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Thank you!  The partially transparent pixels was a late addition to the engine, but I think it makes a BIG difference for the quality of the scene, so it's definitely something I will focus on getting right as I continue to tweak and optimize and try different methods.

The engine is a fairly simple approach, no fancy algorithms like Radiance Cascades for now.  The only acceleration being done is building a distance-field of the scene so that the ray-marching can be accelerated.

There are a bunch of different write-ups on this technique, but this one is fairly good: https://samuelbigos.github.io/posts/2dgi1-2d-global-illumination-in-godot.html

I'm hoping to do a more detailed devlog to get into the weeds about some of the subtle points, but that is the basic idea. 

Shooting rays only towards corners is an interesting idea!  Unfortunately a big part of the lighting right now is from bounce lighting, which doesn't necessarily come from primary light sources like torches.  You can actually see the impact of bounce-light if you open the dev UI with Tab and turn off Bounce light, it makes a big difference!

That being said, totally agree that the current cost is unacceptable!  My approach in this case was to get something looking the way I wanted first, and then move on to optimization after.  That way i have a good idea which features are important to keep, and a nice 'ground truth' renderer to compare against as I try to optimize.

Thank you for both links, I'll definitely dive in and investigate!

only the mesh towers that form the beam that actually damaged the enemy will report damage done.  If there are any mesh towers with 0 damage that means that the beams connected to those towers haven't touched the enemy yet.

Thanks for all your feedback!  Responding to all comments here:

1) I'll look to improve the UI to fix the issues you noted, as well as make things clearer during the Centurion boss battle

2) If you want to built many towers in a row, you can hold down Shift while doing so.  I'll see if there is a good way to make a mouse-only method for this interaction, and make it clear in the UI.

3) Could you clarify what you mean for the Mesh tower?  Currently, when an enemy takes damage, the two towers that formed the beam each account for 1/2 of the damage, and have their total-damage increased by that amount.

4) The clover can indeed make runs very easy if you are already pretty good at the game!  It's mostly meant for people who get stuck or are having a harder time.  But as a bonus, the game acknowledges if you finish without using a single clover, since it is harder! 

What are you observing specifically?  In my tests acid seems to affect the Centurion boss as expected.

Notably, each segment receives acid stacks separately.  So if one segment is receiving acid stacks, but a different segment is not, attacks on the segment without stacks will not get the acid damage boost.

No worries!  I'm just glad there isn't a subtle bug I need to debug now :)

This is on windows?  The web version always pauses when out of focus, which I understand to be a Unity WebGL limitation, but the Windows version should continue even when not in focus.

I just tested with a fresh download, and it seemed to operate even when out of focus for me, which is interesting.

Glad you enjoyed it!  And thanks for the feedback, did you have any specific things you'd like to see in an updated UI?  A UI rewrite definitely feels like a good idea, especially if I can improve for mobile devices, so happy to take into account all ideas!

Oh wow that's definitely not intended!  That's a really great catch, will have to fix that in an update.  The intent is definitely that at any given wave, you always have received a consistent amount of gold from all previous waves with no variation.

Also it's cool to see a playthrough that focuses so heavily on Ice towers, as I usually see them as the most underutilized tower.

Wow!  That's very impressive.  I had a hard enough time beating Harder difficulty with all the unlocks, and had to use lots of movement and occasional sells.

Definitely agree that the final screen should acknowledge these additional triumphs like not unlocking things, selling, or moving towers as an additional bonus!

Not building any towers after defeating Father sounds crazy hard!  I assume you still were able to upgrade towers?

Turning difficulty down lowers the health of enemies, so it should have a good effect at making waves easier to clear.

One thing I notice about your tower setup is that you have a ton of fire and water towers.  These towers are good at igniting enemies and slowing them down, but are not the most powerful in terms of raw damage output.  I recommend experimenting with different towers to see if you can get an easier time.  The stone and tesla towers can be particularly useful for raw damage output, depending on the situation.

Hello!  Fountains do not stack, if a tower is nearby more than one fountain it only gets a single multiplier (it chooses the best multiplier out of all of the nearby fountains).

Level 75 is the final level.  Once you beat it you should get an end-credits sequence, and unlock endless mode!

Ok, PC version has been uploaded!  Should be identical to the Web Version, let me know if it gives you any trouble!

Oh it's actually pretty easy for me to make a PC build, happy to upload that to the page as well :)

Glad you are enjoying it!

Congrats!  Looks like a nice setup you have, so many boulder towers :O

Nice!  Yeah Hard-mode with endless is definitely a real challenge with the adjusted enemy health levels, I usually enjoy starting with Earth+Water to get the benefit of the slow from the splash tower, and the ice tower can be critical to get through some of the swarmy waves.

Here's my most recent setup I used to beat king slime without any clovers!

Glad you are having fun!

Thanks for the kind words!  And yeah definitely the plan, just need to find the right direction to take this kind of prototype :) 

Yeah that is correct, it was just for experimenting with the effect and not with any gameplay at this point

Ah sorry about that!

You can press Shift-0 to reset the UI scale to the default value.  You can also use Shift-1/2/3 to set the scale to 1x 2x or 3x directly.
 

The death animation is procedural instead of a set sprite sheet.  A script reads the pixels from the enemy image, and spawns a particle for each pixel into a standard Unity particle system.  It was very helpful to save time!

That's so good to hear!  Glad you have enjoyed it so much!

I am definitely planning on expanding the game some more, possibly with some new maps, maybe an endless mode.  As someone who's played through it many times, what kinds of things do you think you would be most interested in seeing?

The mesh tower is one of my favorites!  But it has also been the most challenging to balance as well haha.  I find that I usually need at least 3 before they come into their full power, if I can make a triangle and get a lot of coverage.  But they are not the best against hardy enemies with armor..

I think doing a run with limited towers/tower types would be a great idea for a challenge-mode in a new update!

So glad you are enjoying yourself!  I definitely plan a major update to this game in the future with more features, like and endless mode, and a free mode!

In the meantime though, if you type the phrase 'secretcode' you can unlock the dev console, which gives you access to many powers.  But keep it a secret ;)

Ah that is intentional actually!  I found it tricky to balance otherwise, since the number of connections can grow so quickly, it ends up being super overpowered

Aha!  Good catch, can't believe I never noticed that before.  Will be fixed in the next release!

Glad you enjoyed it!  There is actually an auto-play feature you can turn on in the settings menu! and you can also right-click the next-wave button as a shortcut.

That would be awesome!  I'll contact you for more details

That's awesome!  Glad you enjoyed it!

Tiny Tower Defense has been released, a small and casual tower defense game you can play in your browser, completely for free!

This was a personal project to learn more about Aesprite and releasing games in general on Itch, and I had a great time making it!