Devlog #3: Entering the Tavern, Smarter UI, and True Randomness Restored!

Hello Siege Scape defenders!

It's been a busy period since our last update, with significant strides made in creating a more immersive world, refining the user experience, and hardening the core gameplay loop, including squashing a tricky randomness bug! Let's dive into what's new!

Major Feature: The Tavern Hub & Diegetic Game Start

One of the big goals is to make Siege Scape feel like a game played within a larger world. To that end, we've laid the groundwork for the Tavern Hub environment!

• Welcome to the Tavern: Players will now start not in a menu, but as a character exploring a tavern setting. We've set up the background logic to handle this separate exploration phase versus the main tower defense gameplay.
• First-Person Control: You can now walk around the tavern in first-person, taking in the sights before the battle begins.
• Meet the Keeper: Interaction is key! We've implemented an interaction system allowing you to walk up to characters in the tavern, like the Tavern Keeper, and interact with them.
• Starting a Game: Chatting with the Tavern Keeper now brings up the Game Setup screen. Here, players can input a run seed (to share runs or replay specific challenges) and toggle the unpredictable Chaos Mode.
• Seamless Transition: Clicking "Start Game" now smoothly loads the main tower defense level, carrying over your chosen seed and Chaos Mode settings to begin the run.

UI & User Experience Overhaul

A lot of focus went into making the interface more informative and less intrusive.

• Contextual Info Panels: Selecting a Tower or Enemy now displays a relevant info panel near that unit on the screen, showing key stats and options without cluttering the main HUD.
  • These panels automatically position themselves intelligently (e.g., above towers, beside enemies) and adjust to stay fully visible on screen.
• Tower Info Fixes: The targeting priority buttons on the tower info panel now correctly show which priority is active.
• Enemy Info Enhancements:
  • Readable Tags: Special enemy traits (like Armor Type or Enemy Type) are now displayed in a much clearer, formatted way on the enemy info panel.
  • Consistent Font Size: Text displaying enemy traits now uses a consistent font size for better readability.

Core Gameplay & Logic Refinements

We've also tightened up some core mechanics:

• Reliable Card Tracking & Seeding:
  • Implemented an improved system for tracking individual card instances (like specific towers you place) throughout a run, even after deck shuffles. This uses deterministic IDs behind the scenes instead of random ones.
  • The actual order cards are drawn still depends on the game's starting seed, ensuring runs feel different each time while keeping card tracking reliable.
• Smarter Deck Handling:
  • When your draw pile runs out, the discard pile now automatically reshuffles back into it, using the game's seed to ensure the shuffle order is consistent for that specific run seed.
  • Your hand automatically refills to the maximum size after each wave finishes, getting you ready for the next build phase.
• Build Phase Enforcement: Card playing is now correctly disabled while enemy waves are active – you can only build and play powers between waves!

Bug Fix: Restoring Enemy Spawning Randomness!

We encountered and fixed a tricky bug where the enemy type chosen for a wave wasn't properly random, always selecting the first available enemy type regardless of the game seed.

• The Problem: Debugging revealed that the underlying system responsible for seeding the randomness per wave was flawed, leading to a predictable (and incorrect!) enemy selection, especially in early waves.
• The Fix: We reworked how the random seed is generated and used for each individual wave. It's now reliably derived from the main game seed and the current wave number, ensuring the enemy selection process for each wave uses its own unique and properly initialized random sequence.
• The Result: Enemy selection per wave is now properly randomized as intended, respecting the available enemy pool and the run's seed! You should see a much better variety of enemies appearing based on the wave definitions.

What's Next?

With the tavern hub foundation, contextual UI, gameplay phase logic, deterministic systems, and critical spawning fixes in a much better state, the focus can shift back to expanding core gameplay:

• Implementing the Deck Selection UI in the tavern setup menu.
• Adding more diverse Power card effects.
• Starting work on the basic resource system (Gold/Souls).
• Further development of Chaos Mode effects.

It feels great to have these foundational and UI systems working more cohesively, and especially to have solved that randomness puzzle! Thanks for following the development of Siege Scape!

Follow on Twitter: @SiegeScape Follow the Devlog on Itch.io: Itch Join the Discord Server: @SpawnsGaming

Until next time!