Puppyblog!

Because my previous blog post was not a complete academic essay on the subject, nor indeed intended to really go any further than the few people that visit our blog, it seems that a few people are deconstructing the arguments and poking some big holes in the assertion that “The Demo is Dead”, which is fine, but the article is not at all complete, and contains no hard data (of which I have a lot). At the time, I just thought I’d pen some musings on the subject talking to people who already didn’t care (existing blog readers, who are generally customers and therefore unaffected by what we do with our existing titles).

Anyway, the internet sort of exploded in rage and disbelief that a tiny indie developer could become such a cruel, heartless, candy-snatching killjoy.

As a general reply to various comment all over the place, here are some further musings:

99 Reasons To Not Buy Your Game

This was clearly an exaggeration for literary impact, and if that’s not obvious to you, for shame. But instead of just asking me what those reasons are, maybe you could engage in devil’s advocacy, and think of some yourself. Here are some I thought of, spuriously:

1. I got my fill of gameplay already from the demo. (Our demos typically gave away 25% or so of the full game progression)
2. I’ve had 90% of the initial delight of the game for nothing. Paying some money for the remaining 10% is a waste of money. (Note disconnection between “delight” and actual content)
3. I can’t be bothered to pay for it when I can go and play another free demo somewhere else.
4. I’ve already got a bunch of games I’ve paid for but not yet even played. Maybe I’ll not bother getting this one yet.
5. I played the demo ages ago and forgot all about it by the time payday came because something else distracted me in between.
6. I only buy games through Steam.
7. I’m a poor student/waster/single mum and I don’t spend money on games especially when I can be entertained endlessly by demos for nothing.
8. I loved the game except for this one small thing that I didn’t like like I can’t remap the fire button to X and for that reason alone I’m not going to buy it.
9. I thought the game was too easy but that’s because the demo can only show the first 10 levels which have to be easy to not put off the 95% of people who find it too hard.

You’re Just Using Yourself As A Single Data Point!

Some have accused me of using myself as a single data point (“I’ve never bought a game in the last 5 years from playing a demo”) and drawing my conclusions based on this, which is fallacy. This is not the case; my own, singular experience was what got me to look at the data in the first place. It was just a hunch, that I got to thinking about actually a few years ago. It’s only in the last year or so that the data has become impossible to ignore (see below for some figures).

The Nature of Puppygames Demos

Few people were aware of the exact nature of our demos, or even our games, and it’s probably worth researching because our games are of a particular ilk and available only on a particular platform. We make desktop arcade games mostly, and that’s a pretty strange niche to begin with, which substantially effects the way demos work.

Our demos were “full” versions of the games, which could be unlocked by registration (no further download). They tended to let you play the first 25% or so of the game unfettered before expiring on a cliffhanger (eg. first boss appears, or you’re just about to see the next “world”, for example).

Claims that we’re “doing demos wrong” are from people who, I suspect, have not been doing this for as long as we have. The fact is, our demos were more or less no different from nearly every other demo I’ve ever seen. They weren’t even unsuccessful either – they converted at an industry-respectable rate, AFAIK. The problem is that rate is shit and the amount of money we can charge for a successful conversion has been eroded, which brings me to…

Context Is Everything

The context of pricing and market positioning, specifically. Over the last 10 years we’ve seen the average price of an indie game plummet from $20 (sold direct by the developers) to $5 (sold on Steam or BigFish in a sale) to about $1 (sold in a bundle of some sort). Steam pioneered the price slashing in the market – I’m sure you educated types with economics degrees have a special name for this manoeuvre. In the space of a couple of short years, direct sales plummeted to less than 1/10th of what they used to be (and they were never great). Almost overnight, the chances of being an actual indie developer – and succeeding! – have dropped from “you’ll be lucky” to “you’ve as much chance of winning the lottery”. Not only had consumer expectation of prices been eroded from $20 to $5, but consumers were also taught by Steam to buy on the basis of video and recommendation and, most importantly of all, discounts.

Then, just as things didn’t seem they could get more crazy, along comes the Humble Indie Bundle, and we’re now becoming accustomed to picking up titles for a dollar or less. Again, demo unseen. We’re conditioned to buying stuff because it is cheap not because we necessarily want it. I say “we” – yes! I am one of you. I am a consumer. I’ve got a hundred games in my Steam library. I am doing all these things. I won’t buy a game if it’s not on Steam any more. I won’t buy a game if it costs over $10. And so on. This reminds me of an anecote many years ago when a friend of mine came bouncing into the room full of glee because she’d bought some mint essence. When I enquired what was so amazing, she told me that it had been 75% off so she just had to buy it. I can’t recall her ever before or since actually making anything with mint essence in it, but it was a bargain!

In this context, what we now see is that 95% of our income – any developers income – comes not from conversions of demos, but from sales via gatekeepers and bundles. What the focus of my original article was really about is that there is a case for simply dropping prices through the floor and not giving anything away for free. There is “free” stuff everywhere, already. The differentiator we now have is that if you want to sample our stuff, it will actually cost you. Otherwise it is simply unavailable. It is out of reach. You can look through the glass into the shop but you can’t touch it until you spend a (paltry) amount of money. Just like with mostly everything else in the world these days.

Are We Right?

There’s no harm in being wrong. We can be wrong. We’re going on what the data tells us, and we have a lot of data. We’ve sold 481,529 games in the last 3 years, and 30,246 of those have been to people who played a demo. That means the other 451,283 sales were made without anyone ever seeing a demo. If you want percentages, that’s 6%. We’re quite happy to be proved wrong! If the data tells us we’re wrong, we’ll go back to using demos.

Our hypothesis is, we’ll make a bit more money if we ditch demos and drop the prices. As you can say what you like about the 97% of sales being without demos and argue till you’re blue in the face that you don’t buy games without playing a demo first, go on ahead. Argue away – you’re arguing that black is white. You’re not making us 97% of our sales. The bit you need to argue over is this:

6% of our sales are to demo players, direct, and they have made us $72,000. We think that if we drop our prices hugely, and ditch demos, that we’ll continue to make 6% of our sales direct, but that we’ll make a bit more than $72,000.

The Sands Shift Beneath Our Feet

And still that’s not the whole story. The thing that most beginning developers – us included – fail to take into account is how the markets change over time. As I said, when we first started, we sold conversions on demos for games that cost $20. We started just at the tail end of a golden era in independent game distribution (typical bad luck, huh). The internet had just revolutionalised developing games and the gatekeepers were just about to move in, along with a flood of other developers who suddenly discovered they could do it too. It is suprising in hindsight that so many developers clung to the $20 price model in the face of what was happening.

Things came to a head in about 2008 or so, when we released Droid Assault. Droid Assault was released to the sound of tumbleweed. No-one was even the least bit interested. It’s a great game (IMHO, haha), but when it was released, nobody wanted to buy it. Customers were already thoroughly in the pockets of Valve and BigFish by then. If you didn’t have a game on a portal, it simply didn’t sell. DA must have shifted literally a few hundred copies. By contrast on Steam, now it’s finally out on Steam that is, it’s shifted thousands of units.

And so we must realise that the market is changing, all the time, imperceptably slowly. Let’s look at those figures I just mentioned above, and instead, let’s look at just the last 12 months:

In the last 12 months we’ve sold 77,224 games, of which just 725 were demo conversions. The demos weren’t suddenly any different. The prices weren’t suddenly any different. Suddenly, after just 2 years, we’re only making less than 1% of our sales via demos. Nothing else changed except the entire rest of the market.

