Castle Constructor Alpha 3.1 Climbing and Rams

After a long wait Castle Constructor Alpha 3.1 has finally been released. A number of factors contributed to the delay including the difficulty of making the pathfinding system do what we wanted. We have finally reached the point where it is ready to go. So what did we do? We made it so that enemies can climb right over your towers. That's right you cant just wall yourself in and watch them comically throw themselves at your defenses. Now they will walk right up and start climbing, their focus entirely on reaching and capturing your keep. Don't think that your blocks are safe from being destroyed though as the enemies have decided to bring along some new siege equipment, rams. These rams are tough and if they reach your walls they will do their best to break them down, weakening your defenses.

This was a pretty big change to the pathfinding system and while we did our best to knock out a bunch of the bugs, we expect there to be quite a few things that need to be ironed out before it works exactly how we want it. Please make sure to let us know in the survey if they are any you come across.

Known issues:
On web the dust cloud shown when blocks are destroyed isn't visible.
On web the pitch fire effect isn't visible but still activates and damages enemies.
On web the some of the pathfinding isn't working properly.

These issues are specific to web and the performance on web is much worse than on the downloaded version. We hope to improve this in the next version but for the best experience please try the downloaded version if you are able.

The complete changelog is below:

• Soldiers no longer damage your blocks, instead they climb over them. Enemies can climb up to 3 blocks high from the ground as long as the tower isn't capped off and the top block is one that can be walked over.
• Some blocks can now be walked over by enemies.
• The keep now has the second level able to be walked on and enemies can climb up and get into the keep there.
• New enemy: Rams. If they run into a block they will begin attacking it. They will also die if all the enemies in formation with it are killed.
• Added option to change graphics quality.
• Added a link to the game's steam page.
• Balance: Min range of archers and battlements is now a bit larger.
• Balance: Battlements base arrows shot decreased from 3 -> 2.
• Balance: Archers shoot a bit slower.
• Balance: Increased the strength of waves after the first.
• Balance: Stone walls can no longer be placed as the 4th or 5th block on a tile.
• Balance: Cheval De Frise now has a stronger effect, speed reduction increased from 40% -> 50%
• Fixed: flags not facing the right direction.
• Fixed: Menu button and Game speed buttons are now intractable while selecting new card packs.
• Fixed: Made it easier to click flags in creative mode for setting the enemies for the wave.
• Fixed: Murder Holes can no longer be placed directly on top of another murder holes block as intended.
• Fixed: Murder Holes sometimes not dropping rocks out of a valid side.

The next update will hopefully not take as long as this one did. We will be focusing on improving the look of the game, updating levels, changing the look of the blocks, and improving the UI. Along with this we are working on improving the performance of the game and will hopefully get it running much better than it currently does.