TD Master Devlog #2 – Levels, Performance, and Expanding the Battlefield
May 3, 2026
Welcome back to the TD Master devlog.
Development has now shifted from building core systems to refining, expanding, and stabilizing the full game experience. The focus has been on completing levels, improving performance, and addressing feedback from the demo and beta testing.
Level completion and pathfinding
A major part of the recent work has been finishing levels and ensuring that enemies navigate them correctly.
This includes decoration, layout adjustments, and extensive work on pathfinding. As levels have become more complex, ensuring stable navigation across all areas has been critical.
Several issues discovered during playtesting such as enemies getting stuck, walking through walls, or spawning outside the playable area—have now been resolved.
Performance improvements
Performance has seen a significant boost across the game.
This has been achieved through a combination of:
- shader and lighting adjustments
- baked occlusion
- improved prefab handling
- optimized loading and cleanup when many traps are active
In addition, camera-based occlusion has been applied across all levels, reducing unnecessary rendering and improving overall responsiveness.
Screenshots
Gameplay and difficulty
Core gameplay has continued to evolve.
Enemy pathing and targeting logic has been improved, making their behavior more reliable and challenging. At the same time, overall difficulty has been increased to better match the growing number of tools available to the player.
Wave and enemy counts on early levels have been rebalanced to create a smoother progression curve.
Level selection redesign
The level selection system has been completely redesigned.
The previous horizontal slider has been replaced with a map-based interface, giving a clearer overview of progression and making it more intuitive to see which levels are locked or unlocked.
This change helps reinforce the sense of progression and ties better into the overall game structure.
New content
A large amount of new content has been added during this phase.
Enemies
The enemy roster has expanded significantly, introducing more variation in behavior and difficulty:
- Zombie variants (fast, filler, knight)
- Goblin units (armored, runner, tank)
- Human enemies (orange, heavy, king)
- Special units such as dual sword brawlers and fire mages
Player weapons
New weapons have been introduced, including faster and more powerful melee options such as daggers, short swords, and long-range swords.
These additions give the player more flexibility in how they support their defenses.
Traps
Several new traps have been added:
- visual support structures like light towers
- offensive traps such as spinning blade towers
- freeze traps and damage-boosting towers
These expand both strategic depth and build variety.
Playtest and beta improvements
A large number of fixes and improvements have been implemented based on playtesting.
Some highlights include:
- telemetry system fixes and stability improvements
- UI and menu flow corrections
- improved pause functionality
- mouse locking and focus fixes when tabbing
- trap pool cleanup when exiting levels
Level-specific fixes have also been extensive, including:
- navigation mesh corrections across multiple levels
- lighting adjustments for better visibility
- spawn and collision fixes
- ensuring level progression starts correctly
What comes next
With levels nearing completion and systems stabilizing, the focus is shifting toward:
- final polishing of gameplay feel
- further balancing of enemies and traps
- UI refinement and feedback clarity
- continued performance optimization
- preparing the game for a more complete release state
The focus now is on making everything feel cohesive, responsive, and rewarding to play.
Thanks for following the project.