There is no good moment to call a tower defence game “finished”. You play your own build for the hundredth time, you spot another rough edge, and the temptation is to roll the version number again. We did this five times between v0.55 and v0.60. This devlog is the consolidated story.
A run from start to finish
v0.60.0 closes the loop. You can play the demo through to the end now — three nights, all the way through — and the game has somewhere to land you when you win.
When the final wave of Night 3 breaks, a Thanks for Playing scene plays. It’s quiet, it matches the main-menu styling, and it has a Discord link on it because the most useful thing a finished player can do is tell us what they thought.
The credits closing aren’t the only structural change. Build FOB is now the first objective on every night, not just Night 1. The wave countdown sits and waits while you place it, and the rest of your build palette unlocks the moment your engineers have somewhere to come home to. This sounds small. In playtesting it was the single biggest change to the feel of starting a fresh night.
We also added cross-night carry. Your workers, your unassigned civilians, your sealed stock — they all survive into the next night now. The morning panel tells you whether anyone didn’t make it back to shelter overnight (2–10% attrition, rolled on the night seed so a save-reload can’t reroll a bad outcome). The continuity matters: a Night 2 where you lost half your engineers should not start Night 3 with a full roster.
Night 3 Rebalance
The first pass of Night 3 was, frankly, easier than Night 2. The wave counts hadn’t been touched since the prototype, and the boss — a corpulent garden gnome we have been quietly calling Foreman Pudding — was holding 22,000 HP and was simply not threatening at that price.
In v0.60.0 every Night 3 wave is now meaningfully harder than its Night 2 counterpart. Fire gnomes appear throughout the night, not just at the end. Bomb counts climb. Burn duration ramps. And Foreman Pudding is now 40,000 HP and means it.
Hard, Restless Dead, and Survivor
The big v0.56 change was difficulty. Up until then, the dropdown said “Normal”. After v0.56, it says:
- Normal — the existing experience.
- Hard — engineers carry construction material physically. A wall doesn’t go up because you placed it; it goes up because someone walked the brick from the FOB to the build site. This sounds like friction. It is. It changes the whole rhythm of the night.
- Restless Dead — bodies decay over 90 seconds. While they’re on the floor, suspicion rises in the morning truce and morale takes a hit if cleanup is too slow. (We wrote about this one separately — there’s a behind-the-build post on why the hardest difficulty isn’t tougher enemies.)
- Survivor — all of the above, no mid-campaign breathers (long wave cooldowns are capped at 30 seconds), and the unlock target is Night 3 on a clean run.
Each tier has its own save slot. The main menu shows you what you’ve completed on each — “Continue (Restless Dead) — Night 3 · Wave 4” on hover.
There’s also a one-way downgrade button in the pause menu. If you bit off more than you can chew, you can drop one tier mid-run. You can’t upgrade back. We argued about this and landed on it because the alternative (“just start over”) cost us more playtesters than the difficulty ladder won us.
Small fixes that add up
The rest of v0.55–v0.60 is the kind of thing that doesn’t make a screenshot but adds up.
- The skip button during the briefing no longer hangs the game. We’ll get to this one in a moment — there’s a debugging story underneath it.
- Right-click anywhere dismisses dialogue now. Previously you had to click on the panel itself, which was the wrong fix for a problem we’d been getting reports about for weeks.
- The Resupply landing indicator now shows the actual resource icon that came in, not a generic lightning bolt. Tiny change, big quality-of-life lift.
- The HUD “Evacuated: N” counter now survives a save reload (it was undercounting; the level-summary number was right all along).
- Engineers no longer over-run on the final tick of a build or upgrade.
- The fire gnome’s held-bomb sprite now sits in a posture that doesn’t look like the bomb is glued to its forehead.
None of these are headline features. All of them are the reason v0.60 plays better than v0.55.
Behind the build — the skip button hang
This one earned its own section.
For a while, pressing Skip during the Night 1 briefing would just… stop. The briefing wouldn’t end. The Build FOB objective wouldn’t surface. The game wasn’t hung — the UI was responsive — but the night never started.
The shape of the bug is the interesting bit. The briefing system queues up a sequence of dialogue events and awaits on a signal called dialogue_finished. Pressing Skip called a function called clear_dialogue_queue. The function did what it said: it emptied the queue and hid the dialogue panel.
What it didn’t do was fire dialogue_finished. So the await upstream sat there forever, watching a panel that wasn’t going to talk again, waiting for a signal that wasn’t going to fire.
The fix is one line — emit the signal when the queue is cleared. The lesson is older: any time await is the last thing in a function, the thing you’re awaiting needs an irrevocable exit. Hiding the panel isn’t enough. Emptying the queue isn’t enough. The signal has to land.
We’ve since added a 30-second timeout fallback around the await with a caller tag so the next bug of this shape points at the right place from the warning alone.
What’s next
We’re not committing to a date, but the next big swing is one of three:
- Night 4 — a shield-gnome lane mechanic we’ve been sketching since v0.52.
- Meta-progression — between-run carry that isn’t just workforce.
- Localisation — the wishlist demographics are telling us something we haven’t decided how to act on yet.
We’ll pick after we see what the wider playtest cohort makes of the v0.60 campaign.
Join the playtest
We’re adding more players to the Steam Playtest this week. If you’ve enjoyed the demo and want a run at the full three-night campaign with us — including the new difficulty tiers — request access from the Steam store page:
Wishlist Clearance Defence on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4387610
Discord (Eggustus says hello): https://discord.gg/keCtUUk5MM