Tower Defense v1.6.0 — Stable Release

🎮 Gameplay

Healer Troop (support) — locks onto damaged allies, heals 8 HP/tick, deals 3 damage to monsters in heal range; upgradeable TGT stat for more simultaneous targets
Flamer Troop (melee) — applies burn DoT (3 stacks, 3s duration, 0.5s ticks); burn damage scales with DMG upgrades

Necromancer — revives up to 4 dead allied monsters within 2-tile range; revived monsters become revive-immune and take 50% reduced damage
Boss — appears at waves 10/20/30 with 1668 HP (doubled to 3336 at spawn), 15 HP/s passive heal, 200g reward
Shielded — 173 HP + regenerating 69 HP shield (overheals to 104)
Spear — slows to half speed near troops, attacks closest in 2.5 tile radius

Troop HP — troops now have health pools and can be destroyed by monsters, adding strategic depth to positioning
Three monster attack modes:
- stop (default): Monsters pause to attack troops in range, then resume pathing
- slow: Monsters slow to half speed near defense troops while attacking (Spear)
- pass: Monsters penetrate defenses at full speed, hitting each troop once (Runner)
Monster splitting — Brute, Elite, and Champion split into 2 of level-1 on death (non-Boss, non-Shielded, non-pass-mode)
Ice Wizard — splash + slow (50% speed, 2.5s) + shatter bonus (+50% damage on slowed targets); upgradeable SLW stat
Lightning chain — upgradeable CHN stat adds +1 chain target per level (base 2), with 0.5s stun on each hit
Melee troops take 70% reduced damage from monster attacks — they are your front line

Sell confirmation — optional toggle; selling refunds 30% of total gold invested with 3-second global cooldown
Dev mode (triple-click gold) — infinite gold and lives, custom wave composition via DEV popup, Alt+D toggle
Adjustable game speed — 1x / 2x / 4x / 8x / 16x / 32x / 64x / 128x
12 troop types — Swordsman, Knight, Flamer, Archer, Machine Gun, Mage, Sniper, Valkyrie, Lightning, Mortar, Ice Wizard, Healer
9 monster types — Grunt, Runner, Brute, Elite, Champion, Necromancer, Shielded, Boss, Spear

Drag-to-place — click-and-drag troop placement from shop cards onto the grid
Placement preview — ghost preview with range circles, DPS/HPS text shown before placing
Wave preview panel — next-wave monster composition with health/damage estimates, Necromancer revive estimates
Notification system — bell icon with toast popups, notification panel with timestamps and action buttons (Update/Skip/Restart)
Settings panel — persistent settings with Save/Cancel, update channel selection, check interval, auto-download toggle
About page — game info, version with release type, GitHub repo link
Animated tray windows — smooth roll-up/down transitions, single-tray constraint
Smart cursor — standard arrow by default, hand pointer on clickable elements (shop, buttons, troops, grid)
Hover tooltips — shop cards show troop stats on hover, stat upgrades highlight on hover
UI reorganization — extracted game rendering from UI rendering, separated panel and cursor logic

ES modules — entire source base migrated to ES2020 modules with clean module boundaries
GameRenderer extraction — game-specific draw calls separated from core Canvas renderer
Fixed-timestep simulation — deterministic game logic decoupled from frame rate via accumulator
Background heartbeat — keeps the main-thread simulation running when the window is backgrounded
Zero-allocation coordinate helpers — _into variants (tileCenterInto, pixelToTile, shopCardRectInto) write into pre-allocated output objects
Offscreen canvas caching — static grid/path layers rendered once to offscreen canvases for performance
Path2D caching — troop rounded-rectangle paths created once and reused across frames
Data-driven particle effects — all 9 effect types defined in a single EFFECT_DEFS table with generic dispatcher
Config-driven design — all game tuning, monster specs, troop specs, and wave definitions centralized in config.js
Entity pooling — projectiles, popups, and tile-index arrays recycled to minimize GC pressure
Tile-index spatial lookups — O(1) neighbor queries via _monsterTileIndex and _troopTileIndex
Code deduplication — extracted shared _buildStatLines helper in shop.js eliminating ~40 lines of duplication

Complete test suite rewrite — all 32 test files rewritten from scratch, 13 new test files added
1,369 tests across 41 files (up from ~800 tests across 32 files)
>=80% per-file coverage thresholds enforced on all 4 metrics (statements, branches, functions, lines)
Project-wide coverage: 98.37% statements, 91.35% branches, 98.12% functions, 99.61% lines
Save schema pinning — 6 JSON fixtures in tests/fixtures/saves/ for migration testing
Contract enforcement — module boundary contracts tested via contracts.test.js
Canvas hit-test parity — cursor hit-testing verified against UI coordinates in uiHitTestParity.test.js
Memory lifecycle tests — pool recycling, long-session stability, particle cap saturation
Deterministic tests — all tests use fixed seeds, vi.useFakeTimers(), and vi.mock() for full isolation
ESLint + Prettier — 0 errors, 0 formatting warnings

Electron 42.3.2 — latest Electron with context isolation
electron-builder 26.8.1 — NSIS installer with configurable install directory, desktop shortcut
Auto-update via GitHub Releases — channel selection (stable/pre-release), progress bar, one-click install
electron-updater 6.6.1 — automatic update detection and installation
CI pipeline — GitHub Actions on ubuntu + windows, Node 20 + 22, enforcing lint + format + coverage thresholds
Windows 64-bit NSIS installer — attached to this release

CONTRIBUTING.md — comprehensive contribution guidelines with setup, workflow, conventions, and testing practices
CHANGELOG.md — full release history
README.md — updated with latest test count, coverage stats, and version references

Existing users will receive the update automatically through the built-in auto-updater.