So actually what you really need to be arguing over is this:

1% of our sales are to demo players, and they have made us $5200 (yes, really). We think that if we drop our prices hugely, and ditch demos, that we’ll continue to make 1% of our sales direct, but that we’ll make a lot more than $5,200.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Many years ago, when we first started making games, the perceived wisdom of the age was to follow an apparently successful formula, and strike it rich. Or at least, make a living. Games sold for an average of $20 or so. This is in the dim, dark depths of history, in 2003.

This formula was: offer a demo, and convert demo players into customers by having amazing demos (and, as a secondary, offer a money back guarantee just in case a customer mysteriously wasn’t satisfied). All you need is a large enough influx of traffic downloading a large enough number of demos and a large enough conversion rate. Simple! And this we have done, for the last 10 years.

To cut a long story short, it doesn’t work for us.

Today, none of our games have a demo, and they probably never will have again, either. The Demo is dead.

Long Live Video!

Why have we done this? How can we possibly gain from no longer hosting demos? Well, the times have changed. I have come to realise that I’ve not bought a single game from playing a demo in the last 5 years, maybe longer. Why am I buying games? Or rather, why am I buying the games I am buying as opposed to other games?

Mostly because they’re recommended to me by friends, and sometimes reviews. That generally isn’t enough though; I also want to look at the game before I buy one. And this is where video comes in! Just about every game I’ve bought for the last 5 years has been on the basis of watching a video of the game – either a review along the lines of Total Biscuit, or a trailer in Steam, or on the developers’ websites, or shared on Facebook or Twitter. Usually I don’t even need a recommendation from a friend if I watch a trailer for a game that I think looks interesting.

But there is another thing at play.

Almost none of the games I’ve bought have even had demos. They’re full versions only, accessible only via Steam, and/or usually… rather cheap. And with a bit of investigation we’ve noticed that 99.9% of all the games we’ve sold on Steam have been bought “blind”, without anyone ever sampling a demo.

This got me to wondering why we are bothering with demos any more.

What Does a Demo Do?

I’ll tell you: it has three primary functions:

1. To assure the end user that the product actually installs and runs ok on their machine
2. It gives the potential customer a good long demonstration of the game with no up-front investment on their part
3. The shocker: it then gives them 99 excuses not to buy the game.

Video manages to sidestep 2 and 3 nicely. Video still gives the customer a demonstration of the game, albeit non-interactive; but it does have the potential to cram all the interesting bits into a very short space of time – rather like a movie trailer does. But, barring a total disdain for the style or genre of game, it doesn’t give the customer any reasons not to buy the game. Not a single one. You have to actually pay to form an opinion on how it plays.

The first function is trickier. Why do people buy something if they don’t know if it’ll even run or not? It turns out it’s required a little bit of technical wizardy to solve, which we’ll be releasing the source to in due course as it’s GPL, but basically – take a look at Revenge of the Titans now, if you’re unregistered, and you’ll see that the title screen has in fact been replaced by the video trailer which is now rendered inside the game. So we know at this point that the game is going to run fine on your machine, and more importantly, so do you. We’re slowly converting the other three games into video title screens as well.

In-App Purchase

Of course, once a potential customer has installed the game, fired it up, and been presented with the trailer video instead of an ordinary title screen, that’s not quite the whole story. Customer clicks “PLAY”… and is transported straight to an in-app purchase screen which you can use to unlock the game there and then. Unfortunately this IAP screen can only take credit and debit cards (no PayPal or other dubious payment systems). However… it is working, and working nicely.

Now all our games have a built-in IAP system (and a cunningly built-in one-click buy mechanism too), we’ll be able to collect some stats on how things look without demos, and I’ll be following up in a few months about the end result.

… and this one’s got a few more goodies in it.

Firstly and most obviously, it’s now got fancypants shader effects in it, which I’ll be expanding on a little in another patch. You can turn these off in the Options menu.

Secondly, we’ve added Easy Mode. This is a campaign mode like normal campaign mode but the difficulty is capped at a much lower level for more casual play.

Thirdly, we’ve enhanced Sandbox Mode for those of you that have it. The editor now allows you to specify a lot more detail about spawn points, and also specify exact amounts of each resource available. Check out the new editor options at www.RevengeOfTheTitans.com

Fourthly, we’ve added Research Respec - you can now completely redo your entire research tree, at any time, without penalty.

ps.
You will notice a little screen flickering going on at the start, which we will soon remove. It’s gathering some logging information for us so we can get to the bottom of a driver crash. Sorry for the annoyance.

I was idly warbling away to fans on the Steam Community forums today when I had a little think about some of the facts and figures involved in making games. When I read it back to myself I realised it was actually pretty fascinating reading for people outside of the industry (that is, the players of our games). There were some amusing estimates of how much effort goes into making games from the fans, so here are the facts and figures for you all to see, and hopefully, tweet, reblog, and comment about, until all children are suitably scared in their beds and night and vow never to want to becomes games developers ever again, and some sort of massive JUST SAY NO style meme floods the internets and makes it to the very top of Reddit’s wonderfully insular and self-referential news pages.

Ultratron took 24 man months to develop, or if you want to put a financial figure on it, about $120k at ordinary salary rates. Ultratron has so far made a loss of $100k.

Titan Attacks took approximately the same amount of time. Titan Attacks has just broken even after 7 years, so that’s cause for a can of lager in celebration.

Droid Assault took quite a bit longer – about 36 man months, or $180k ish. Droid Assault has so far made a loss of about $120k.

Revenge of the Titans took about 7 man-years to develop, or about $420k. It’s only just broken even. Sandbox mode took 12 man-months and has so far cost us $56k. It is unlikely to ever break even.

For most of the last 10 years, I subsidised all the development of the games by working as a menial contractor in the IT industry and effectively putting every spare hour of my life into them. We started seriously in 2002. It wasn’t until 2010 that we actually made enough money to buy anything more than a celebratory curry!

So now you know why a) you don’t really want to be an indie game developer if you can help it and b) why we’re not making any more arcade games

* probably. Unless a genius can think of some way we can make them for about a tenth the cost that’s palateable.

We gathered in our millions around the Consoles of our cities to hear the announcement. Whole families turned out and stood out in the plazas waiting for the rumblings from inside the machine to herald its latest edict for the good of humanity. We stood in silence, until a deep red light flicked on from a scanner situated near the top of every Console, and a laser scanned over the suspended crowd, surveying. Counting. And then the Console spoke the words of Central Nexus.

All humans are to report in an orderly fashion to their nearest RecycloMat Facility. Transportation will be provided free of charge by Central Nexus – your friendly system overlord. There is no need for alarm and recycling is painless. Central Nexus wishes at this time to thank you for your peaceful co-operation in this hazardous waste recycling operation and wishes you continued happiness and contentment for the remaining duration of your current form.

Read the rest of this entry

So… work is underway on our new game. I’ve called it “Battledroid” for now (ahem), a name which may or may not stay. I quite like it. So by way of warning, there now follows a wall of text explaining everything.

What is Battledroid?

Battledroid is a massively multiplayer asynchronous online war fought over the blasted and war-torn landscapes of Earth in the not entirely distant future a few centuries from now. At war are various ultracorporations (whom we shall call “factions”), who vie for control of territory in order to boost their own manufacturing capabilities. Everybody who is sensible has left for more peaceful pastures in the rest of the Solar System, leaving the wars to be fought by giant armies of autonomous battledroids.

