Castle Arena: a Map Editor, the 15th Arena and the Arena HUD
Post 13 ended on a promise: a new economy, a new AI, a larger field, all held back to ship together. Between October 8 and 13 that foundation landed in the main code, and more came with it than fits in one post. None of it is a release yet: the game is still 0.1.0 and has entered a refinement period, where preserving what exists counts for more than rebuilding.
A map editor
Until now every arena was drawn by hand, in code. Now there is a map editor: the 2D plan and the 3D scenery in the same window, Tab switching between them without reloading anything. In 3D, linked symmetry (the M key toggles it), ground painting, lines of models, sets and favourites, align and distribute, lock and hide, stamps and a draggable time of day. On the plan, multi-select, copy and paste, a reference image, a ruler, route heat and a side-by-side comparison of the two halves. A command palette with configurable shortcuts, shared undo, an unsaved warning and recent maps. On publish, the editor refuses models the game cannot mount, and a button tests the map in the game itself. It ships packaged for Windows.
Moss River, the 15th arena
The first arena made entirely in the editor. The bases sit atop two plateaus, and the battle runs down the ramps into a valley of dense forest cut by a river with two bridges. What the editor produces enters the game as data: loose models at the pack's scale, sculpted relief, ground paint and a clean area where the automatic scenery does not grow. The Steam stat and achievement for arenas went to 15. The plan for the Harbour, the next one, has begun.
New faces, again
Post 12 brought models for four races. Now the undead, orc, dwarf and barbarian kits of the Toon RTS pack came in, with new cavalry and infantry for elves and humans. The Bone Legion swapped its old skeletons for the undead, and every faction picks the colour of its clothes from the pack's texture, so two factions never repeat the same model in the same colour. Twenty-two troops became real creatures: bears, wolves, a tiger, boars, a crocodile, a turtle, a crab, eagles and a bat from one pack, dragons, a bull, a gargoyle and goblins from another. Creatures sleep, get stunned and howl. The Ancestral Beast, the Giantess and the Gear's machines got bodies, and so did the Hex's sheep. Buildings and scenery from the Toon RTS and Fantasy Village packs, buildings in the faction's colour, mesh weapon effects, water with a bed, caustics and ripples borrowed from Castle Survivors' pond, and the Rescue with the look of its Clear.
Icons went the same way: a 500-icon pack for the shop, build buttons by troop type, no icon repeated within a faction, and the slots of the card, the inventory and the shop filled in.
The Arena HUD
Options › Interface has a new HUD style, Arena, after Dota 2 and TFT. It is a skin over the same interface: the scoreboard pinned to the top with living troops in a big number, the build card as a 6×2 card shop with its border by cost tier, and gold with the income pips. The battle setup screen shows the whole arena, with panels in drawers and a summary strip with Start. The bestiary, the war room and Create mode follow the same model. Also in: Alt+Enter for fullscreen, big text and controller at 1280×720, the build card showing the troop in 3D, perk cards with icons, each map's plan on the arena pick, the castle gates as a loading screen, allies in a dimmed tone in team matches, tips in the online room and the window opening at the monitor's size. In the Default style nothing changes.
The rules, read from the script
The invisible part is the biggest. The Castle Fight DE economy that post 13 described is in for good: 250 gold and 125 lumber, a base income of 5 every 7 seconds, a 5,000 castle, a bonus for the first build, buildings and upgrades at DE's times and income that dies with the building. The AI upgrades early. Damage became base plus die. Then we read the EU 2.0.42 map's script function by function, 32 for troops and 34 for buildings, and DE 9.33's object data confirmed 91 of the 105 numbers: splash that hits the main target, preferred targets, mines with an arming time, spells drawn from a group, buildings born without mana that only cast after a full cadence. The Archon draws one of two spells, the Obelisk heals the wounded first, Ruin has ten outcomes, the Fist of Hell never lands on the castle. About 30 values that were estimates were resolved, and every number now carries the mark of where it came from. The AI's spawn tuning was recalibrated: from 20.3 to 2.6 points of deviation over nearly three thousand matches.
Two doubts only a running DE could settle were checked in DE: Rot at 20 per second and Roots at 4 and 5 seconds were already right in the game. The orb's Phoenix Fire stays unmodelled for now.
And the Studio
On the 24th and 25th Castle Arena started exporting its data to Kastle Studio and taking back what is edited there, straight into its code. That subject has a post of its own.
— The team