New Mode: Night Bus

a new way to lose everything you just earnedThere is a bus. It is going to drive one street tonight, and it is not going to wait for you.

Night Bus is a tower defence mode wearing the wrong coat. You do not carry a gun in it. You carry a torch and a wallet, and everything you build gets built while a horde is already walking toward you.

Every civilian in the district is behind a door, and every door is in the half of the street the horde walks through. Knock early and they cross an empty road. Knock late and they run into the wave. Roughly a third of the doors are not a rescue at all.... some are empty, some open on something that was waiting for you to knock.

Whoever reaches the bus takes a seat. That is LOOT, and it is on you until you SECURE it. Zombies drop COINS, and COINS buy the street: MG nests, flamers, tesla coils, mortars and spotlights on the blocks; barricades, wire, mines and tar on the tarmac itself. The two never mix. A coin never becomes loot, and loot never buys a gun.

A flow field runs the horde, so a barricade genuinely reroutes the walk instead of just soaking hits. Sealing the road off completely is allowed, and it is a trap: the pile becomes a ramp, and they come over it onto the pavement where your guns are. Nothing out there is permanent either, barricades rot on their own clock, faster with a crowd chewing them, and razor wire is cut to pieces by what it cuts. You are buying a wave of cover, not a wall.

Three times a route the road is blocked kerb to kerb, and the only thing that shifts a roadblock is people. You send three of the civilians you just loaded back out into the road to heave, and you hope they come back. Waves land on a 32-second clock while they work.

Every three waves the bus offers you the ladder. Cash out the LOOT on board, or ride it up a rung and risk the lot. Stages keep escalating and the mode does not end — it just eventually takes everything back. The only LOOT that ever leaves with you is what you secured.

Streets, doors and spawns are generated per run, so no two nights are laid out the same.

Night Bus is in the build now. Tell us where it is too cruel and where it is not cruel enough, the discussion board is open, and we read all of it.
See you at dawn....at least some of you....
- DustyEffsky