Read the rest of this entry

It’s St. Valentine’s day! Apart from delivering coffee and jam on toast to Mrs. Prince, I’ve been beavering away losing hair and sanity making our games work nicely on Linux through Steam. I now have about two handfuls less hair, but also for your perusal, delectation and delight, all of our Steam games working on Linux!

It also happens to be the case that Valve are celebrating the official release of Steam for Linux starting today, and so we’re doing a special sale of all our games on Steam at 50% off! Now there’s a reasonable chance you’ve already bought one of our games if you’re reading this blog, so if you fancy spreading the love a bit, why not buy the gift of a game for that special friend that you forgot to buy flowers for this morning? A copy of Titan Attacks for the object of your affections will surely go a long way to getting you past first base. You might even find out what first base is! I never got to find out myself, I just looked at Mrs. Prince funnily one day and bam! Pregnant. But that’s another story.

Don’t forget that all our games are also “Buy Once, Play Anywhere” – your games will run on any operating system even if you buy the Linux version. And all you existing Puppygames customers – you can still go here to get your FREE Steam keys (note that you have to register your game first though).
Read the rest of this entry

It’s here! Including all the recent pre-Xmas updates such as the new line-of-sight effect, wibbly wobbly shader effects, friendly droid targeting HUD display, and of course most importantly, pot plants, but now with added Steam gubbins – there’s 30+ achievements to er… achieve, and you can compete for hiscores with your Steam Friends!

… and it’s 20% off for the first week! Steam page here.

… and if you’ve already bought it, or if you want to buy direct from us we’ll give you a free Steam key!

We proudly present…

Click here to download the latest version!

The latest update for Droid Assault not only includes

• Fancy line-of-sight lighting
• Wibbly wobbly shader effects
• Friendly droid targeting HUD display
• Improved level design
• Various tweaks and fixes
• Pot plants!

but also features a completely new mission, just for Christmas, introducing…

• A completely new giant level with 12 floors!
• 12 festive droid types to kill or capture!
• 5 flavours of deadly nano-bots to hunt down!
• Seasonal weaponry, particle effects, and snow!
• Christmas trees and presents!
• Doors and lifts!
• Fairy lights!

Here’s a few screenshots of the new features…

Read the rest of this entry

Now you can listen to the music of Dave Sunerton-Burl whilst beavering away with the Revenge of the Titans level and campaign editor, and then play and share your creations in the new Sandbox mode, and compete for hiscores!

You can get Sandbox Mode and the Soundtrack directly on Steam here, or buy it directly from us (and you get a free Steam key anyway!).

Confused? What is this Sandbox mode you speak of? Here’s what it is in a nice easy to read list format:

• Create your battlefield, choose your Titan adversaries and select your weapons and tech with the online editor! Add mission briefings to your levels to create custom campaigns!
• Publish your levels and campaigns to share them online!
• Play community built levels & campaigns!
• Compete for hiscores!

Here’s one I made earlier… Read the rest of this entry

Thanks to those that send us feedback on the RotT online editor beta. … and now the new Revenge of the Titans Sandbox mode gets it’s turn to do the beta thing.

With the Sandbox mode you’ll be able to play all the user published levels and campaigns, and compete for hiscores. You don’t need to have signed up to the online editor, but if you have done you can login using your online editor account details and you’ll be able to play your own unpublished levels and campaigns as well.

… if you’re part of the beta testing group that is

Please note:
The Sandbox mode beta will only be available to people that have bought the game from this site.
It wont work if you’ve bought it from Steam or from the Humble Indie Bundle.
Sorry about that. It will be available to everyone when it’s released.

If you want to take part send us your name and email address using this contact form, and we’ll sign you up and send you a reply email as soon as we can. In the meantime download and install the latest build of Revenge of the Titans from this site.

Once again any feedback is greatly appreciated – please use this contact form.

And again a general disclaimer – it’s a beta so there may be bugs! And they’ll be some limit on the number of people we’ll sign up for free, so first come first served etc.
Read the rest of this entry

We’ve got a beta test version of the online editor for Revenge of the Titans up now at www.revengeofthetitans.com/editor. But before you click anything please read the whole post, as there are a few things you should know first.

Edit: the Sandbox mode beta is now live, so some of the below has changed…

This is a beta test version. This means it’s not quite finished, so there may be bugs! Also, this is just the web-end – the actual bit where you can play the levels isn’t quite done yet is now in beta, but we thought we’d release the editor in the meantime. So, please bear in mind…

• Javascript and cookies must be enabled
• We will dubiously sniff your browser – it will only work with up-to-date browsers, and Internet Explorer 9
• You wont will be able to play any levels or campaigns that you create
• Published levels and campaigns wont will be visible to anyone else
• Levels and campaigns you create may not will be playable in the final release
• The hiscores are not real!
• There may be small graphics issues with the map editor, such as thin outlines around tiles
• If you’re using Opera you may want to disable the right mouse button gestures that Opera uses
• It may be a bit slow, especially in Opera unfortunately
• It may break
• It may make your computer explode for no reason. Use at own risk etc.

Please let us know of any bugs you find, or any suggestions you have, but don’t use the blog comments for bugs, please use this contact form so we know what browser you’re using etc. There’s a link to the form in the editor as well.

So to wrap up, here’s the link again – www.revengeofthetitans.com/editor, and remember…

• It’s a test – it’s not finished
• You can’t play any levels or campaigns yet
• Please don’t use the blog comments for bugs

Enjoy!

So I went to Rezzed with @Cliffski (and Mrs. Cliffski), ferried there in a state of mild car-phobia induced air conditioned comfort in his spaceship-like Lexus. I couldn’t tell you what Lexus it is, just that it is black, and has batteries in it to make it go, and a charming electronic assistant lady called Lizzy who tells Cliff where to drive. I also managed to figure out how to transmit music from my phone to the car, and forced Mr. and Mrs. Cliffski to endure my “eclectic” musical tastes. I notice that most of the music I listen to has what graphics people might describe as a “high dynamic range” – that is, it has quiet bits, loud bits, bits with low frequencies, bits with high frequencies, and mostly every combination in between. It turns out that this is crap for cars, as you can’t really hear anything, and this probably explains why nearly all modern music is just a massive irritating wall of sound – because the only place most of it gets listened to is on car radios. Anyway, I digress. This is what we did when we got there:

Indie Stone

We went to see a talk by the Indie Stone of Project Zomboid fame (I’ve been doing some things for them). We were nearly as surprised as they were as the room was packed out with hundreds of people (a show of hands in response to a question from one of the, er, Stoners, showed that maybe 90% of them were fans of Project Zomboid). Anyway – the presentation was of course quite funny, detailing as it did how not to set up a studio and have several disasters. We make our own luck, as the saying goes

I was going to throw tomatoes at Lemmy for forgetting to mention me but as he was visibly shaking like a leaf with nerves decided that would be a bit mean. My time will come! I think it’s time I did a talk at one of these talk things, having amassed all sorts of interesting bits of know-how and wisdom about the industry, games, and coding in general.

Borderlands 2

We wandered around and looked at all the man-shooters on display – still strangely the most prevalent sort of game at computer game shows. There were also a rather large bunch of indie games there but unfortunately my largest and most vociferous organ was telling me that I had to go and eat, so we didn’t hang around and play any of them for any significant length of time. Can’t even remember the titles.

