It’s been longer than I meant since Devlog #7, so there’s plenty to get through: a sixth night in the campaign, music in the shop at last, and runs that finally add up to something instead of evaporating at the morning. All of that is live in the Steam Playtest at v0.89.1.
And like last time, this is a balance call as much as a catch-up. Night 6 hands you a brand new kind of unit and I’ve had nowhere near enough eyes on it. More on that at the bottom.
Night 6: Hold the Line
Night 5 was where the campaign stopped. There is a sixth now, and it brings in people of your own who fight back.
Until now your defence has been towers and walls, and anything with legs on the floor was either a gnome or somebody you were trying to keep alive. Night 6 unlocks defender training in the Safe Zone. A defender costs you Construction Material and one of your workers, and walks straight out onto the floor. There’s no separate deploy step to remember. You train one, it turns up.
They form up properly, too: a front rank with reserves stacked behind it, and when somebody in the front goes down a reserve steps up into the gap. The important bit is that they are solid. A gnome can’t stroll through your line the way it walks past a tower. It has to stop and deal with whoever’s stood in front of it, which makes a rank of defenders a wall you’re allowed to move.
The night is called Hold the Line, and that’s the job.
Music, at last
The game had no music at all. It has a score now, and it shifts with the night: one mood while the shop is quiet, another once the gnomes are on their way. Options has separate music sliders for the game and the menus, with a mute for each, saved with the rest of your settings, and the score ducks back whenever anybody is speaking.
A career worth keeping
The end-of-night screen gives you a verdict now rather than a table. Come through without a mark on the place and you’re told it was tidy. Scrape through and you’re told that as well. The numbers that earned it sit underneath, Night cleared, Store held, Accuracy and the rest.
Behind that there’s a Career page holding your lifetime totals across every run you’ve ever played, and those totals go up to your Steam profile too.
The Safe Zone looks like a workforce
Your workers used to be one bloke copied thirty times, stood in a heap. There are four different looks now, two of them lugging a delivery box about.
They have somewhere to be, as well. The Safe Zone has work stations and gathering spots, so people walk over, get on with a job, and natter to each other while they do it, instead of milling around in the middle. It’s a small thing, and it makes the Safe Zone feel like somewhere people actually work.
A night that builds
The opening two waves of a night are a fixed, known quantity now, and the pressure climbs from there to the finale. Before, a night could hit its ceiling early and then flatten out, which is a very different thing to sit through. There was also a bug where a late wave could inherit Endless mode’s escalation, so a boss could land far harder than it should have. That’s gone.
I took the Bombardier and Extinguisher fire sounds down by a good margin too. They were much louder than everything else and carried halfway across the shop.
Bug fixes
Most of this lot is saves.
- Loading a save no longer ruins the night. Save mid-wave or during the truce, come back to it, and the HQ would come back with no engineers, no cleanup service and a target the gnomes could hit but never finish, so the night couldn’t end. Fixed, through both of the ways a save gets loaded.
- Your objectives come back correct. A loaded save kept the objectives from the wave before, and the next Wave Complete ticked them off for free. That’s how a boss once got beaten before it had even turned up.
- A save that cannot be loaded now says so. It fails loudly instead of quietly letting you carry on regardless.
- Pinned gnomes no longer respawn forever. One could get stuck and come back on the spot indefinitely, so the wave never ended and the night couldn’t be finished.
- Gnomes stop getting snagged on the floor. At one spot on the map they could catch on the edge of the walkable area and simply refuse to budge.
- The funds log tells the truth. It used to claim payments that never landed, so the money you were shown and the money you actually had could drift apart.
- The codex has stopped spoiling itself. A page only appears once you can reach the thing it describes, so it’s not handing you Night 4 on Night 1 any more.
- Achievement toasts match what you did. You get the one you earned rather than a pile of them at once, and the icons are all in now.
- Walls reload the way you left them. Damaged or destroyed, they come back as you left them, and fire no longer catches on something you haven’t finished building.
Night 7: the Last Aisle
There’s a seventh night in the playtest as well. It went out a few weeks back without much said about it, so if you have got this far you may already have met it. The armoured gnome is its spine. They’ve been about for a while as the occasional nuisance. On Night 7 they are the wave. They start turning up from the second wave rather than the fourth, and there are half again as many by the time the night’s done.
Night 7’s boss
The night finishes on a new boss, and this one is not a damage problem to solve. You’ll recognise the shape of it, because it’s built like the Pyro, except the hat and the canister on its back are green: whatever’s in there isn’t going on your walls, it’s going on the gnomes. It walks in and hits like the others, but while it’s on the floor it keeps topping up whichever gnomes are nearest to it. Leave the rest of the wave standing and they keep getting patched up. Clear them out first and you’re left facing a boss with nothing to heal. That’s the decision I’m after. What I can’t judge on my own is whether it reads on screen, or whether it just looks like the numbers are lying to you.
A demo, soon
Next job is getting the demo online: a shorter, self-contained slice you can play without signing up for the playtest. I’m not putting a date on it, but it’s the next big thing on my list, and the work to carve it out has already started.
Help me balance it
Here’s the ask.
- Play Night 6 and tell me about the defenders. Are they worth a worker and the Construction Material, or would you rather have another tower? Do they hold long enough to matter?
- Is the climb fair now? A night should get harder as it goes and peak at the finale. If one falls flat in the middle or spikes somewhere odd, that’s exactly what I need to hear about.
- How’s the mix? Too loud over the effects, too quiet? It’s new, and it’s the sort of thing I’ll only get right with other people’s ears on it.
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 nothing moves this game faster. Fair play to everyone who’s already sent something in. A good half of the fixes up there started as somebody’s report.
