It has been a busy few weeks since Devlog #6, so this one is a proper catch-up. Night 4 has stopped being the end of the road, the whole game has learned to play on a controller, and the difficulty finally climbs the way I always wanted it to. All of it is live in the Steam Playtest right now at v0.85.0.
One thing up front, and I mean it: the headline stuff here is brand new and I have not had nearly enough eyes on it. So this is a call for balance help as much as a devlog. If you play Night 5, or you turn a wall into a gate, I’d genuinely love to know how it felt. More on that at the bottom.
Night 5: Fighting Fire with Fire
For the longest time Night 4 was the finale. You’d see off the Foreman Pudding, get your Thanks for Playing, and that was your run. Not any more. Night 5 is in, and it does what the title says: it fights fire with fire.
The headline is the Bombardier. Night 5 is the first night that lets you build it, and it earns its keep the moment the crowds get thick. Where your single-target towers pick gnomes off one at a time, the Bombardier lobs area fire into the middle of a pack and softens the whole lot at once. It stays out of the build wheel until the third wave, so by the time the first proper press arrives you’ve just been handed the tool that answers it. Fair play, it teaches itself.
And the night ends on a new boss: the Pyro Gnome. He is a fire-breather and he is not shy about it, rolling in on the last wave with a good deal more health than the Foreman before him. You’ll want your line sorted and your Bombardier well fed before he shows his face.
Night 5 is fresh out the door and, being honest, barely tested. I’ll be watching how it plays and tuning the squeeze over the coming days, and your reports will steer that directly.
Walls that turn into gates
This is the one I’m most pleased with. A wall can now take a single upgrade that turns it into a gate you open and close on the fly. It’s the first piece of your maze you can move around while a night is live: every other wall is fixed once it’s up, but a gate is yours to swing.
The idea is to let you play cleverer. Hold a gate open through the quiet so your crew can nip through, then slam it shut the instant a wave sets off and force the gnomes the long way round your maze. It costs a fair bit of Construction Material, so it’s a proper decision rather than a free trick, and the gnomes react to it honestly. They won’t wander through a gap that snapped shut in their faces, and opening one re-routes the ones already on their way. Getting that to feel fair rather than fiddly took some careful work under the floor, and it’s another thing I’d love feedback on: does opening and closing a gate feel powerful, or just faffy?
Play it on a pad
The other big job was making the whole game feel at home on a controller, with Steam Deck squarely in mind. This turned into a proper pass rather than a quick bolt-on:
- A pad cursor that actually lands. Point at anything on the HUD and press A, and it presses the thing you’re pointing at, not the spot next to it. Game speed, Skip Wave, the top bar, the lot: all reachable without a mouse.
- Radial wheels on the sticks. Building is done through a wheel now. You spin round to the tower you want and drop it in, with a ghost preview first, a confirm to commit and a back button to bail.
- Menus and codex you can drive with a d-pad. Options, the Report a Bug window, the Endless setup, the codex list: all fully navigable, scrolling to keep your highlighted option on screen instead of leaving it stranded off the edge.
- The right button prompts, every time. Every on-screen prompt shows the button for whatever you’re actually holding, with proper Steam Controller and Steam Deck icon sets, and a setting to pick your input if the game guesses wrong.
I also eased the camera off so it doesn’t chase the stick or jump about at the screen edge. Much calmer to look at with a pad in your hands, and it’s exactly where I want the Deck experience to sit.
If you play on a Steam Deck or with a Steam Controller, I especially want to hear from you. Tell me how it feels in the hand: what’s comfy, what’s fiddly, whether the wheels sit where your thumbs expect and whether every prompt shows the right button. Getting a pad game to feel right is the hardest thing to judge without a room full of Decks, so a quick note from an actual Deck run is worth a fortune to me.
A fairer climb
The difficulty system had a real going-over, and this is the change you’ll feel more than see.
The old version judged how close the gnomes got to your shelves in a straight line. Trouble is, on a winding maze a gnome can be near you on screen while still being a long walk from actually reaching anything. So the game kept easing off exactly the clever mazes it should have been rewarding. It now reads how far each gnome really has left to travel through your maze, which is a much fairer measure of how much trouble you’re in.
On top of that, the whole thing went from a one-way ratchet to a proper give-and-take: if you’ve genuinely over-built your line it can ease the pressure back down, not only pile it on. And the pacing is remembered in your save now, so if you put a long run down and pick it up later, the curve carries on from where it was instead of resetting and spiking.
Endless mode rides on the same work. The ramp climbs one steady step at a time instead of lurching several at once, it scales properly on maps with no Safe Zone, and the late waves have a gentler ceiling so a long run stays a fight rather than a wall.
The codex, redesigned
The in-game codex is a nicer place to be between waves now. It’s one clean, expandable list of categories that opens straight onto a readable page, with dark, legible text. And I went through every entry so the lore and the unit write-ups match what’s actually in the game today, with new pages for CO2, the endless enemies, evacuation and the Orders panel. A few had drifted out of date as things changed, so they’re all back in line.
The small stuff that adds up
As ever, most of the work doesn’t make a screenshot:
- No more chokepoint jams. Gnomes could bunch up and stop dead at a tight bend in the maze under a heavy wave. That’s sorted, so they keep coming. I also shut down a cheeky exploit where they were sneaking round the back of the shelves to raid from behind.
- Overwrite your saves. You can save over an existing slot now, with a confirmation prompt so you can’t lose a run by accident. No more drowning in half-finished slots.
- A fuller night-end summary. The morning readout tells you far more about how the night went, with Damage Dealt, your Top Target and a corrected Best Tower line, plus a Load Save button on the night-failed screen.
- One tidy cleanup order. All the little morning tidy-up jobs fold into a single General cleanup entry you order as one block, instead of a dozen separate lines cluttering the queue.
- The towers ease round into each firing pose now instead of snapping to it, which takes the last bit of stiffness out of watching them track a target.
Help me balance it
Here’s the ask. Night 5, the Bombardier, the Pyro and the wall gate are all live in v0.85.0, and they’ve had far more testing in my head than on real screens. So if you fancy it:
- Give Night 5 a go and tell me where it felt off. Too easy, too brutal, a wall you couldn’t get past, a wave that fell flat, all of it useful.
- Try turning a wall into a gate mid-night. Did it change how you played, or did you forget it was there?
- Push a long Endless run and see whether the climb feels fair the whole way up.
You can send it straight from the game with the Report a Bug button, or come and tell me on Discord. I read the lot, and this is the fastest the game has ever improved.