We wandered into a section labelled “18 Only”, hoping for scantily clad pole dancing ladies and these naked booth babes I hear everyone decrying, but annoyingly there was just some guy in a rubber Alien suit, and Borderlands 2. The Borderlands 2 demos were wired up to XBox360 controllers. WTF? I wrestled with the controller for a minute, looking probably like one of those long lost tribespeople that some missionary westerner has just given a knife and fork to, and eventually gave up in disgust. So in short: it looks like Borderlands 1, but prettier and the interface is a smidgen slicker. I’ll be buying it and playing it with a keyboard and mouse as God intended.

Fish And Chips

Eventually my stomach won the argument and we went in search of fish and chips. This you must know if you visit Brighton: the Regency Restaurant, on the sea front opposite the old burnt-out pier, makes the best fish and chips I’ve ever had. The Indie Stoners arrived along with torrential rain, and we decided to go to the pub.

Pub

In this bit we discuss things that we are not allowed to repeat in front of anyone, let alone broadcast all over the internet A couple of things became apparent though. Firstly, the Stoners absolutely hate the AAA games industry with a passion, and after they told us their life stories, I can see why. Secondly, we had a good laugh at the Zomboid team’s expense concerning what disasters might have befallen them on the way down from tha Toon to Brighton including hilarious anecdotes such as strapping all the laptops with the source code on to the front of the van (“for safekeeping”).

Peter Molyneux

The next talk we went to was to see what batshit silliness Peter Molyneux is up to with his new “independent” studio 22 Cans. It turns out that he’s hiring lots of people to make little games for iPhones, and to be fair he did have quite an interesting “game” concept he talked about which he claimed was about curiosity – “what’s in the box?”. I thought that really it asked the question, “Just how much money can you fleece people out of via iTunes?” Molyneux actually seemed to concur on that point. Nothing wrong with parting people from their money, I always say. Anyone daft enough to spend it in such a manner clearly needs to be parted from it as soon as possible before they actually go and do something stupid with it.

Cliff and I stood at the back and sniggered like naughty schoolboys. During the Q&A session I was just almost but not quite drunk enough to want to ask Molyneux whether Cliff was fired or whether he quit Lionhead in a huff. But again my pleasant nature somehow smothered my desires to make mischief and the session ended without incident.

Mitu and Redshirts

After the session we bumped into Cliffski’s minion, Mitu Khandaker, who is simultaneously developing Redshirts for Positech Games (ie. Cliffski) and also strenuously denying being a minion. Just as I was getting into my stride mocking one or the other of them the Mode 7 team happened by broadcasting their intentions to obtain food from Italian restaurants, and my favourite organ once again declared its interest in food. Exeunt Indies. Past Molyneux near the front entrance; I tried to get Cliff to rant at him (“Remember me? Huh? Remember?”) but he wouldn’t do it, which is a shame as it would have been entertaining.

Pizza, Beer, etc.

Went and had a pizza. Waitress threw a plate on floor behind me. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in Final Destination. Anyway, having dodged certain death from flying crockery, we went out to go and find the RockPaperShotgun drinkiepoos at some fancypants club called Audio. Talked to a bunch of people there including me old mucker Adam Martin, whom I conclude needs to port Titan Attacks to iOS for me, though he doesn’t know it yet. But we were so knackered we only managed a couple of drinks and had to retire back to the hotel. Out like a light. An interesting day.

I recently acquired a Raspberry Pi, the £25 computer which is the brainwave of various UK industry luminaries, most famously including David Braben, the author of 8-bit classic 3d-space-shooting trade game Elite. I have a few thoughts about how it’s delivered, what it costs, who it might be aimed at, and what might be done to improve things for level 2.

The Raspberry Pi arrives as a naked circuit board about the size of a box of what we in the UK call fags. This always amuses Americans, but Americans are of course easily amused, albeit for an extremely short duration. The circuit board has as many connectors on it as you could reasonably hope for in a computer – two USB ports, stereo jack, Ethernet port, micro-USB power input, HDMI out, and composite video out. There’s even something called a GPIO which is a bunch of pins which you can connect “things” to that do “stuff”, but that’s for very clever propeller head types who understand electrickery, and not programmers like me.

Of the USB, Ethernet and stereo jack, we shall have nothing much to say. Or indeed the GPIO thing. They are as they are and I dare say no improvements could be made on them. The other outputs represent some rather odd thinking.

HDMI Output

HDMI is the future! HDMI is awesome! VGA is dying! … but unfortunately, HDMI is only available on the very latest monitors and newer TVs. So we’ve got a £25 computer, and the theory is that you’re supposed to pick up and use some existing mouse, keyboard and monitor that you’ve got, probably gathering dust in the spare room, to save you a pile of cash. Except, of course, your monitor only has the usual D-shaped SVGA input. Everyone I know has a spare SVGA monitor lying around. Not a single one has a spare HDMI capable monitor. A few people quite likely have monitors with DVI-D input, but I have a feeling that like mine it is already in use as the main PC monitor. The solution in my case was to buy an HDMI cable and a brand new HDMI-capable monitor. £115 vanishes.

Then there’s this thing about HDMI not exactly being reliable, like SVGA is. In my case, all I got was a black screen on startup. It could have been any number of things but fortunately I’ve got quite a diagnostic mind and I’m not 12 years old, like many of the prospective owners of the Pi are purportedly meant to be. Suffice it to say it took me an entire evening of Googling around to discover that you had to create a text file with HDMI configuration parameters in it to get the monitor to actually display anything. This is fun… for various values of “fun” which unfortunately lie somewhat outside my comfortable parameters. You see, I spend all day, every day, trying to figure out why the fuck stuff doesn’t work properly. I was rather looking forward to plugging in the Pi and tinkering with it straight away, but I didn’t even get that far. I had to wank about fiddling with it just to get a fucking picture. Yes, that made me cross.

Composite Output

A nice touch but pointless. Almost all composite-input devices likely to be found around the home are now rightfully in landfill and those that aren’t are generally massive and not the sort of thing you generally want cluttering up a spare corner of a small room. Not only that but they tend to be Jurassic power-guzzling dinosaurs and prone to going on the blink. The other day I spent a happy afternoon coding in CRT distortion effects in the new version of Ultratron. So anyway: composite output – might as well have saved the money on providing this output, no-one in their right mind needs or wants it who is going to own this device. Yeah, even you. You’ve got a spare old SVGA monitor in the garage too haven’t you? Throw that old black-and-white portable telly in the skip.

Micro-USB Power Input

Er… why? I’ve got about 20 different adapters lying around my house, all with sturdy jacks, providing voltages anywhere between 3v and 12v. I literally have a box full. I expect mostly everyone else does too, because over the last 30 years, nearly every widget you’ve bought came with its own. I bet amongst them all you’ve got a 5v DC input you could have already used. Well, it doesn’t matter, you can buy the flimsy microUSB input instead for another £5.

Supplied without an SD Card or software

Now, here’s probably the most controversial thing I’m going to say about the Pi. As it comes, it won’t actually switch on or do anything, even if you’ve got the spare keyboard, mouse, and shelled out £85 for a monitor and cable. You also need to get yourself a 4GB SD card to put on some firmware and an OS. Although this process is trivial, and the cost is nothing to worry about (literally, the price of a bag of peanuts), it’s completely unlike my first experiences of computing.

My first real computer was a Vic-20, back when they first came out. It cost quite a lot of money – a lot more in fact than all this Pi stuff has come to in real terms – but: I plugged it in to the telly, switched it on, and tuned the TV using the twisty analogue knob. And there it was: a BASIC interpreter, 3583 bytes of RAM free (though 2 went missing immediately somewhere). It came like this out-of-the-box. I could get coding on it within seconds. It’s this plug-and-play appeal that turned so many people off of PCs for gaming and on to games consoles in the first place and represents exactly why software engineers are so derided by mostly every other engineering principal.

