Feel pass, and a wall that worked too well

Mechanics being correct and a game feeling good are different problems, so the next pass was entirely about impact. Swings now land with knockback, a very short freeze on contact, a camera shake that scales with how many collectors you caught, and damage numbers that pop and drift. Collectors and barricades grew health bars that only appear once they are actually hurt, so a full field stays readable.

The automated hero then found something no amount of staring at code would have. Running “turrets plus hero” produced the exact same result as turrets alone — suspiciously identical. The hero had walked into the player’s own barricade and stayed there for the entire wave. A human would have walked around it, but it pointed at a genuine problem: with waves eventually coming from every direction, your own fortifications boxing you in would be miserable.

The fix became a mechanic rather than a patch. Barricades are now built just low enough that the hero can vault them and just tall enough that the collectors cannot. Walls are purely anti-enemy, and hopping the fence is a real mobility advantage — which is about as on-brand as a farmer gets.