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TOWER INCREMENTAL key art CRT-03
● RECCH-03
PLAYABLE IDLETOWER DEFENSE

TOWER INCREMENTAL

Hold the tower. Aim the LANCE. Die into a talent tree.

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ABOUT THIS GAME

A tower-defense incremental. An auto-firing tower at screen center holds back escalating enemy waves while you manually aim the LANCE. When you die — and you will — the run's currency banks into a large branching talent tree, and boss first-kills drop tokens that unseal gated regions of it.

CURRENT RELEASE

v0.14

2026-10-18
  • Closing the help codex now really closes it. Its animated preview used to keep drawing out of sight for the rest of the session, using up your machine for nothing; now it stops the moment you press Escape.
  • CRYOSEISM fix: when your frost shell shattered and its nova killed something, the next enemy in line froze in place for a frame. Every enemy now moves every frame, whatever the nova kills.
  • Behind the scenes, every release now measures how fast the game runs, both in the browser and in the simulation, and compares it with the release before. Slowdowns get caught before they reach you.
  • The DEBUG panel (bottom-left) now shows live frame timing, particle counts and memory, if you are curious what a big fight costs.

ROADMAP

NEXT UP

  • A late-run escalation so runs end decisively instead of grinding down into a slow finish.
  • Hover a distant talent and see the cheapest route to it, with the total cost to get there.
  • See what a wave is made of before it arrives, so targeting and loadout choices have something to read.
  • A first-run pass that teaches the lance's firing rhythm and what death actually banks, without a tutorial.

LATER

  • A statistics screen: runs, bests, kills by weapon and family, elites slain.
  • Show when your shell will refreeze and what your armour is actually stopping.
  • Refund previews and a planner mode, so experimenting with a build is cheap to judge before you commit.
  • Share a build as a short string, so you can hand someone your tree.

MAYBE

  • Sound — the visual escalation ladder maps straight onto it.
  • Milestone badges, with no rewards attached.
  • Catch-up progress for time spent away.

Plans, not promises — no dates, and any of it can change.

RELEASE NOTES

v0.13

2026-10-17
  • The talent tree is now a map you uncover. Each tab starts with only what you can buy next, plus grey outlines one step further out. Buying a node pushes the fog back a step, and refunding pulls it back in.
  • Keystones show from the start as goals: dark outlines past the gate. Hover one to see its name and what it does, so you always know what you're working toward.
  • Every tab has been laid out again so you can read it at a glance. The root sits in the centre, a few straight, labelled branches each go one way (PIERCE, RATE, RICOCHET…), and a single spine runs down to the boss gate. No more tangled or crossing lines.
  • Reaching a tab's gate is quicker: the spine down to it is only a few nodes long. You still need a boss clearance to open it.
  • Search finds only what you've uncovered, and the weapon-slot hints say UNLOCK: ??? until the node they point at is on your map.
  • Your old save is reset: the tree's paths changed shape, so earlier purchases no longer line up.

v0.12

2026-10-17
  • You can now see every hit. Damage numbers float off enemies in the colour of whatever hit them. Crits come up bigger with a !, and a stream of hits adds up into one rising total instead of a blizzard. Zoom far out late in a run and only the crits, kills and boss hits stay, so the screen stays dark. Settings lets you show all of them, only the notable ones, or none.
  • Getting hit reads as getting hit. Damage to the tower floats off the point of contact, ember for what got through and frost for what your shell soaked up. The screen shakes by how much of your tower a blow took: chip damage barely moves it, a heavy hit really lands. There's a numeric HP readout under the wave bar now too.
  • Fights feel physical. Enemies jolt and squash when you hit them, harder the more of their health a hit takes. Melee enemies pull back and lunge into each strike. Ranged enemies brighten and coil just before they fire, so you can see a shot coming.
  • The tower got a rebuild. It's bigger, its health ring is split into segments that drain clockwise, and every weapon you slot has its own barrel that swings to track its target. Shots leave from the barrel tip with a flash in the weapon's colour.
  • Faint rings around the tower show how far each of your weapons reaches. Press G to cycle all of them, just the weapon you're aiming, or none.
  • Gold is banked the moment an enemy dies, with nothing left to pick up. You watch it fly to your counter, which ticks up as it lands. A boss pays out in a stream.

