Fighting Fire with Fire
It has been a busy few weeks since Devlog #6, so this one is a proper catch-up. Night 4 has stopped being the end of the road, the whole game has learned to play on a controller, and the difficulty finally climbs the way I always wanted it to. All of it is live in the Steam Playtest right now at v0.85.0.
One thing up front, and I mean it: the headline stuff here is brand new and I have not had nearly enough eyes on it. So this is a call for balance help as much as a devlog. If you play Night 5, or you turn a wall into a gate, I would genuinely love to know how it felt. More on that at the bottom.
Night 5: Fighting Fire with Fire
For the longest time Night 4 was the finale. You would see off the Foreman Pudding, get your Thanks for Playing, and that was your run. Not any more. Night 5 is in, and it does what the title says: it fights fire with fire.
The headline is the Bombardier. Night 5 is the first night that lets you build it, and it earns its keep the moment the crowds get thick. Where your single-target towers pick gnomes off one at a time, the Bombardier lobs area fire into the middle of a pack and softens the whole lot at once. It stays out of the build wheel until the third wave, so by the time the first proper press arrives you have just been handed the tool that answers it. Fair play, it teaches itself.
And the night ends on a new boss: the Pyro Gnome. He is a fire-breather and he is not shy about it, rolling in on the last wave with a good deal more health than the Foreman before him. You will want your line sorted and your Bombardier well fed before he shows his face.
Night 5 is fresh out the door and, being honest, barely tested. I will be watching how it plays and tuning the squeeze over the coming days, and your reports will steer that directly.
Walls that turn into gates
This is the one I am most pleased with. A wall can now take a single upgrade that turns it into a gate you open and close on the fly. It is the first piece of your maze you can move around while a night is live: every other wall is fixed once it is up, but a gate is yours to swing.
The idea is to let you play cleverer. Hold a gate open through the quiet so your crew can nip through, then slam it shut the instant a wave sets off and force the gnomes the long way round your maze. It costs a fair bit of Construction Material, so it is a proper decision rather than a free trick, and the gnomes react to it honestly. They will not wander through a gap that snapped shut in their faces, and opening one re-routes the ones already on their way.
Play it on a pad
The other big job was making the whole game feel at home on a controller, with Steam Deck squarely in mind. This turned into a proper pass rather than a quick bolt-on:
- A pad cursor that actually lands. Point at anything on the HUD and press A, and it presses the thing you are pointing at, not the spot next to it.
- Radial wheels on the sticks. Building is done through a wheel now, with a ghost preview first, a confirm to commit and a back button to bail.
- Menus and codex you can drive with a d-pad. Options, Report a Bug, the Endless setup, the codex list: all fully navigable.
- The right button prompts, every time. Every prompt shows the button for whatever you are holding, with Steam Controller and Steam Deck icon sets.
I also eased the camera off so it does not chase the stick or jump about at the screen edge. If you play on a Steam Deck or with a Steam Controller, I especially want to hear from you. Tell me how it feels in the hand: what is comfy, what is fiddly, whether the wheels sit where your thumbs expect. Getting a pad game to feel right is the hardest thing to judge without a room full of Decks.
A fairer climb
The difficulty system had a real going-over, and this is the change you will feel more than see. The old version judged how close the gnomes got to your shelves in a straight line. Trouble is, on a winding maze a gnome can be near you on screen while still being a long walk from actually reaching anything. It now reads how far each gnome really has left to travel through your maze, which is a much fairer measure of how much trouble you are in.
On top of that, the whole thing went from a one-way ratchet to a proper give-and-take: if you have genuinely over-built your line it can ease the pressure back down. And the pacing is remembered in your save now, so a long run picked up later carries on from where it was instead of resetting and spiking. Endless mode rides on the same work: the ramp climbs one steady step at a time, it scales properly on maps with no Safe Zone, and the late waves have a gentler ceiling.
The codex, redesigned
The in-game codex is a nicer place to be between waves now. It is one clean, expandable list of categories that opens straight onto a readable page, with dark, legible text. I went through every entry so the lore and the unit write-ups match what is actually in the game today, with new pages for CO2, the endless enemies, evacuation and the Orders panel.
The small stuff that adds up
- No more chokepoint jams. Gnomes could bunch up and stop dead at a tight bend under a heavy wave. Sorted. I also shut down a cheeky exploit where they sneaked round the back of the shelves to raid from behind.
- Overwrite your saves. You can save over an existing slot now, with a confirmation prompt so you cannot lose a run by accident.
- A fuller night-end summary. Damage Dealt, your Top Target, a corrected Best Tower line, and a Load Save button on the night-failed screen.
- One tidy cleanup order. All the little morning tidy-up jobs fold into a single General cleanup entry.
- The towers ease round into each firing pose now instead of snapping to it.
Help me balance it
Here is the ask. Night 5, the Bombardier, the Pyro and the wall gate are all live in v0.85.0, and they have had far more testing in my head than on real screens. So if you fancy it:
- Give Night 5 a go and tell me where it felt off. Too easy, too brutal, a wall you could not get past, all of it useful.
- Try turning a wall into a gate mid-night. Did it change how you played, or did you forget it was there?
- Push a long Endless run and see whether the climb feels fair the whole way up.
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 this is the fastest the game has ever improved.