devlog #6: I made the game stop ending

PolyTowerz has a final boss. It is called The Omega Gauntlet, it took me about three weeks to build, and beating it was the end of the game.

Then I looked at what people did after they beat it. They stopped playing. Not in an angry way. There was just nothing on the other side.

That is the entire reason 1.4 exists.

THE DEAL

When you beat the Omega now, the king turns up and offers you something. Five thousand core shards, and the world resets. Every level locks again. Boot Camp stays completed, because nobody wants to replay a tutorial.

Everything comes back harder. But your towers remember. In the second cycle they deploy at level 2 instead of level 1. In the third, level 3. The power carries forward, the difficulty carries harder, and the skill tree grows a branch you have never seen.

I was nervous about this for weeks. A prestige loop can read as an insult. You just spent hours finishing a campaign and the game says do it again. So I gave myself one rule. The second run has to be a different game, not the same game with fatter health bars.

WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGES

Three enemies exist only inside a cycle.

The Colossus is the one that broke my own strategies. 1400 health, 300 shield, and it walks slower than anything else in the game. That sounds harmless. It is not. Every tower inside its aura fires about a third slower just because it is standing there. You cannot out-damage it from one spot. You have to spread out, and I clusters for months.

The Herald heals every enemy around it, three percent of their health per second. Ignore it and the wave simply stops dying.

The Phasewalker goes untouchable in bursts. Your shots pass it is solid again.

There is also a twelfth tower, and you only get it inside a cycle. The king does not hand out his crown for free.

THE OTHER THING

The rest of 1.4 is a change I should have made a year ago. pads. Little glowing squares. Put your tower here, thank you. Now you build almost anywhere, and what limits you is a tower budget per map inshere a tower belongs.

It sounds small. It changed every level in the game.

I also rebuilt how every tower is drawn. They used to be flat shapes. They now have shading, a foundation pad and a real glow. And the Blackholld. It drags enemies toward its centre, collapses, and throws them back down the path.

THE HONEST PART

The hybrid towers shipped in 1.3 and they were quietly bad. I measured it properly in August. 104 of 110 combinations were weaker than just buildhat tile, at one and a half times the price. The formula averaged the two parents, and averaging a strong tower with a weak one gives you somethine. No value I tuned could fix that, because the problem was the formula, not the number.

They now anchor on the stronger parent instead of averaging. Every one of the 110 rows is above its better parent and below the sum of both.

1.4 is not out yet. I am still balancing the cycle enemies ossus to get nerfed at least once more.

A question, because I genuinely do not know the answer: when a game offers you a New Game Plus, do you actually play it, or do you close it and move