Built to a Price, But What Price And Why?

So the Raspberry Pi commands all sorts of cool headlines like “a computer for just £25!” mostly because it sounds, well, cool. Except I’ve spent £200 on mine in total, which coincidentally is about what my Vic-20 cost me albeit in 1982 money. That’s clearly beyond typical pocket money for today’s cash strapped youth who of course absolutely, completely need mobile credit and, er, whatever it is that teenagers spend money on. Drugs I expect, as they can’t easily get booze any more.

About £165 of that cost was the monitor, keyboard and mouse; the keyboard and mouse were really just me being slightly extravagant (I have an awesome tiny Cherry ultra-compact keyboard), but the monitor… well, that was annoying, really, as I could have used one of several other devices kicking about the house if the Pi ditched its HDMI and composite outputs in favour of something more befitting its status as a cheap toy that is meant to be attached to stuff you have lying around gathering dust.

So with the Pi only about 12% of the total cost of the whole setup, why exactly is it designed like this? Why is it built to meet a £25 price point when a few bob here and there would barely change the overall cost but vastly improve the whole experience? Who buying one of these things actually gives a fuck that it’s £25 and not, say, £40? I really have no idea.

It would appear that there have been engineers involved in the market research. Oh dear.

No-one buying computers cares that it costs £25 or £35. Especially when you have to buy a bunch of other things to make it work anyway, and then waste an evening trying to get it to boot. There are of course a few electronic engineering types having gentlemen’s accidents over the GPIO port and that’s great, but I seem to recall that the Pi was all about getting a generation of kids into computing as we used to know it, back when we had Spectrums, 64s and Amstrads. The problem is that price was only a small factor in the choice of whether we owned one of those home computers back in the day, yet it seems to have been absolutely the driving factor in designing the Pi.

What I’d Do To Make Me Happy

Were I to think about the successor to the Pi, apart from the usual guff about making it a bit faster and giving it more RAM through the inevitable march of progress (nabbing the chip out of a Galaxy S II would just be incredible), I’d ditch HDMI and composite out in favour of a technically obsolete SVGA connector. I suspect the cost would be as near as identical as to make virtually no difference to the prospective buyer’s financial situation – as we’ve already established, the cost of a Pi is only actually a fraction of the total cost of actually using a Pi. Not only would this mean you can use that old Dell monitor, it’d also work, unlike the HDMI port, which doesn’t.

Secondly, I’d supply the Pi with a 4GB SD card plugged in to it already, with an OS on it, that boots. In fact I’d probably consider wedging the thing inside a keyboard casing with a trackpad and then you’ve literally got something just like one of those home computers of old, the spirit of which the Pi is attempting to capture. If you sold the bundle of things ready assembled for under £100 you’ve got a no-brainer for any prospective parent thinking about getting one for his or her geeky kids.

Lastly I’d switch from using microUSB power input to a standard 5v DC power input. And then I’d supply the device with one anyway, in the box.

The choice of Linux as an OS is unfortunate but a bit of a necessity given there’s bugger all alternatives yet. Linux is incredibly complicated. Just look at the BASIC interpreter command prompt startup of a Vic-20 compared to the Pi. Eek. This isn’t really going to help a new generation of geeks get in to programming; it’s likely to make them think, this is just too much effort for too little gain. Well done for creating the sort of barrier to entry that filters out all but the most heavily bespectacled and introverted propellerheads but is that really what we need? I believe that the barrier should be as low as absolutely possible in order to hook people into fiddling before people need to get into the nuts and bolts. Look at Mac OS. It’s got Unix underneath but even an idiot can use it after switching it on. I think the Pi is going to need something like that.

Anyway, more ramblings about the Pi later, as I get to grips with the horrors of Linux and C programming (Python! You must be joking). Eventually I’m hoping to get some Java code running on it.

Afterword

You might think I’m being a little negative about the Pi so far. Actually I’m having a reasonable amount of fun tinkering with it; my fears are really more meta-fears; I suspect that the Pi will turn off more people from software engineering than it will turn on, supplied as is. It is the very raw roots of modern computing. Unfortunately those roots are ugly, messy, nasty, clunky things; and one of the chief reasons I don’t use Linux as my main OS, and also one of the main reasons I use Java as my weapon of choice.

Talking of Java, seeing a bit more of an effort to support Java on the device wouldn’t go amiss. After all, it’s very, very likely that Java is what they’re going to be actually exposed to in higher education. Not Python.

The LWJGL project, which provides the low-level graphics, sound and input bindings required for Java to make great games such as Revenge of the Titans, Titan Attacks, Spiral Knights, Tribal Trouble, Starfarer, Blocks That Matter, and yes, the ubiquitous Minecraft, needs your help. Well, that is, if you’re a reliable, seasoned Mac OS X developer with a fairly deep understanding of the Obj-C display APIs. Read the rest of this entry

Having spent the last few days dealing with the aftermath of turning 39, I’ve finally gotten the database rinsed and cleaned and full of genuine registrations again from the Great Birthday Giveaway… and with some cunning databasery I’ve managed to reinstate some previously disabled games. What does this mean for you?

In short: if you ordered more than one game, I have reactivated the first one you ordered.

So if you were one of the people that fired up Steam the other day and discovered your game(s) have vanished, or if you tried to obtain a Steam key and were told that your email has been disabled, or if you tried to register your Puppygames registration but were told the same, you may now again register your game – just the first one you ordered – and get a Steam key for it (if it was Revenge of the Titans or Titan Attacks – Droid Assault and Ultratron don’t have Steam keys yet, but they will have, and you will be able to get them in the same way).

All in all I’ve managed to give away a further 2,353 free games to people who either didn’t read the small print quite right or for whatever reason were unaware of the one game limit. This makes me feel all magnanimous and warm inside, and is back in the spirit of things, bringing the total grand giveaway to 13,701 games.

Just to allay a few untrue rumours circulating – no-one is going to be banned by Valve for blagging an extra key. There are a few script hackers who might be in trouble though, and it was these guys filling up the registrations database with shite that have caused everyone all the grief, you included.

So in short: run your game, pop your email address in and wait for it to register, then go to http://www.puppygames.net/steam to get a Steam key if it’s Revenge of the Titans or Titan Attacks.

As a little treat for the internets, on my birthday the other day I decided that we would give away our games for free, and see what the power of a single tweet could accomplish.

Well, of course, our server was flattened within the hour, as it turns out our keygen can only generate about 15 keys a minute, and we went on to give away 22,500 keys.  The only reason we only gave away 22,500 keys was because BMTMicro, our payment provider, closed our shop page after 12 hours because we couldn’t cope with the huge backlog coming in.

To make matters more amusing, we only had about 6,000 Steam keys to hand, and these ran out sharpish as well. It also turns out the Steam key retriever contained a schoolboy thread race error in it causing a couple of hundred people to receive duplicate Steam keys. And the cherry on the cake was that unbeknownst to us, a few days before the promotion, our server silently stopped sending email to customers after it was “migrated” by Rackspace. I’ve no idea how its configuration could have changed in that time, but it did. So we had this perfect storm going on:

1. Site flattened
2. Shop page shut down
3. Ran out of Steam keys
4. Email sender kaput

The end result is that my single tweet generated 3,000 support emails, none of which we will be answering No, instead, we are going to send an email to each and every one pointing to a FAQ page which explains what went wrong and what you can do about it, and if you’ve got some problem that’s not answered in the FAQ, we advise emailing us again.

