Voidfall Tactics — Update 0.4: Spoils of War

Loot, Selling, Smarter Enemies, and a Smoother Battlefield

Voidfall Tactics is still mid-port from its original web prototype into Unity, and the crew of the Ossuary Queen has been busy. Like last time, this update was built on a feature branch and merged via pull request — I’m keeping the good-habits workflow going even as a team of one. This phase is less about flashy new art and more about depth: there are real stakes to every fight now, real rewards for winning, and enemies that actually make you work for it.

Update 0.4 brings battlefield loot, an item-selling economy, a big combat-feel upgrade, and enemies smart enough to brace for your attacks.

What’s New

Loot the Fallen

Downed enemies now leave their gear behind. A glowing loot bag marks each body — step up to one during battle and grab what they were carrying (with a chance at a little extra). What drops is themed to the enemy: raiders leave sidearms, marksmen leave rifles, and the mindless Void beasts leave trophies worth good money. Anything you don’t have time to grab mid-fight might still turn up as salvage when the battle ends.

Sell Your Surplus

The shop now has a SELL tab. All that looted gear and those beast trophies don’t have to clutter your inventory — turn them into credits to fund your next upgrade. Winning fights finally pays off in more ways than one.

Signature Weapons

Every operative now starts with a proper named weapon of their own — a Field Rifle, a Mind Focus Crystal, a Guard Buckler — instead of a generic loadout. They’re tuned to sit just below the first shop tier, so your early purchases feel like genuine upgrades rather than sidegrades.

Combat That Just Flows

No more hunting for buttons before you act. Click a tile to move there, click an enemy in range to attack, or click a downed ally to stabilize them — the game highlights all your options automatically at the start of each turn. The old MOVE and ability buttons still work for special abilities and items, but the basics are now a single click. Hovering an enemy also tells you your attack and warns you (in red) when they’re out of reach.

Smarter Enemies

Enemies that close the distance but can’t quite reach you will now brace for impact — digging in for extra defense instead of standing around exposed. And they’re not all equally clever about it: I’ve given every unit a hidden Wisdom stat, and the sharper enemies use it constantly while the mindless beasts rarely bother. Watch a Void Marksman hunker down behind the advance while a Warpdog just throws itself at you. It’s the first step toward enemies with genuinely different tactical personalities.

Quality of Life

• The in-battle items menu now blocks the board behind it — no more accidental moves or attacks through an open menu
• Unaffordable shop items dim out clearly instead of hiding their price
• Floating “+1 item” / “+credits” popups when you buy and sell
• The victory screen scrolls now, so long loot summaries don’t overrun the text
• Cleaner menus throughout — stray icon squares and misleading labels removed

A Note on Building for the Future

A lot of this phase was invisible groundwork. When I added enemy bracing, I didn’t just bolt on a “brace” flag — I reworked how the AI represents any action so that the next ability I give enemies (a special, an item, a heal) slots in without rewriting the plumbing. The same goes for the Wisdom stat: it’s live and already steering one decision, but it’s built to steer many. I lean on Claude Code to do most of the actual writing while I stay responsible for the design direction and the systems architecture — and increasingly, that architecture work is where I’m spending my attention. It’s more fun to build a machine that makes good enemies than to hand-script one good enemy.

What’s Next

There’s a fire-breathing beast called the Cindermaw already built and waiting in the wings — it just needs its artwork before it can join the enemy roster. Beyond that: putting the Wisdom stat to work on more AI decisions, then backend integration, user accounts, and WebGL deployment.

Thanks for following along.