavy AI, navigation, and logic components immediately upon unit death to eliminate corpse node overhead, introduced camera distance culling for held weapons to slash mesh draw calls, and set default resolution scale to 0.75 on mobile and touchscreen devices to significantly reduce 3D GPU fill rate.
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Sprint 2 AI & CPU performance pass: introduced AITickManager to stagger behavior tree ticks across frames (4 ticks/s in combat, 2/s while idle, 1/s off-screen), throttled off-screen skeletal animation trees, feeler raycasts, and rotation slerps via VisibleOnScreenNotifier3D, throttled redundant vision overlap checks to a 2-second cooldown, and dynamically disabled RVO avoidance simulation on stationary units to drastically improve frame rates during large 100+ unit encounters.
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Major performance optimization pass: replaced per-unit SubViewport health bars with a lightweight billboard shader (eliminating 100 GPU render targets at 100 units), disabled shadow casting on unit meshes, halved shadow map resolution, added self-disabling HealthComponent processing, introduced a physics tick rate toggle (30/60Hz) in settings, and capped Level 4 raid enemies at 60 to prevent unbounded scaling.
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Renamed the rogue and scoundrel faction building from Slums to Hideout across all game menus, tech tree actions, minimap indicators, and unit descriptions.
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Added a dynamic Dust Shock Ring visual effect for the Rock Golem's Ground Tremor ability and building collapses (player structures and enemy spawners), featuring radial dust expansion, scattering debris chunks, and central impact puffs.
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Upgraded ambient nocturnal firefly clusters with high-visibility bioluminescent orbs, gentle ground-illuminating glow lights, and increased map density (28 clusters on Level 3, 16 on Levels 1 & 2) that remain visible in explored territory throughout the night.
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Implemented procedural vegetation wind sway across grass and tree canopies on all three levels, added multi-mesh tree scattering (Ancient Oak, Autumn Sentinel, and Red Tree) with 50% rescaled tree heights, root vertical-offsets, tuned density, and building placement clearing.
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Modernized the Objectives panel with a wider 320px layout, category badges (⚔️ MAIN, ★ BONUS, 🛡️ CRITICAL), and structured quest cards to eliminate awkward text wrapping, and unified the Gold display with the Day/Time clock into a sleek, centered top header bar featuring an anti-aliased transparent coin icon.
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Upgraded Lightning magic visual effects across Elementalist and enemy Lightning Mages with branching zigzag bolt geometry, dynamic localized arc flash lighting, and multi-layered electrical burst and spark impact VFX on all chained targets.
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Upgraded Frostbolt projectiles across Elementalist and enemy Frost Mages with glowing crystal prism cores, vaporous frost mist trails, and sparkling ice shards, backed by a dedicated one-shot frost shatter impact VFX, and organized external VFX assets under addons/PolyBlocks.
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Upgraded Firebolt projectiles across Elementalist, Spellblade, and enemy Fire Mages with multi-layered stylized flame trails, sparkling embers, and dynamic point lighting, backed by a dedicated one-shot fire explosion impact VFX.
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Added grouping preference descriptions to recruitment tooltips and live squad member tracking (displaying group leaders, followers, and third unit members) to 3D in-world unit hovertext.
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Enhanced unit hover tooltips to display a compact 2-column grid of available actions and abilities with short names, cooldown timers, and ability type tags for both recruitment buttons and 3D in-world inspection.
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Added in-game toast notifications when friendly units fall in battle and standardized generic display names across all toasts and hover tooltips, preventing Godot duplicate numbering (e.g., SkeletonPeasant1, Warrior2) and engine masking names (e.g., CharacterBody3D@2140) from appearing in player-visible UI.
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Updated the World Map level selection screen texture with a cleaner high-resolution parchment map tailored for the war room table.
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Integrated Fog of War and map perimeter boundary masking across both the water shader and a massive sub-ground seabed floor, eliminating specular sun/moon reflection bleeding in unexplored fog and seamlessly cloaking the world exterior in darkness.
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Doubled the physical scale, collision bounds, navigation obstacle footprints, and health bar heights for both the Amphibian Hunter Hut and Undead Crypt spawner buildings.
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Added ethereal burning purple psionic hand flames and glowing ember particles to both hands of the Psychic unit, complete with dynamic localized lighting and smooth fade-outs upon unit defeat.
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Redesigned the Psychic shield visual effect into a crystal-translucent psionic barrier with a dynamic orbiting energy sweep and delicate hex lattice that smoothly cycles around the bubble, keeping the unit model, facial details, and combat animations fully visible without visual obstruction.
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Built an in-engine 3D PhotoBooth Studio tool for capturing high-fidelity transparent UI icons, dialogue portraits, and marketing frame sequences/turntables with 3-point studio lighting, animation scrubbing, and batch export, while configuring export presets to exclude developer tools and tests from production builds.
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Connected all 7 shared animation libraries to the Skeleton Peasant enemy, retaining all native animations while expanding walk, idle, attack, and death pools to over 360 animation clips and fixing walk animation playback.
