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Blog Post 2 – Gebäude erwachen zum Leben

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Buildings Come Alive: Animations, Particles & Waving Banners

Hey everyone! Welcome back to another Banner Rush devlog.

This week I focused on something that might sound small, but makes a huge difference in how the game feels: bringing the buildings to life.

animated buildings

Two Layers of Animation: Idle & Event

Every building now has two distinct animation layers working together.

Idle Animations keep things visually active at all times. Ambient particles, subtle movements, glowing effects. The battlefield never feels static or dead, even between actions.

Event Animations are triggered by what you actually do in the game. The best example: when you play a unit card and a soldier spawns from the Barracks, the door physically opens. The whole building does a satisfying scale pulse, it grows slightly and snaps back, giving you that tactile "yes, something just happened" confirmation.

This works across all three upgrade tiers of every building. Each tier has its own animations that match its visual scale and importance on the field.

The Barracks (Kaserne) Lv1 to Lv3

kasernen

The Barracks is where your melee units spawn. Watch the door swing open when a unit is deployed. Notice how the building pulses to confirm the action.

The Factory (Fabrik) Lv1 to Lv3

fabriken

The Factory produces ranged units and has a more industrial feel. Smoke particles, mechanical movements. It reads as a working forge even when you're not actively using it.

The Oracle Lv1 to Lv3

oracle

The Oracle is the magical resource building of the three. It glows, pulses, and feels distinctly different from the military structures. The blue particle effects make it immediately recognizable on the battlefield at a glance.

Smart Proximity Triggering

Here's a detail I'm particularly happy with: the nearest building gets triggered, not a random one.

If you have two Barracks on the field and spawn a unit, the game calculates which Barracks is closest to the spawn position and triggers that one's animation. It sounds simple, but it makes the feedback feel intentional and grounded rather than arbitrary. The game reacts to where you're playing, not just what you're playing.

Waving Banners: More Than Just a Shader

Every building proudly waves its banner, but getting it to look good took more work than expected.

bewegter Banner

I added a custom wave shader to the banner mesh. The catch? The original banner mesh didn't have enough vertices for a convincing wave effect. Too few vertices means the shader has nothing to deform, and you get a stiff, ugly result.

So I went back into the mesh, added more vertices, and now the banners wave smoothly and naturally. It's one of those invisible technical fixes where the groundwork is hidden, but the end result just feels right.

Your Banner. Your Identity on the Battlefield.

Each building displays the banner of its owner, so your opponent always knows exactly whose army they're facing. Community member CamaradeOurs said it best:

„Everyone recognizes you with horror when they see it“ — CamaradeOurs 😎

That's exactly the feeling we're going for. Your banner is your signature on the battlefield. That's why it's called Banner Rush.

What's Next

With all buildings now animated and alive, the battlefield has so much more personality and visual feedback. More updates coming next week on the road to Early Access.

If you haven't already, add Banner Rush to your wishlist! It means a lot to me as a solo dev and makes sure you don't miss the launch.

Bis nächste Woche, Tommy @ HexLeaf Studio 🐦

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Blog Post

Blog Post 1 – "Under the Hood: Rebuilding Our Units from Scratch"

Hey everyone! Welcome to the very first Banner Rush dev blog. We're a small studio — okay, a one-person studio — working hard to bring you a tactical real-time card game that we're genuinely proud of. And today, we want to pull back the curtain on one of the biggest changes we've made recently.

The Big Rewrite

Sometimes in game development, you have to take a step back to take two steps forward. That's exactly what happened with our unit system — the core of everything that moves, fights, and dies on the battlefield.

Our old system worked. It got the job done. But over time, it had grown into a massive, tangled mess. One single file was responsible for melee combat, ranged attacks, hybrid units, animations, health bars, networking — you name it. Every time we wanted to change how archers behave, we risked breaking how swordsmen fight. Not great.

So we took a deep breath and rebuilt the entire thing from scratch.

Bannerrush_Archer

What Changed (And Why You'll Notice)

We split our unit logic into specialized modules. Melee units, ranged units, and hybrids each got their own combat brain. What does that mean for you as a player?

Archers actually feel like archers now. They draw their bows, aim, and release with proper timing. Before, the animation sometimes felt off — shots would fire before the bow was fully drawn, or arrows would lag behind. Now, every archer's attack is perfectly synced with their animation. It sounds like a small thing, but trust us: it makes combat feel so much more satisfying.

Smarter target selection. Ever watched three of your archers all shoot the same enemy while another one walks right past them? Yeah, us too. Units now spread their attacks across enemies intelligently. If one archer is already targeting an enemy, the next one picks a different target. No more wasted arrows.

Projectiles that behave. We fixed a sneaky bug where arrows could hit multiple units at once if they were standing too close together. One arrow, one hit — unless you're using a piercing ability, of course.

Leaner, Meaner Code

Here's a fun number: we went from over 3,100 lines of code down to about 2,000. That's a 34% reduction. Less code means fewer places for bugs to hide, and it means we can add new unit types and abilities much faster going forward.

What's Next?

This rewrite laid the foundation for a lot of exciting stuff coming soon. Better AI, new abilities, smoother animations — it all starts here. Stay tuned for our next post, where we'll talk about how we made Banner Rush's AI opponents smarter and more unpredictable.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for following the journey. If you're excited about Banner Rush, keep an eye on our Steam page — more news coming very soon!

— Tommy, HexLeaf Studio

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