Devlog 10: how I made PolyTowerz more juicy, without touching the simulation

1.5 is out. The headline is co-op, but the last few days before release went into something you cannot put in a feature list: what it feels like when a tower hits something.

Before, a hit was a small spark and a floating number. It worked. It did not feel like much.

Now the enemy flashes on every hit, the damage numbers glow in neon, impacts grow with the tower's level and the beams are denser. The health and shield bars drain with a white trail behind them, so you see what you just lost. A kill pops its credits above the damage numbers and small coins fly up to the credits chip. A kill streak gets a badge under the top-left row at 5, 10, 25 and 50, and it pays nothing extra. Every wave ends with a short summary, and the result screen counts up its stars.

The part I care about most as an engineer: none of it touches the game itself. In co-op both phones hash their whole game state once a second, and if the two numbers differ the server ends the match. So every effect here only reads state and draws. Nothing writes into the credit pools, the random streams, the tick counter or the hash. No sim version bump, no new field in the save file.

The upgrade shockwave got a second pass. A tower upgrade sends a gravity wave across the board. After testing it I made it smaller and slower.

I put the changes into a short video. The clips show the German interface, because that is what my phone is set to.

I do not know yet whether any of this changes how long people play. 1.5 only went live this week, so there are no numbers to show.