Abuse!

It didn’t take long for some people, in Eastern Europe and Australia, to latch on to our generosity, and quickly create scripts to generate hundreds of Steam keys for themselves, which presumably they have been trading. Unfortunately I know about this. Unfortunate for them, that is, as every single one of these keys will shortly be invalidated by Valve, who will also at their discretion be completely banning accounts who took advantage of the abuse. This is called “karma”.

Slightly Less Abuse!

I’m not sure just how clear that tweet was about the offer but to me it looks very much like “1 item max” means that I only wanted to give away one game each on my birthday. I’m terribly sorry to all 3,137 people who decided to take all of our games during the offer, because I’ve had to disable them all, and again, Valve will be taking your keys off of you, and no, I’m not giving them back because there are thousands of you and you had your chance and blew it.

What We Are Left With

So out of that 22,500 ”sales”, we’ve actually ended up with just 11,200 legitimate people who took us up on the offer – happy birthday me! And a thousand thank yous to all those who took the offer in the spirit in which it was intended – you really are our fans and you make it all worthwhile for us. Keep an eye out for the completely updated, revamped and changed Ultratron 3.0 coming in the next couple of months, and of course, Droid Assault will be making an appearance on Steam as well soon.

Some Of Your Problems Answered

Where do I get the Steam key from for my game?

http://www.puppygames.net/steam

I got a duplicate key! Can you fix this?

Just try again, it’s fixed now.

I never received the email you said you sent me!

Try again, it’s fixed now. And check your SPAM folder!

It says you’ve run out of Steam keys!

We’ve got some more now, just try again.

My game has reverted back to a demo version!

That’s too bad – I did only want to give one game away each and I haven’t time to deal with everyone who somehow “misunderstood”

Ever wondered exactly what the Titans wanted revenge for? Not long ago, our esteemed friends from Titan attacked our peaceful planet, a battle which played out in our seminal shooter Titan Attacks – winner of Gametunnel.com’s Action Game of the Year!

Well obviously you must have soundly thrashed them. Why not relive history and show us how it was done – and in case you missed the news – now you can do it in recently updated crispy HD graphics!

Getting to the point … Titan Attacks is now available on Steam for both Windows and Mac OS with over 40 new Steam achievements and online hiscore table!

… and to celebrate the launch, for one week only, it’s on special offer!

Alternatively, if you’d like to support us by buying direct, you can then activate a FREE Steam version, which means more pies and ale for us, and if you’ve already bought Titan Attacks no worries – we’ll give you a Steam key too.

A new trailer for the new year, with a spanking new tune by Allicorn, who is also our new programmery person!

Previously Allicorn did half of the droid sound effects and music for Droid Assault – his first task as full-time new programmery person is to make the Sandbox Mode add-on content for Revenge of the Titans, and hopefully he’ll have that ready for Easter or thereabouts. Over to Cas…

Allicorn and I have played pen-and-paper RPGs together once a week for the last five years. He is frighteningly clever but humble and helpful. When he’s not doing RPG gaming with me and our mutual friends, or coding for Puppygames, he’s also one of the administrators of Yog-Sothoth. I’d like to think there was some overlap in our clientele already.

Wolcum Yole, Puppyfriends! As a special treat to all the boys and girls who have been good all year we have spent the last month working on completely free DLC for Revenge of the Titans!

All you need to do is make sure you install the latest v1.80.14 release (download the demo from our site here if you’re a Puppygames customer, or go to your Humble Indie Bundle download page, or just fire up Steam and it’ll update automatically). You’ll find that between 19th December and 8th January there’s a new game mode available – Yeti Attack! You get all the toys in the game, albeit in limited numbers, and you can even use disruptor towers safely! The objective is to survive for exactly 30 minutes of a constant stream of Hoff Yetis arriving from the north. The maps generated are completely random so there should even be some good replay value in there as well. Afterwards you will be treated to some amusing statistics.

Wolcum yole! Christmas lurks just around the corner, ready to pounce on unsuspecting credit cards and weakened bank accounts. To alleviate the suffering just a teeny, tiny, weeny bit, here is a new version of Revenge of the Titans, v1.80.14, which in a few days’ time you will discover has a special Christmas treat in it.

Here are the download links (except for you Humble Bundle types, you need to go back to your Humble Bundle download links and get them there. And, er, wait a day or two for the caches to update first):

• Windows
• Mac OS
• Linux 32-bit Debian
• Linux 64-bit Debian
• Linux 32-bit tar.gz
• Linux 64-bit tar.gz

What’s New and Noteworthy?

The first thing half of you will notice is that the mouse handling is completely different. I realise that this is a fairly bold and risky thing to do to a fairly long-established control mechanism in a product that’s already very mature, but… it never really worked properly before, you see. It didn’t use the desktop mouse settings, it didn’t work with tablets, it didn’t work with some mouse drivers, it was quite frequently completely erratic in movement, and it also grabbed the mouse when you clicked on the window which is kinda rude and doesn’t behave nicely in windowed mode when it comes to alt-tabbing.

So now the mouse is no longer captured by the window, and you use either the left or right buttons to scroll the screen by click-and-drag. The right mouse button has a tiny sensitivity threshold on it, which means it should still respond sensibly to its original functions (picking up buildings to build, cancelling operations), whereas the left mouse button will immediately drag. The left mouse button of course won’t drag if what you’re clicking on would otherwise have some other effect – for example, attempting to drag whilst in range of a capacitor isn’t going to work – you need to use the right mouse button.

The reason for allowing the right mouse button in drags as well is so that you can go into build mode and still scroll the screen about with the mouse like you used to. Or smartbomb mode, etc. It takes a little bit of getting used to – especially after 4 years of the old way of just waving the mouse about – but after a few games it’s just second nature again. Of course you can still use the cursor keys or WASD to scroll anyway if that’s what butters your bread.

The next thing I’ve changed is the display context handling. Er, what’s that, you ask? Well, put it this way: if you had driver problems before, they might have gone away now and the game is more likely to run. There were a lot of issues with the nice resizable window we introduced in v1.80.13, and hopefully they’ve all gone away now, although sadly with the loss of the minimise and maximise buttons.

The powerup spawn effects (and building attack effects, etc) now use chunky fat lines to draw, and because they’re now being drawn the same way as everything else in the game, they should be proper fast on all drivers. A few people had problems with the game suddenly dropping to about 2fps whenever a powerup spawned. This should now be fixed. It looks prettier, too, I think.

Finally there’s a subtle change to the way animation works, and screen transitions. You probably noticed on the screen transitions that some sprites were rendered before others, just for a single frame, so we’d have this sort of partial display which was just noticeable. This especially irritated me because I’ve seen it about 100,000 times, and it’s been bothering me for several years (yes, really). Well, I finally got around to fixing it.

Please let us know ASAP if there are any odd issues with the new version!

So Long, Desura

This part of the post is likely to attract all manner of hate and flames, but it has to be said: Desura wasn’t working for us. We spend just as much time and stress figuring out how to release software on the Desura platform as Steam, but unfortunately make literally 1/1000th of the money. So little in fact I don’t think Desura have even managed to pay us any money yet. It doesn’t make sense for us to support Desura any more, and so we’re not. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a great client, their hearts are in the right place, but… we’re on Steam.

So my humble apologies to anyone with their eggs in the Desura basket. Contact us if you’ve got any issues.