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Integrated 5 newly imported Mixamo animation libraries (Attacks, Death, Idle, Locomotion, Victory) across all 9 player units and configured randomized death animation pools to add combat variety upon unit defeat.
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Imported and converted 94 Mixamo combat, idle, locomotion, victory, and death animations into 5 standardized, lightweight GLB animation libraries in res://Assets/Animations/Mixamo/, stripping redundant meshes, aligning rigs with Godot's Humanoid skeleton standard, and configuring all locomotion and idle clips to seamless linear loops.
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Cleaned up Level Select map environment post-processing settings by removing unused Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) to eliminate editor renderer warnings and optimize mobile/PC compatibility.
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Migrated all 9 player units and ability resources to the unified Universal Animation Libraries (UAL1 and UAL2), updating AnimationTrees, StateMachines, Move BlendSpaces, and combat actions with clean clip bindings.
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Reworked the Warrior's Commander Aura visual from an intrusive ground disc into a sleek, transparent outer boundary ring with a continuous orbiting wispy blue highlight wave.
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Standardized grass foliage scattering across Level 1 and Level 2 to match the lush stylized look and proportional density of Level 3.
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Overhauled the minimap into a clean tactical radar with class-colored unit pips, distinct building and spawner badges, collision-free Explore/Kill/Defend bounty overlays, strict Fog of War visibility filtering, and 3D mesh, health bar, and torch lighting culling.
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Equipped the Bandit unit with a stylized stick of dynamite prop in his right hand featuring an active burning fuse complete with sparkling particles, a rising smoke trail, glowing ember tip, and dynamic warm light flicker.
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Upgraded procedural terrain visuals with multi-biome texture blending (sandy shorelines with wet coastal margins, natural stony clearings and cliff rock, and anti-tiling grass variation) and synchronized foliage scattering so grass stays off beaches and rocky clearings while supporting dedicated prop biomes.
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Added a seamless watertight cliff skirt and expansive deep seabed floor beneath the map, along with horizon-spanning ocean waters and atmospheric day/night depth fog so the world feels like a cohesive, continuous landscape rather than an island floating in empty space.
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Dressed up the Level Select screen into an atmospheric commander's war room tabletop with dark-stained wood grain, beveled edge trim, physical parchment borders with brass corner brackets, human-scaled weapon adornments (swords, staves, daggers, maces, shields), 3D gold coin stacks, and warm tactical lighting.
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Added a dynamic golden camera view frustum reticle on the minimap that tracks the main camera viewport in real-time, and set the camera's zoom floor to start at the default overview height.
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Overhauled the options menu across Audio, Video, and Gameplay tabs with live numeric readouts, 3D resolution scaling (50%-100%), max framerate caps (30-144 FPS / Uncapped), and an invert zoom toggle.
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Introduced a data-driven "Under Construction" status for upcoming levels on the World Map (such as Level 4), displaying a 🚧 map badge, custom developer notice, and a disabled play button.
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Enforced minimum 3.5m spacing corridors between building collision boundaries and expanded the Village Plaza's starting Fog of War vision radius to 38.0m, ensuring ample explored room for town expansion with wide, unobstructed avenues for squad navigation.
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Added magical atmospheric visual effects to the Slums Nightblade tent addon, featuring pulsing etched purple floor runes, a mystical violet flame hearth with dynamic dancing light flicker, and flowing shadow breeze mist drifting through the entrance.
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Added magical visual effects to the Barracks Psychic Tower addon, featuring a hovering storm cloud with a Coven mana-purple core, bright green arcing lightning bolts to the spire tip, and orbiting anti-gravity runestones.
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Transformed Coven addon platforms into hovering arcane islands with pulsing mana rune levitation effects, chaotic floating weapons that drop, dissolve, and respawn on the Summoner platform, and elemental greatsword imbuement surges on the Spellblade platform.
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Added elemental chimney visual effects (Fire, Ice, Lightning) with dedicated particle systems, lights, and organic animations, plus dynamic interior window spell practice flashes to the Coven building.
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Overhauled the Spellblade visual effects to feature significantly larger, more vibrant elemental flames, lightning arcs, and frost trails that fully engulf the weapon, and fixed an issue that was preventing the VFX from displaying.
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Added translucent purple ghostly fist and foot mental projection visual effects for the Psychic unit's punch and kick attacks.
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Automated the low-poly character rigging pipeline with high-resolution Voxel skinning and specialized non-manifold mesh fallbacks, eliminating weight bleeding and mesh tearing across all 9 base units.
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Disabled Android Demo builds in release automation to streamline release packaging while retaining configurable support if needed in the future.
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Implemented an object pooling system for projectiles, floating combat text, and visual effects to reduce memory allocation and prevent performance stuttering during large battles.

