Another Week of Polishing: The Home Stretch

We have been grinding on this demo for a month before release and another two weeks after, but we are finally hitting the home stretch. It has been a lot of work, but we know you guys will appreciate the extra effort. These fixes make the game feel a lot more stable and enjoyable to play, and honestly, it is starting to feel like a real game now.

The High Ground Overhaul We finally unified our rendering and logic to respect the elevation of the terrain. Whether it is units, buildings, corpses, items, or blood decals, everything now correctly climbs the height of the tile they are standing on. We even fixed item clicking. It used to be a nightmare to click items on a hill because the hitbox was stuck at base level, but we now check the meta data dst of the image itself so its much more accurate. No more clicking air.

Pathfinding: The Parking Breakthrough This was our biggest win. We were struggling with massive unit counts causing stutters. We tried leader-follower systems and BFS, but they all felt clunky. We finally arrived at a Master Path system where the leader calculates the main route and everyone else calculates their own local A* to follow it. The real magic happened when we stopped forcing units to cram into the exact same pixel at the destination; we let them find their own free spot near the goal. It turned a rigid, jittery pathfinding problem into a smooth parking behavior. Hundreds of units moving across complex terrain with zero lag? It is a beauty.

General Polish & Bug Fixes

• Control Groups: Switched from an unordered_map to a basic array of size 10 for better memory. Fixed the crash where deleting a unit would break the control group. Also we reset control groups now when the game is over, so the state is not persistent to the next game.

• Extraction: Added a proper Extract button when units enter the extraction area and a text showing how many units you have in extraction zone and how many are still missing, fixed the cryopod labels not updating after reviving a unit. We also reset enemy leveling up timer when the game ends, before the timer would still be active from previous extraction and the enemy units would level up too fast.

• UI: Added a simple click indication animation, added map name to the HUD, and color-coded selection circles (Green for you, Red for enemies). Selecting decorations is only possible in the map editor from now.

• QoL: When you double click on buildings it should select all types of that building, we already had this for units so it was very easy to implement. Having multiple buildings selected, and setting rally points will now set it for all of them not just for one building. We fixed an issue where double tapping a control group woule make the camera move to a wrong spot, not where the unit or building of that control group are.

• Fog of War: Fixed the jitter in fullscreen by making sure we use actual window dimensions instead of a hardcoded 1280x720. And we reinitialize the fog texture when changing from windowed to fullscreen and vice versa.

• The Suicidal Base Attacker: Changed the default target ID from 0 to -1. Units now successfully do nothing if you order them to attack an empty void. Before they would go attack unit or building that had id 0 which might be their or opponents base, depending on which one spawned first.

• Supply Math: Fixed the extraction supply calculation so you are not perpetually capped at 3 supply if you have more manpower available. Fixed a bug where when a training of a unit was done the supply of the player got -1. This was a problem caused by the civilian being removed from units. To fix this in unit removals we now only do -1 player supply if the unit is not a civilian.

• Chat Messages: Fixed the all enemies destroyed message and added milestones for 20, 10, and 5 units remaining.

• Music & Hotkeys: Music properly respects your options now. And we restricted hotkeys while the chat is open.

The game is feeling incredibly robust. We are ready to start working on the new gameplay features, so stay tuned! We can't wait to start working on it. :)

WHAT IS COMING NEXT?

Now that we are done with polishing and happy with where the demo is, we are diving straight into [01_MAP_AND_MOB_MODIFIERS]. We will be implementing Tiered Unit Groups (White, Blue, and Yellow) which feature distinct modifiers, custom buffs, and debuffs. We are also adding variable global traits to extraction zones to keep things spicy, such as:

• Frenzied: Enemy units gain +25% attack speed.

• Vampiric: Hostile units heal themselves for 15% of the damage they deal.

• Adrenaline Rush: Enemies move 20% faster.

Thank you all for the feedback and bug reports. They have been invaluable.

Let's get back to work!