Warbell v0.9.0

Warbell v0.9.0 — The Remodel

Every living thing in Warbell has been rebuilt. The hero, the orks, the townsfolk, and
the wildlife all share one new articulated skeleton with real per-clip animation — walking,
running, jumping, swinging, and blocking instead of sliding around as stiff boxes. This is the
biggest visual pass the game has had.

The hero knight — plate harness, wooden kite shield	Orks — tusked, armoured, and finally articulated
Townsfolk — woodcutter, farmer, miner, guard builds	Wildlife — wolves and the rest of the menagerie

New

• Completely refined models. The whole cast — hero knight, every ork variant, all the
  townsfolk trades, and the wildlife — was remodeled onto a single shared skeleton with
  chamfered low-poly parts and per-surface materials. They now read as one family instead of
  a grab-bag of cubes.
• Real animation for everyone. Mobs walk, run, attack, and crumple on the same per-clip
  animator the hero uses — no more rigid sliding.
• A bigger, bolder hero. The knight got a thicker, stronger stylized build, real boots, a
  cleaner helm, and a wooden kite shield with a gold boss. He can now jump, his walk has
  more punch, and his shield no longer clips through his arm.
• Armor you can see. Equipping armor now actually re-skins the knight — the whole plate
  recolours and each set adds its own signature look (dragon spikes, a gold crest, a chest
  device) instead of leaving the hero unchanged.
• A second world: the Volcanic Ashlands. Pick it from the start-screen map selector for a
  scorched-frontier run (one of its biomes is still flagged "not ready").
• A loading screen worth watching. The branded veil now actually shows on boot and New Game
  (it used to sit on a frozen frame for ~2s), with a sweeping gold progress bar and a fresh
  rotating lore tip each load.

Combat & balance

• Tougher everything. HP pools across the hero, defenses, and town buildings were raised to
  stand up to the night damage-ramp, and defense damage was re-derived so a siege stays a fight
  deeper into the night.
• Town buildings hold longer — farms and producers take more punishment before falling.

Fixed

• No more getting trapped in your own buildings. Raising a producer or a War-Table
  wall/tower/ballista on the spot you're standing used to wedge the knight inside it — he now
  steps clear.
• The hero no longer plays a tiny unearned landing-crouch on the first instant of a run.

Under the hood

• Smoother, richer terrain — bump-mapped ground relief, smoothed island edges, and the old
  repeating-grid tiling artifacts are gone.
• A worn-stone courtyard — the castle paving was reworked from a brick grid into irregular
  flagstones.
• Performance pass — terrain frustum-culling, far-scatter distance culling, a cached static
  IBL, reused separation buffers, and a tightened follow-cam that reads the hero larger.
• Faster pathfinding — the night-wave A* was rewritten onto a binary heap.

---

The Windows installer is self-signed, so SmartScreen shows an "Unknown Publisher" warning on
first run — click More info → Run anyway. (A trusted certificate authority cert is needed to
remove that prompt.)

Full Changelog: v0.8.1...v0.9.0

Full Changelog: v0.8.1...v0.9.0