v0.3.6-alpha

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Overhauled the build pipeline: Android builds now reliably export, sign, and update in-place without requiring uninstall. Demo and Full builds share save data so progress carries over when upgrading.

v0.3.4-alpha (skipped number due to build server configuration issue)

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Resolved Android level loading freezes during scene loading, unified mobile save file storage between Demo and Full builds, and added a BUILD_ANDROID workflow toggle in CI.
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Fixed friendly melee units (like Warriors) freezing in place in front of enemies during attack cooldowns instead of remaining engaged in combat.
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Fixed floating combat text spawning and displaying over enemy units and spawners under undiscovered or inactive fog of war.
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Fixed Android release export builds failing on tag push by adding an automated CI safeguard to ensure export presets remain unsigned for external apksigner.

🚀 Features

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Added Elementalist unit stats tuning (150 HP, Cloth Armor), cautious AI positioning, and the initial spellcasting framework featuring Lightning Bolt (arcing up to 2 extra targets), Firebolt (single-target burst + 10 Burning DoT over 2s), and Frostbolt (single-target + 50% Chilled snare).
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Added periodic combat target re-evaluation and self-defense priority over buildings, preventing units from standing idle while attacked, alongside pursuer-crowded bounty calculations with stochastic bravery checks.

⚖️ Balance

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Set initial faction bravery stats for testing (Barracks: 5.0, Slums: 4.0, Coven: 3.0).

🎨 QoL & Polish

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Upgraded GitHub Actions release pipeline to a parallel Job Matrix strategy for faster multi-platform exports and isolated runner VM environments.

v0.3.1-alpha

🚀 Features

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Added 3D Floating Combat Text displaying damage taken in red and healing in green above battling units, enemies, and buildings, with configurable category filtering hooks.
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Implemented Level 3 playable map (150x150 flat terrain, 8 Undead Crypt spawners, 2-minute raider attacks) with Coven building support, all 9 unit hires at 300 gold costs, multi-building tech prerequisites, and a 30 enemy kill objective.
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Implemented Level 1-3 Alpha Demo restrictions with automatic store purchase modal when attempting Level 4+.
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Added Local Treasure System where units drop carried gold on death, heroes autonomously gather treasures, and maps procedurally spawn hidden gold pouches in unexplored areas (Level 1: 4, Level 2: 6, Level 3: 10).
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Reworked the World Map Level Selection screen using a high-resolution 8K map viewing surface with smooth camera panning, 3D level markers, animated active route paths, a 3D Warrior player location token, and a dev-only visual marker placement tool.
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Wounded units now retreat to town to heal when health drops below 50% (staying in town until 75% HP), benefiting from accelerated health regeneration near the Hearthstone Plaza.
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Added 3D In-World Live Unit & Enemy Status Tooltips displaying real-time HP, armor, and active behavior objectives (bounties, combat targets, and raid intentions) above units in terrain.
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Expanded Action Panel Tooltips to support Buildings, displaying strategy summaries, strengths, weaknesses, structure armor, and utility features.

🎨 QoL & Polish

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Redesigned Objectives UI into a mobile-friendly collapsible slide-out panel with progress toasts and initial 0/N counters, and unified all game UI elements to a Burnished Gold & Warm Obsidian fantasy theme.
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Updated Local Treasure visuals with a 3D gold pouch model, magical golden light pulsing, particle sparkles, ground-level hover animations, and fog-of-war hiding.
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Enhanced Level Select 3D rendering sharpness with native display resolution scaling, MSAA 4X anti-aliasing, camera-aligned billboard title labels, and 3D metallic gold star models.
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Unified HUD visual design with glowing blue borders and dark glass panels, suppressed native tooltips in favor of dynamic scroll-free tooltip cards with usability warnings, and relocated the Day/Time display into a collapsible Objectives panel.
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Implemented zoom-invariant 48px screen-space proximity targeting for 3D unit inspection, preventing building walls from obscuring hovered units.

🐛 Bug Fixes

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Fixed Windows Demo build crashing on launch by updating export resource filters to bundle all required dependencies.
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Fixed Fog of War visual bugs including map center fog/foliage clearings on unit hire, zero grass in the center of the map, and offset foliage fog trails on larger levels.
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Fixed mobile level loading freezes, eliminated un-yielded main-thread procedural generation stalls, and resolved NavigationServer3D thread access errors on /root/FogManager.
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Fixed mobile status cards rendering behind HUD overlays by promoting tooltips to a top-level CanvasLayer, and ensured locked/disabled action buttons still display tooltip cards.
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Restored 100% unblocked map click handling for bounty placement and targeting in crowded combat areas by isolating 3D unit inspection strictly to mouse hover.
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Fixed Fog of War leak where moving the mouse over unexplored or grey fog could hover and reveal hidden enemies.

v0.2.6-alpha

🎨 QoL & Polish

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Configured automated logging-patch-notes skill and integrated Google Forms sync.