Puppyblog!

You may or may not have noticed our server being extremely broken lately. In fact a week ago it developed a fatal bad sector on the boot disk and exploded, taking everything with it (including lwjgl.org unfortunately which is still not back up yet). We’ve worked tirelessly trying to piece it back together in between day jobs and progress on Revenge of the Titans, and it’s popped up and gone down like a yoyo ever since, occasionally losing the odd blog post and comments in the process.

We still don’t have email (though we do still have the puppygames Gmail account, so keep using that, please!). Hopefully this will be sorted fairly imminently.

Because of the server’s unexpected demise we completely missed the August 29th date for releasing Revenge of the Titans 1.51. So what we’ve done is roll it all up into a slightly bigger release with what was going to be in 1.52, and this is now scheduled for release on 12th September. The big things in the new release are:

• You can now sell buildings! And if you’re quick enough (10 seconds), it won’t cost you a bean.
• The HUD has been completely redesigned and can be hidden from view when you need to place buildings right down the bottom
• The research screen now has a tree view as well as a categorised view, and all the building stats are available for researched items
• Introducing the Medals screen, which you can view at any time, showing you the medals you’ve earned in your war efforts so far (with a total score)

Stay tuned for updates!

Next up for GUI tweaking is the research screen, which currently looks like this…

There’s 2 major changes to make that people have requested:

1. to be able to view more complete info and stats of already researched items
2. some way to tell what research item leads to what, rather than effectively having to guess

The following images are first thoughts, and quick mockups – I know they don’t make a lot of sense as to what’s being hovered on,  refineries don’t lead on to robotics etc. … Read the rest of this entry

Thanks for all the feedback on the HUD changes – it seemed opinion was split between versions 1 and 2, but with the majority in favour of version 1, so I’ve gone ahead and sorted all the graphics and XML for that.

It may be possible to add some option to choose between the two at a later date, and I’ve arranged the various buildings so that they could potentially open up from category icons in little panels of 1×3 or 2×3 building icons… but as its taken 2 and a half days of fiddling to sort the HUD out so far I don’t think I’ll have time to do that before the next release which we have planned for Sunday.

This is how it was looking before…

… and here’s how it looks now….

Changes made…

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We’re going to be making a few changes to the buildings/powerups panel. Here’s the current HUD….

First of all, and by popular demand, we’re going to add a sell button. Unfortunately there’s not enough room to squeeze it into that bottom panel, as that’s about as wide as it will go on a vertical display – the max width when vertical is shown by the dotted lines.

We could make the icons smaller to squeeze it in, but some people have also commented on the icons being too small to tell apart easily as it is, so that’s something else that would be good to address as well – magnification on hover being one suggestion.

There also needs to be a way to be able to hide the buildings/powerups panel, as it prevents building along that bottom edge.

So, 2 different designs after the jump…

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Well, we’ve finally released the Saturn levels for Revenge of the Titans under the guise of version 1.5! This has been quite a complex release, what with the addition of several completely new alien types and a whole new world, and an awful lot of fiddling with balance, bug fixing, enhancement, and so on. Without further ado, here’s the links:

Windows

Mac OS

Linux

Like last time it would probably be a good idea to play through from level 1 again with a new profile, as the amount of money available in the levels is somewhat different now, as is the cost of researching various things.

And here are some pics…

Yes, the boss is armed with a laser. No, he’s not very friendly.

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