Ultrabundle refresh being prepared

If this release of Revenge goes to plan, that is, generally seems to work properly, we’ll do a refresh of the Ultrabundle games using the same code, which will fix the same issues, etc. Fingers crossed.

Revenge of the Titans ab morgen im Handel erhältlich!

Yep, Revenge of the Titans available in stores starting tomorrow! says Google translate.

Am 25. November, veröffentlicht Iceberg Interactive „Revenge of the Titans – Die Rache der Titanen”. Das im Retro-Look gehaltene PC-Spiel ist eine Mischung aus Echtzeit-Strategie und Tower-Defense. Die Spieler müssen erneut die Erde retten, die ein weiteres Mal von den Titanen überrannt werden soll. Die furchterregenden Bodentruppen der Titanen bedrohen die Erde mit ihren grauenvollen Monstern. Ist die Erde diesmal dem Untergang geweiht?

Die Spieler von „Revenge of the Titans“ müssen ihre Verteidigung schnell aufbauen und immer weiter upgraden, während sie die notwendigen Ressourcen aus den nahegelegen Mienen schöpfen. Neue Technologien und Gebäude müssen erforscht werden um die Erde und das Sonnensystem zu verteidigen. All das, während die Titanen unaufhaltsam heranrücken.

Features:

50 Level auf der Erde, Mond, Mars, Saturn und dem Titan
Unzählige Technologien und Gebäude zum Erforschen
Spielmodi: Entspannter Endlos-Spielmodus und aufregender Survival-Modus mit Online-Highscore-Listen

„Revenge of the Titans – Die Rache der Titanen“ ist zum empfohlenen Verkaufspreis von 19,99 Euro im Handel erhältlich.

Weitere Informationen unter http://www.iceberg-interactive.com/

Erstwhile indie entrepreneur, caustic media darling and Ferengi executive Cliffski has put together an awesome site of like-minded indie games developers where we flog our humble wares called Show Me The Games. The site is a dedicated not-for-profit co-operative between a few of us indie developers to bring in direct sales to benefit each other, the lifeblood of expansion in our industry.

This morning we are proud to announce a sale on Show Me The Games called… Show Me The Sales!

If you’re a customer of ours (either directly, via affiliates, through Steam or the Humble Indie Bundle), please stroll on over and check out some incredibly cheap and nifty titles from our fellow indie peers, many of which would make great Christmas gifts for friends and family (especially, hem hem, on account of their extreme cheapness for the next 14 days). Of course, you could spend Christmas day playing Monopoly instead. No? I thought not. Go now!

If you’re in any doubt about any of the titles available on Show Me The Sales don’t forget they all have demos and all have refund policies.

To accompany the recent v2.00 release of Titan Attacks is this new trailer wot I have done…

Cas has also done a few fixes – so if you had any problems with Linux freezing, have a go and see if it’s got better.

Linux Ultrabundle Fixed

I’ve just uploaded a hacky fix to make the Ultrabundle games work properly on Linux. If anyone could let me know why Frame.isActive() always returns false on Linux I’d be grateful. Grr.

Revenge of the Titans Updated to v1.80.13

Humble Bundlers – download the update from your Humble Bundle page, not Puppygames!

Revenge of the Titans also got an update which actually changes a few things, some of which will make whiners whine, but as that’s what whiners do, we shall leave them to it. Amongst the changes is that the resolution of the game has now been fixed regardless of your screen’s aspect ratio. It was supposed to be like this before but because of a bit of a logic error it never really worked as intended. Now it does. You should find the game now resizes to any size you like when running in a window (press “P” to pause and ungrab the mouse).

Balance & gameplay changes in the game are as follows:

• The overall difficulty level of the game has been slackened off a tiny bit. You will be able to hoard a little more money before things get really tough. But hoarding money is not the way to win this game anyway. Spend it on defenses! Or as we like to call them here in Blighty, defences.
• Battledroids and repair drones have been nerfed, and are now produced in slightly fewer numbers.
• The repairs that repair drones do now actually cost you money. The repair cost is 10% of the basic value of the building per hitpoint restored. The base, having no cost as such, costs $750 per hitpoint.
• It’s now running under Java 7 on Windows, and should see about a 20% boost in performance, which you won’t notice really unless your machine is marginal in the CPU area.
• Fixed a few typos here and there
• Fixed a bug where you the difficulty was not being attenuated when you were being kicked in by the Titans. This has been in for ages! I did think it was a little odd that people were complaining quite so much about difficulty – turns out the little tweak that was in there to allow players to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat was broken!
• Nerfed boss hitpoints a little
• Any of you running on Steam will be delighted to know that we have added Steam achievements and Steam cloud support!

That little lot is bound to upset loads of people but, well, you know, they needed fixing. You’re unlikely to really notice unless you were heavily into repair drones, or you were finding the game too hard – in which case, give it another spin, you’ll probably get a lot further before you hit the Easier Level button.

After a bunch of false starts, bodged uploads, and some really annoying library wrangling between LWJGL versions, we have finally unleashed the updated Ultrabundle games, Droid Assault, Titan Attacks, and Ultratron. Existing customers can download nice brand new ones from the usual Puppygames locations (keep your old versions hanging around in case, eh?).

AZERTY keyboard users: sorry, but Ultratron is currently going to be pretty tricky to play as it uses WASD – we’ll upload a fix to this in an update probably next week.

What’s Changed

Titan Attacks has received a giant graphical overhaul and grown up into what we now call version 2.00. Now not only does it look timeless it also looks sharp and modern. A nice trick if you can do it Three cheers to Chaz for making it look so much more… nice.

Now in widescreen, sort of…

Before and after…

There have also been a few small gameplay tweaks. Firstly, it’s now basically mouse controlled, because that’s how everyone normal plays it, although you can still use the keys if you’re desperate or stuck on a laptop. The mouse however allows you to move the ship at whatever speed you like. This means the ship speed shop item has been replaced with a different upgrade – “Addon recharge” – which governs the speed at which all your addons reload and fire. You’ll probably want to be upgrading it last. Finally, the ship only starts with one bullet, which is a bit more traditional, and gives you an early thing to aim for in the upgrades.

You’ll also notice now that the window is fully resizeable to any size you so desire, and we’ve added a much-asked-for world select screen!

Droid Assault recently already underwent the big graphical overhaul in the previous 1.90 release, so now with 1.90.1, we’ve done a few refinements to it. The maximum zoom of some of the droids was causing some performance issues and sometimes looked a little crazy so it’s been capped. The laser beams and flamethrower and flames have had their effects thoroughly revised. The game has become slightly easier too, with the droid you are controlling given 50% more hitpoints than before. So, a bunch of little tweaklets which should make for a very slightly nicer experience. Still haven’t put fast droid switching back in yet though – sorry.

Ultratron, being the oldest and simplest title, has simply received the ability to resize the window and a little bit of a title screen overhaul. A few tiny weeny tweaks have been made to the powerups – the spidroid powerups will now remain onscreen indefinitely for you to pick them up. Shooting the freeze powerup pauses the enemy robots momentarily, and shooting the three-way powerup causes your shots to split into three! This can give you an incredible amount of bullets flying around on screen but of course you are fairly hampered in your movement and aiming by the need to shoot it. That’s about it for Ultratron.

Unfortunately we’ve sort of lost the ability to redefine the keys along the way which might be a bit of an arse for those of you with AZERTY keyboards or other abominations. We’ll probably have to come up with a fix for that before the forthcoming Steam release.

And it is a proper tweaking. Firstly and without further ado, go and download it and while you’re waiting read about what we’ve changed.

