In Devlog #5 we closed the loop — three nights, start to finish, with somewhere to land you when you win. Since then we’ve been busy enough that one version number wasn’t going to cut it. This is the round-up of everything between v0.60 and the build going live today.
There’s a lot here, so the short version: the campaign gains a fourth night, your units now have morale that actually changes how they work, fire gnomes set fires that spread, and Endless mode has grown into a sandbox with a store generator behind it. Then there’s a new tower, damage types taking their first steps, and the usual pile of fixes underneath it all.
A fourth night
The campaign has grown by a night. Night 4 has gone from a rough outline to something you can play start to finish — dialogue and voice acting in, its beats playing through properly.
We made a deliberate call on its roster. Rather than throw a grab-bag of half-baked new enemies at you, Night 4 brings exactly one fresh foe — and keeping that count to one means we can actually tune how it plays against everything you’ve built up by the time you reach it, instead of balancing five things badly at once.
The boss it ends on no longer marches in alone, either. It now travels with an escort — a cluster of hangers-on whose health is pooled into shared bands that visibly pulse for as long as the boss is still standing. The intent is to make it a proper “deal with the big one” puzzle rather than just another health bar to chew through. It’s still being tuned, but it changes the texture of that fight considerably.
Fire that spreads
A new troublemaker has joined the ranks: fire gnomes that lob little incendiaries — and the fires they start now spread, creeping across the floor mid-burn and carrying their flames with them rather than politely staying put in one spot. They’re a bit clever about it, too: they hold their fire when there’s already plenty burning, so they don’t just torch the same spot over and over.
A spreading fire is exactly the sort of thing that’s a delight or a nightmare depending entirely on the numbers, so this one’s very much still in the balancing stage. But a floor hazard that genuinely moves changes how you think about where you stand your line.
Morale
Your units now have feelings, and those feelings matter. Morale is two-sided: units in good spirits work that bit sharper, while rattled, worn-down units start to slip. Keeping civilians safe and holding onto your shelves lifts morale; losing shelves or letting gnomes reach the HQ drains it. And if it bottoms out, Commander Eggustus gives you a heads-up — with a small window to claw things back before the whole operation folds.
The thing we cared most about was making it legible. Morale should never be an invisible dice roll behind the scenes. So we made the meter far easier to read at a glance: a band-coloured bar that tracks how things are holding up, a clear neutral marker, a warning icon when things start to slide, and an unmistakable alarm when it’s about to give out entirely. The tooltip spells out what’s dragging it down — “HQ under attack”, that sort of thing — instead of just showing a percentage and leaving you to guess. You should be able to glance at it mid-fight and instantly know whether to press on or pull back.
It’s tied to the night’s difficulty so the pressure builds sensibly rather than all at once, and there’s still a fair bit of balancing ahead — but the number now has real stakes sitting behind it.
The Laser Tower
There’s a new tower on the line: the Laser Tower, a beam weapon rather than a projectile one. Its emitter head rotates to track whatever it’s firing at, with the beam lancing out from the lens itself rather than a fixed muzzle. We’re still tuning exactly how it looks and behaves, but it already tracks live targets down the aisle and earns its place alongside the projectile towers — a continuous beam plays very differently from a stream of darts, and we’re still finding out exactly how.
Endless mode, and a store that builds itself
Endless mode is a survival run on its own terms — no fixed run of nights, just gnomes who keep coming until you finally fold. Each map keeps its own local best, so there’s always a number to beat, and runs save and resume, so an Endless session can carry across sittings.
Sitting behind it is procedurally generated stores. A “Generate-a-Store” option builds you a fresh shop to defend rather than replaying a hand-made one, with the supplies and staff scaled to fit whatever layout it hands you. Every store is built from a seed, so you can roll for a fresh layout or replay the exact same one. We’re still working out what makes a generated store fair as well as varied, but the bones of a real sandbox are there.
Damage types — early days
Quietly underneath all this, we’ve started laying the groundwork for damage types and immunities. The idea: not every tower hurts every gnome the same way, and some enemies will simply shrug off certain kinds of fire. Over time, matchups will start to matter — bring the wrong weapon to the wrong foe and you’ll feel it.
The first enemies that shrug off certain damage have gone in, alongside different ammo types for the dart tower, so it’s already starting to bite. New arrivals like the flamingo (pictured) only add to the matchups to come. But this is genuinely early — there’s a lot of balancing ahead before it’s something you’ll consciously be playing around.
The small stuff that adds up
As ever, most of the work doesn’t make a screenshot:
- Enemies could occasionally wedge themselves on the spot where they appear instead of setting off — they now get moving straight away.
- Restarting a night no longer drags a stale wave count over from the previous one, so a fresh attempt actually starts fresh.
- The pre-night briefing camera now pauses at each stop long enough for its voice line to land, instead of gliding on and talking over itself.
- A clutch of storage-box economy fixes so build slots behave across a multi-night run: each night hands your slots back, the on-screen counter reads how many you’ve actually got left, and counts carry through the night-to-night chain. Engineers share the resupply load now, so crates trickle in more steadily.
- A general sweep tidied up smaller snags — a duplicated orders briefing, a misbehaving “Fill” click, replaying a wave no longer scrambling its save, civilians stalling mid-shuffle, and the occasional enemy clawing its way out after being walled in.
Join the playtest
This build is going live today. If you’ve enjoyed the demo and want a run at the campaign — a fourth night, morale on the line and all — request access from the Steam store page:
Wishlist Clearance Defence on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4387610
Discord (Eggustus still says hello): https://discord.gg/keCtUUk5MM