v0.11

2026-08-14
  • Hand the mouse to any weapon you like. MANUAL is now a targeting mode like NEAREST or DENSEST, free on every weapon from your first run — pick it in a weapon's socket or click its HUD chip mid-fight. There's only one mouse, so giving it to one weapon quietly takes it back from the other; you'll see the old one fall back to an automatic mode on the spot.
  • The lance can fight without you. Give it any automatic mode and it picks its own targets and fires on its own — a little shorter-sighted than your aim, and it will never spend an overcharge for you, so aiming still pays. A build with nothing on the mouse at all is a perfectly legal build now.
  • Aim the mortar yourself and the shell lands exactly where you clicked, instead of wherever the tube thought the crowd was thickest. Worth it when you can see where a wave is going.
  • The mortar can't cover its own feet any more. There's a dead zone around the tower it won't shoot inside, drawn as a faint ring — anything that gets that close is another weapon's problem. The blast still splashes inward, so it's a limitation to play around, not a safe pocket.
  • Take the nullfield off automatic and it banks charges instead of firing volleys: one click, one well, exactly where you put it. If you've bought BINARY COLLAPSE, that's two charges to spend.
  • Every weapon that picks a target — the lance included — now has its own mode line on the HUD, so you can see at a glance who's doing what, and who's holding the mouse.

v0.10

2026-08-13
  • Choose where your run starts. Every boss you reach unlocks a checkpoint just past it, and you can drop straight in there instead of re-walking the waves you've already beaten. Runs stay short as the ladder gets long — and starting from wave 1 is always still on the table.
  • REDEPLOY now opens a deploy screen: your loadout, what your build does, and the checkpoint picker, all in one last look before you launch. It only shows you what you've got — editing stays in the tree, one step back. Pressing R on the death screen still throws you straight back in, no screens in the way.
  • A settings panel, reachable from the gear on the HUD, the death screen and the tree. Screen shake and flashes each dial down to LOW or off entirely — and off really means off, including the death whiteout and the low-health pulse.
  • Your save, as text you can keep. Copy it, download it, or paste one back in. An import is checked as carefully as your real save is, so a bad paste is turned away and nothing you have is touched. Losing progress to a cleared browser is no longer a thing that can happen to you.
  • The death screen now tells you why you lost. Which weapon did what share of the damage, in its own colour; what destroyed you and how; and your biggest single hit of the run.
  • Waves cleared now counts the waves you actually survived, rather than counting from wave 1 when you didn't start there.

v0.9

2026-08-11
  • A seventh weapon: the MORTAR. It fires itself, aims at the thickest part of the crowd, and lobs a shell over everything to land in the middle of it. Against one enemy it is the weakest thing you can carry. Against a wave standing shoulder to shoulder it is the best.
  • The shell takes time to arrive, and it commits the moment it leaves the tube — it lands where the crowd was, not where the crowd went. Quick enemies walk out from under it. That is the price of the blast.
  • Everything the blast touches catches fire, and the fire keeps burning long after the tube has gone quiet. It is a different burn from the lance's afterglow, and one enemy can carry both at once.
  • A new branch to grow it in: THERM BLOC. Three feeders — heavier shells, hotter fire, faster loading — and all three have to reach the breech before the gate opens. On the way there, CONTAGION makes burning enemies set light to their neighbours, and STICKY PROPELLANT leaves every impact smouldering on the ground so anything walking through catches too.
  • Two keystones past that gate. ACCELERANT stops fire from merely refreshing and lets it pile up instead, so a saturated crowd burns far harder than a single hit ever could. DETONATOR — which used to sit off in an unfinished corner of the tree — has moved in properly: kills leave a rune that explodes a moment later.
  • Three slots and seven weapons now. Two of them answer crowds and they do not answer them the same way: the CONDUIT wants enemies strung close enough to leap between, the MORTAR wants them piled up. What you leave behind matters more than ever.

v0.8

2026-08-09
  • Every weapon that picks a target now picks its own. The autocannon, the gravity well, the lightning conduit and the gold designator each carry their own targeting mode, so a loadout is a set of jobs rather than one shared setting — the well anchoring the crowd while the autocannon executes the wounded and the conduit sweeps up what's left.
  • Each weapon has a mode it was born with and keeps for free, forever. The autocannon starts on nearest, the well and the conduit go for the thickest knot of enemies, and the designator hunts the fattest purse on the field — that last one is a mode nothing else can have, because marking the richest target is the whole reason that weapon exists.
  • You choose a weapon's mode where the weapon lives: click its loadout socket and the picker now lists every mode it can use, with its built-in one marked and the ones you haven't unlocked yet naming the talent that grants them. The choice sticks to the weapon, so it follows that weapon between slots.
  • Mid-run, click a weapon's readout on the HUD to switch it on the fly — only that weapon changes. A readout only becomes clickable once that weapon actually has a second mode to switch to. The old T key is gone; there was never a sensible key for four weapons at once.
  • The targeting talents moved out of the autocannon's branch and onto the tower itself, in a new TARGETING ARRAY. Buying a mode there unlocks it for every weapon at once, and none of it switches off when you unslot the autocannon. The ballistics branch closed up the gap it left behind.
  • Old saves are cleared by this release — the targeting talents live at new addresses and a stale purchase would have refunded nothing.

