Pest Protocol - 0.3.1
Small but mighty update! This one's focused on three things: making the game speak your language, making enemy progression feel earned, and tightening up the economy.
🌐 i18n — New Language Support
The game is now fully playable in Chinese (中文), with English as the default. A new language dropdown in Settings lets you switch anytime, and all UI text, shop upgrades, enemy names, and reports translate live. We also shipped a custom font fallback so CJK characters render crisply. More languages are on the roadmap.
🔓 Enemy Unlocks — Milestones, Not Money
Enemies are no longer bought in the shop. Instead, new species unlock through milestones: crush enough of a species and the next one appears. The Day Summary now shows a progress tracker for each upcoming species (locked → in progress → unlocked).
- Squash 250 Mosquitoes → Strong Mosquito
- 250 Strong Mosquitoes → Wasp
- 250 Wasps → Strong Wasp
It's a natural "kill → unlock → kill harder" loop that fits the core fantasy much better than a shopping cart.
⚖️ Balance Pass
- Clearance Tier thresholds smoothed: Tiers 6–8 now unlock earlier (4500 / 12000 / 25000 vs. 6500 / 15000 / 28000), so late-game upgrades stop feeling impossibly far away.
- Economy rework: Swarm Size got an extra tier (V) and repriced steps, Fast Respawn now has a cheap early entry point (t0), and the old shop-based enemy unlocks were removed and replaced by the milestone system above.
✨ VFX & Polish
- Golden bugs now emit gold sparkle particles — bigger and rendered behind the bug so they pop without hiding the kill.
- Ground-aware impact effects: the Construction Site zone now reacts where you swing — water splashes over the pond, grass tufts fly up over the lawn, based on a per-zone impact mask.
🐛 Bug Fixes
- OS cursor hidden during rounds (the spatula is your cursor now) and correctly restored in menus/settings.
- Keyboard/dropdown fixes: arrow keys no longer fight with open dropdown lists, and Back/Esc now correctly closes an open dropdown instead of exiting the screen (Settings + Weapon Config).
- Cleaned up dozens of dead/duplicate translation keys that were bloating the en.json.
- Fixed a settings-save flow so alerts don't re-trigger after dismissal.
Play the demo now