Playtest 0.1.7 and 0.1.8 make riding through battle more rewarding and make drafting, upgrades, progression, and campaign navigation much easier to read.
Draft and Overdraft
- Rebuilt the Draft footer as a compact command dock with a live pick ratio, projected Gold payout, and Confirm action.
- Added a persistent Safe / Medium / High / Max risk gauge so every Overdraft tier is visible before committing.
- Hovering or focusing an extra card now previews its enemy and payout multipliers.
- Added clearer card-edge glow, risk accents, Veil motes, selection impacts, and confirmation effects as Overdraft rises.
- Mandatory cards are visually separated from optional picks so the safe allowance and player-chosen risk are easier to understand.
- Wave Events now present their two tradeoffs in a compact parchment dossier over the battlefield.
Attunement Relay and rider feedback
- Added Attunement Relay: stay near a turret for 1.5 seconds to store the rider's full attunement bonus on it for three seconds.
- An overcharged turret keeps firing with the bonus while the rider moves to another turret and begins charging it.
- Added a one-time explanation when Attunement Overcharge is first triggered.
- Added charge bars, orbiting rings, particles, tether transitions, a gold-red treatment, and spatial chimes.
- Added hoof sounds, dust, movement lean, and smoother attunement transitions to the mounted rider.
Gold and combat feedback
- Nearby Gold Pickups now attract to the rider.
- Uncollected coins fly to the rider at wave end, so moving around never reduces the wave's authored payout.
- The first three coin piles collected manually each wave now trigger escalating trails, bursts, and chimes.
- Nearby coin drops group into readable visual piles during crowded waves.
- Added stronger audio and visual confirmation for upgrades, selling, placement, cancellation, and starting a wave.
Turret upgrades
- Rebuilt the Turret Upgrade panel with clearer current-versus-next stats, attack interval, level progress, Gold requirements, Ascension state, and maximum-level messaging.
- Upgrading while the panel is open now changes the turret portrait and triggers a tier-colored flash, ring, particle burst, and scale punch.
- Updated turret-shop damage values to include active War Table and run modifiers.
- Improved selling and upgrade focus flow for mouse, keyboard, and controller.
- Corrected Arrow turret projectiles so they launch from the turret's authored firing point.
Campaign, tutorial, and The Path
- Added an optional Skip the Tutorial choice when creating a new profile. It opens Trailhead and grants Binding Presence without awarding skipped battle rewards.
- Expanded campaign onboarding to teach movement, camera rotation, panning, and zoom.
- Streamlined the battle tutorial and prevented guidance messages from lingering into later phases.
- Expanded the post-tutorial guide to lead players to The Path and through the purchase of Binding Presence.
- Cleared campaign portals now crumble and display the highest completed difficulty while remaining available for replay.
- Added visible road inlets between connected routes, Veil portals, and the Campfire.
- Reworked The Path as a pannable, zoomable star chart with clearer focus navigation and an explicit ability-slot picker.
- Hero ability icons now refill clockwise during cooldown and pulse when ready.
Presentation, interface, and fixes
- Improved enemy grounding across camera angles while preserving intentional flight height for flying enemies.
- Adjusted turret and build-pad heights to sit more naturally on raised terrain.
- Added movement-speed-aware enemy animation playback.
- Limited dense Ice Flurry and coin effects to preserve route and enemy readability.
- Reworked the leaderboard into one scrolling surface with expandable Enemies, Turrets, and Damage Taken details.
- Moved campaign achievement and reward notifications to a bottom-left queue so they no longer cover movement controls.
- Added a custom open-and-closed hand cursor and live input prompts to path building.
- Improved options-panel sizing, main-menu focus restoration, campaign control prompts, and smaller-screen layout behavior.
- Refined turret, Ascension, and landmark sprites for cleaner presentation and reduced asset size.
Bug reports
Include Playtest 0.1.8, the map and wave, input method, and reproduction steps when submitting a bug report.