v0.7

2026-08-07
  • A sixth weapon: the CONDUIT. It fires itself, picks the thickest part of the crowd, and throws a bolt of lightning that leaps from body to body — each jump a little weaker than the last. Against one enemy it is the worst gun you own. Against twelve it is the best.
  • Hit something enough times and it locks up. Every arc banks static charge, and when the meter fills the target freezes solid — it stops walking, stops shooting, stops everything — then gets a moment's immunity so you can never simply hold one enemy down forever.
  • Bosses refuse to be frozen. They soak up the charge instead and take it back all at once as a burst of damage, so the CONDUIT is still worth firing at them — it just cannot take a boss fight away from you.
  • A new branch to grow it in: ARC GRID, wired like a substation. Three feeders — one for more jumps and longer reach, one for raw speed and damage, one for faster stuns — and all three have to reach the busbar before the gate opens.
  • Two keystones past that gate. DISCHARGE makes a freezing enemy dump its charge into everything around it. GROUND FAULT turns damage the tower takes into stored power, earthing it out as a shockwave — the harder the waves hit you, the more often it fires back.
  • Deeper in, SHOCK LATTICE leaves stunned enemies taking more damage from everything you own, not just from the lightning. Three slots and six weapons now, so what you leave behind matters more than ever.

v0.6

2026-08-06
  • Balance is now tuned from data instead of from feel. This release adds a harness that plays the game itself — thousands of complete runs, headless, in about twelve seconds — and reports how far each build actually got.
  • It sweeps 144 combinations: every way of fitting five weapons into three slots, crossed with builds ranging from an empty talent tree to a fully bought one, ten runs each. For every combination it records the wave reached, the gold and prestige earned per minute, and which weapon actually did the damage.
  • The first thing it found: the ASSAYER's payoff grows as your tree fills. Slotting it is worth roughly 30% more prestige on a young tree, but around six times more on a complete one — for about nine waves of survival. That is now measured rather than guessed, and it will inform tuning before anything changes.
  • Under the hood, every run now tracks damage per weapon. Nothing shows it yet — it is the groundwork for a death screen that tells you which weapon carried the run and what actually killed you.
  • Nothing about how the game plays has changed in this release. It is a tools release: the point is that the next balance pass will be based on evidence.

v0.5

2026-08-05
  • A fifth weapon: the ASSAYER. It picks the most valuable enemy in range and marks it in gold — and when anything else you own kills a marked enemy, it pays far more. It is cheap, it unlocks early, and it deals no damage at all.
  • That makes your loadout a real decision. Three slots, five weapons, and one of them buys income instead of killing power: take the ASSAYER and you kill slower but bank more, leave it out and you push deeper. Neither is the right answer.
  • A whole new branch to grow it in — THE EXCHANGE, laid out as a set of balance scales. One pan rewards patience: marks that last longer and appreciate the longer their target survives. The other rewards aggression: faster marking, marks that splash onto everything near a marked corpse, and permission to appraise bosses.
  • Two keystones at the fulcrum. COMPOUND INTEREST sharpens every appraisal for the rest of the run, each marked kill making the next one worth more. GREED TRADE makes marked enemies 40% tougher and pays double for killing them anyway.
  • The death screen now tells you exactly what the marks earned you, so you can see whether the slot was worth it.
  • Gold talents are sprinkled across other branches too, so a build without the ASSAYER still has somewhere to invest in income.

v0.4

2026-08-04
  • Find any talent instantly. Press / and start typing — the tree lights every match and everything else fades back. It searches names, descriptions and what a node actually does, so typing "chain" finds the chain-lightning keystone even though the word never appears in its title.
  • Matches on other branches aren't hidden from you: each tab shows how many it holds, and Enter hops between them one at a time, jumping to the right tab and centring on the node.
  • Talents locked behind a sealed gate still show up in your results, ringed in gate amber — so you can see what a clearance token would buy you and plan for it.
  • The panel on the left now tells you what your build actually does before you deploy: estimated damage per second for each weapon you have slotted, your effective health, armour, and every keystone that's live.
  • It only counts what will really fire. Take a weapon out of your loadout and its whole branch drops out of the numbers, exactly as it will in the run.
  • Expand STATS for the full list of everything your purchases have changed, so you can check a node you just bought is really doing something.