Hi everyone, time for another devlog.

This one's been a bit delayed - real life has gotten the better of me lately, but fear not, work continues in the background. The main thing I want to talk about today is Element Crush's first splash tower - the mortar tower, which is created by combining lava elements together.

The mortar tower fires projectiles in an arc, and when they land, they damage all enemies in their area of effect. You can see from the image below, that the AoE hits adjacent lanes as well, making the splash quite significant. The AoE is a circle, however, meaning that the splash is still most effective in the mortar's own lane, and secondarily in adjacent lanes. In order to balance this advantage, the mortar has below average stats, and can only fire on enemies at least three tiles ahead of it, as illustrated. This means that mortars will be most effective in the back columns.

Here's a gif of the towers in action :)

Over and above this, I've created a new "experimental" page for the game, where I'll be posting builds which aren't 100% polished yet and the leaderboard is disabled. That page can be found here: https://vfqd.itch.io/element-crush-experimental This current build contains all 9 towers that I've built so far and each time you start a round, you'll start with a random selection of 5 of the elements. I'm really keen to see what you guys come up with while messing around with the new towers and would love to hear your thoughts and balance and strategies ;D

As for the plans from now, I'm going to be creating an interface to allow for the picking of elements before the game starts and doing a bunch of playtesting and balancing, and some other small pieces of work. After that's all done, I'll post this new version with the new towers on the main page and reset the leaderboard like before.

As always, thanks for reading, and let me know your thoughts