Combat and Balance
- Reduced early difficulty ramp and enemy pressure.
- Improved non-zone attacks so they keep pace with larger enemy counts.
- Rebalanced bosses with lower health and stronger damage.
- Nerfed lifesteal and HP regeneration substantially.
- Improved giant enemy ranged behavior, patrol range, fire rate, laser reach, and beam damage.
- Added giant-enemy leaping behavior and repaired missing body faces.
- Improved mine targeting, placement logic, and trigger radius.
- Fixed zone and mine clipping through ruins.
- Added boss hit-flash and hit-shake feedback.
- Improved enemy motion smoothness during high-count waves.
Rendering and Performance
- Rebuilt attack rendering around GPU-batched lanes.
- Preserved full visual quality at maximum projectile counts.
- Continued optimization work reduced frame-time spikes without sacrificing asset or VFX quality.
UI, Accessibility, and Presentation
- Added the new default, hover, and click cursors.
- Added click scale-bounce animation.
- Added adjustable text/UI scaling from 85%–150%.
- Fixed black side bars in windowed mode.
- Removed the fullscreen toggle from windowed-mode settings.
- Changed the title text to “Tower64: The Beginning.”
- Achievement notifications now queue instead of stacking.
- Centered event buff text.
- Improved UI readability across menus, settings, combat, and level-up screens.
Localization
- Completed the localization audit across menus, events, stats, attacks, achievements, death screens, and boss text.
- Added missing non-CJK attack descriptions.
- Main-menu, event, and stat text now use the same localization path.
Audio
- Added distinct Calamity and Disaster intro/death sequences.
- Redesigned attack, impact, charge, travel, and boss feedback audio.
- Preserved fallback-safe audio catalog behavior.
- Expanded runtime audio coverage and preload safety.
Stability and Bug Fixes
- Added staged shutdown teardown to prevent leaked owners during forced headless exits.
- Eliminated the non-fatal ObjectDB leak warning in validated shutdown runs.
- Hardened threaded audio loading against stale or unowned requests.
- Fixed scene-reload light retention using stable instance IDs.
- Hardened transition recovery and resource cleanup.