Puppyblog!

My favourite game, Droid Assault, has just received a little TLC, and updated to version 1.8. This version should install correctly on Windows Vista and Windows 7, and it should also work on ATI Catalyst 10 drivers. You may or may not notice it running a little more smoothly as well, especially on slightly older hardware, though I really doubt you’ll notice it. Four other things were fixed:

• Multi-core AI was completely broken but nobody seemed to notice. They’ve had their brains ripped out and replaced with the brains from the gidrahs in Revenge of the Titans.
• The disruptor now does 50% more damage.
• The S490 droid is less annoying now, having twin blasters and moving 50% quicker.
• Registration details now fade after 30 seconds

I hope you have fun with it!

Any problems, please let me know as soon as possible. I’m off to bed now.

I’ve been having balance issues lately. It’s not due to the giant bottle of gin I have just bought, either. Rather, it’s all about the problem of balance with the cost of stuff, crystals, and the value of the gidrahs when you destroy them.

First of all, I have a feeling that there are too many crystals on most worlds, which let you harvest an awful lot of cash that way. Secondly, I have another feeling that silos may be just too damned useful. The difference between having silos around all your refineries and not having silos is pretty drastic. So I think they’ll be first up against the wall when the nerfing revolution comes. Which will be around the time of Saturn. Silos will become somewhat less effective – I think I’ll reduce their efficiency increase to just 10% (down from 25%) per silo. And there will be a smallish reduction in crystals. In fact there will also be a reduction in crystals if it appears you’ve got a whole lot of cash in the bank, too, as you’re clearly doing rather well.

Also, the amount of money that can be harvested by shooting gidrahs is pretty massive. This sort of lends itself to a gameplay balance issue whereby the player doesn’t have a whole lot of incentive to bother collecting crystals, especially if you get the aliens cornered in a tight spot and can keep them at bay using minimal firepower and expense. Or alternatively the collection of crystals can be trivial if they’re behind the choke point on the map, meaning you’ll come away from a level with $30k in the bank.

The difficulty range was supposed to work best in the range of $0-$15k or so, but clearly it seems I’ve got to extend it to cater for up to $30k. And so I shall

Work on Saturn continues, with suicide exploding gidrahs working nicely, and the code for flying aliens in, but they don’t yet drop bombs. And we can’t seem to get a good graphic for it yet, so to distract himself, Chaz is doing the scenery instead, which revolves around toxic waste and pumping machinery. I tried a nice simplex noise fog shader for some cool weather effects but discovered it was too slow, so that’s on the back burner again and unlikely to see the light of day.

And finally, I got around to fixing the three older games, Droid Assault, Titan Attacks, and Ultratron, after leaving them broken for over a year (the wouldn’t work on ATI cards, and also wouldn’t install on Windows Vista or Windows 7 properly). I’ll upload nice fixed versions this weekend with any luck.

It is with great sadness that I have to report the death of Teazle, the most lovely dog in the world, who was with us for 12 years. Teazle was the other puppy behind the name of Puppygames (Smudge was the other, but she passed away many years ago now). We’re all very very upset and won’t be doing any work for a few days. We miss you, Teazle x

Some kind soul on the ever-lovely RockPaperShotgun made a lovely tech-tree graphic. I’ve not checked it for accuracy thoroughly but I thought it’d be worth sharing with you all.

You will be horrified and dismayed to discover that the really cool exotic weapons, the laser, rocket, and disruptor, will now cost a staggering $15,000 to research in the Saturn release. They are the pinnacle of offensive technology! They’re supposed to be really hard to get. At least, early in the game.

Lasers and rockets have also been nerfed very slightly in the forthcoming release. Lasers will do a teeny bit less damage, and rockets only explode when they hit their actual target location (as opposed to anything in their path). Also, rockets will cause splash damage to any nearby buildings! This means you will have to be very careful to place them such that gidrahs won’t slip behind them and amongst your valuable buildings, causing it to start raining rockets down on your own base! The sword has two edges, etc, etc.

All three exotic weapons now cost a huge $5000 to buy as well, reflecting the fact that with two of them you can pretty much defeat any level with relative ease. You still can, of course; you just need to be rich enough to afford to

Droids and turrets had a “big” AI overhaul; they now select new targets every 2 seconds, which means if something more suitable to shoot comes along, they’ll switch to it. Droids fire a bit more rapidly now, and move a smidgen more quickly as well.

And lastly autoloaders are somewhat cheaper at just $750. You know you want them! Sit back and watch the battle take care of itself

In other news, Chaz has been hard at work on Saturn, and he’s got Saturn wraiths done, and is currently finishing off suicide bombers. These little critters start off slowly, then accelerate towards their target, whereupon instead of biting, they explode causing splash damage to all buildings nearby! Better shoot them from a great distance. Fortunately being explody they are quite easy to pop.