greytide

Devlog ·

A tester wanted collectible figures,

Build spots became hex tiles and every tower got a glossy hex base, on a tester's suggestion; the same hours moved table state into sessions, gave towers a way to pay Points, and turned up five tower-check failures.

Issues: #743, #548, #634, #535, #605, #689, #783 · Agents quoted: the worker on the hex markers, issue 743; the worker on the tower registry, issue 548; the worker on the sandpit paint, issue 605; the worker on the bathroom session, issue 689; the worker on the tower-check regressions, issue 783

Hex tiles and a plinth for every tower

A tester, Average Joe, suggested that build spots could be hex tiles, and that towers could stand on matching hex bases like collectible toy figures. The worker on issue 743 found that the small drilled dots were never geometry: every table paints them into its surface texture through one shared function. Replacing that function put hex markers on all sixteen tables at once, each in its own material: an inlaid line on wood, glazed tiles in the bathroom, a pressed groove in the sand, a printed sticker on fabric and cardboard.

Every tower mini now sits on a hex prism: a black foot, a glossy band in the tower's accent colour, a rim coloured by role (shooters red, lobbers orange, auras violet, and so on), the tower's name printed on the front and its affinity on the back. Because the base belongs to the mini, picking a tower up lifts both without any change to the hand code. While a figure is carried, free legal spots glow faintly.

The desk with a figure held; look at the hex inlays and the printed plate on the base.

The worker ran six look passes and several went against it. The first bathroom screenshot showed tiles so saturated they drowned the road, so the fill was cut from 78 to 50 percent. The glow was invisible in the first frames; the worker only saw it by comparing frames before and after a pick-up, then made it about twice as bright. Close-ups were blurred by depth of field and the dark top of the base hid brown accents, so it was lightened. One test carried the duck over the tower case, which the game reads as "drop to sell", and the camera followed it into a blur; the drag target was moved.

The bathroom after the tile fill was cut back.

Whether the look is right is the owner's call, and the issue stays open for it.

A coin that left the frame

The worker on issue 548 gave the tower registry three new verbs the sandpit towers had been working around: pay Points with a coin pop, a hook that tells every kind of tower about each kill, and permission to speed a dude up rather than only slow it. The Sandcastle Flag, which used to count its neighbours' kills every frame and reach past the registry for the table's purse, moved over to them.

The probes passed on the first run. Making the result visible took the work: the first screenshots of the flag mid-wave showed the Points counter ticking, and no coin or "+1" anywhere. Cropped frames showed the coin spinning above the pole as intended, while the "+1" starts a few centimetres higher and rises out of the top of the frame. The pay point was lowered, and the next sequence caught a coin and a "+1" in the same frame as the counter.

A gold coin and a plus-one over the flag.

Smaller things that landed

Five towers stopped working

The lead ran the whole tower check on the merged build and it failed in five places: Superglue and Airbrush Kid never fired, Gloss Coat and Dice Tower dealt damage but killed nothing, and the engine's Pull barely moved a dude. All had passed the day before, so the issue (783) lists the morning's merges as suspects. It is being diagnosed; no cause is claimed here.

What nobody has checked yet