Why we’ve tweaked it

Before I tell you the exact nitty gritty of what’s changed you might want to know why we went monkeying with the secret sauce with one of the greatest videogames ever made, eh? Well, it all stems from the fact that Droid Assault is going to wind up on Steam in the not-too-distant future, and your average Steam punter is perhaps a little more discerning (or shall we say, “scathingly critical”), en masse, than you delightful and forgiving Puppygames fans are.

Droid Assault suffered a few arbitrary and unnecessary limitations in various areas. Firstly it was designed around a rather crappy 320×320 display area (along with our other two minigames, Titan Attacks and Ultratron). The window was fixed, square shaped, and decidedly a bit weird. In this modern day and age it seemed a little incongruous.

Also, the game did rather suffer from being somewhat mindless. It started off reasonably sensible but by the time you got to, say, two thirds of the way through the game, it became an almost random frenzy of blaster fire; 90% of the droids were blown up, including often most of your own droids, in the first 10 seconds of the level, leading to a couple of minutes of relative tedium. Again, this probably wasn’t going to satisfy the relatively eclectic tastes of the Steam demographic, many of whom clearly prefer deeper, more involved games, as our runaway success Revenge of the Titans has shown us.

So, I wanted to make the game a little deeper and more tactical than it used to be, and the following raft of changes is chiefly aimed at getting depth and tactics into this game to replace the random destruction.

Read the rest of this entry

All software is subject to the strange force of entropy that causes stuff that previously used to work fine to suddenly not work any more. This is an embuggerance which programmers live with on a daily basis, as it appears to occupy about 80% of our miserable time just keeping on top of it.

And so it would seem that some of our stuff has been broken by the Great Rug of Entropy deftly yanked from beneath its wobbly feet. Allow me to describe the symptoms, causes, and possible cures.

Linux

The Debian Packages Won’t Install On Ubuntu 11

Indeed they won’t, because Canonical in their infinite wisdom added some more checking into their .deb unpackager which disagrees with the sadly out-of-date Debian package maker we use. You can actually force it to accept the .deb files we provide (there’s some fancy commandline thing that works – please enlighten me in the comments and I’ll update this post with the solution). If you don’t fancy doing that then the good old .tar.gz files still work as normal.

Java 7 Breaks All Our Games On Linux

Oracle have just released the shiny new Java 7. Hurrah! It’s considerably faster than Java 6. Unfortunately it breaks all our games, and also, it has some serious crashy bugs in it at the moment so generally I’d advise not upgrading to Java 7 for a few months just yet. Unfortunately some Linux distros – notably it would seem Arch Linux – have automatically upgraded Java, and now the games don’t work. The solution is to roll back to Java 6. I advise you to use OpenJDK rather than the Oracle one, as it seems to work better.

Mac OS X

Problems with Lion

There may be some problems with Lion not working, but so far nobody’s come up with a concrete set of problems and/or solutions. We do know that Java is not installed by default in Lion, and so what should happen, on a brand new machine, is that the first time you run one of our games, it’s supposed to go and download Java. This is of course a crappy solution and it’s entirely Apple’s fault. They will be releasing a deployable solution soon which we’ll take advantage of just as soon as we can. If you have any troubles, comment below and tell me and I’ll update this post.

Windows

Surprisingly there appear to be no problems with Windows except possibly with that Razr mouse thing which appears to misbehave. And some of you still can’t figure out how to install new graphics drivers. It really is criminal that Windows still ships on OEM machines with drivers that simply won’t play 50% of the available games out there.

Other News

We’re just putting the final touches to the new version of Droid Assault which has many incremental improvements. We could easily massively expand it into a really quite big and deep sort of game but we’re unsure of the potential market for games like Droid Assault any more so we’re holding off further development on it. But right now the plan is to release it as we have it, which is basically the same but much more polished and improved in various subtle ways, and then think about what to do next. Well, what to do other than give the same treatment to Titan Attacks and Ultratron, which also near completion. All three titles will be making an appearance on Steam soonish, but as with Revenge of the Titans, you will be able to get free Steam keys for all of them if you buy them direct from Puppygames.

So we can cross another cheevo off the list: Revenge of the Titans is now available in actual physical form, in boxes lovingly drawn by Chaz, in actual shops! If that isn’t cool enough, said boxes also come with a double-sided hi-res poster inside and also the full-length music EP and also a free Steam key and also the Mac version is included as well!

How cool is that eh? I’ve got 3 of them here at home, still wrapped in their cellophane.

Many thanks to Iceberg Interactive for publishing the game phyically for us. We’re hoping that they make a bunch of money on it, because we’d like a nice simple retail partner we can turn to when we need them, and if this works out, it will be them.

Follow Up : For A Buck

A very interesting selection of responses to our previous bit of bloggage about selling games for a buck. Just to cure any wild speculation about things, I should say there’s no way we can sell games for a buck – it costs us $1.50 to process a single sale as it is*, so we’d actually be paying you money to, er, take digital goods “away”. This would lead to brain meltdown and financial apocalypse.

Even assuming we could process the fee for nothing, we don’t actually get enough visitors a day to sell enough copies even at the (very unlikely) conversion rate of 100% to make minimum wage. Obviously minimum wage might be ok if you are 21 and live with your parents but unfortunately I’ve got an entire family to look after in good old Blighty and it’s not getting any cheaper to live here!

Still, it was interesting to see the number of people who would impulse buy a game based on the strength of a video and / or a review of the game from some trusted source somewhere on teh internets. There were a few people who won’t even throw a dollar at anything – presumably not even a bag of crisps – unless it’s a dead cert, but I suspect that though vocal these people are absolutely a minority and I’ve got the figures to back it up! Revenge has been selling on Steam for 3 months now without a demo just fine. And just ask Apple how their pricing policies and refund policies have worked out for everyone. So, sorry guys, but if you won’t even throw a dollar at something to try it out for yourself, your options are becoming increasingly limited and at the end of the day you’re probably just cutting your nose off to spite your face. Well done! You saved a dollar! You can watch TV tonight all night again as a reward.

* We’ve just been informed that BMTMicro, our payment processor, are going to be able to reduce their fee from about $1.50 to 70c on games priced under $5 – so we’ve updated the price of the Ultrabundle and the games within to $4.97 to see what happens!

Paypal, Amazon Payments and Google Checkout

If you’re reading this then chances are you’re a fan and already bought something from us anyway, but BMTMicro have now added the ability to buy our games really easily using Paypal, Amazon and Google Checkout! Unfortunately right now Amazon are still insisting on getting address details but BMT I think are working on convincing them they don’t need that info for a registration.

What We’re Doing Now

So: Chaz is moving house, so he’s going to be incommunicado and otherwise busy for a month or so. While he’s doing that, I’m tarting up the Ultrabundle games, making them finally display in fully freely resizable windows (about time eh!). Droid Assault has gotten a much more thorough working over, with varying levels of zoom depending on droid scanner ranges, and tweaks to gameplay, weaponry, droids, and difficulty. I’ll be releasing the new Droid Assault update soon.

I think it’s ok to tell you that the Ultrabundle games will be available on Steam at some point in the not-too-distant-future, and like Revenge of the Titans, you will be able to get free Steam keys for them as soon as they’re released. So don’t let that get in the way of buying the Ultrabundle now

After I’ve gotten the Ultrabundle games sorted for Steam, we’re going to start work on a new game. This isn’t the game we were originally planning to do next – we think that game is going to take about 2 years to get to releasable state and we’ve only got money for a year left. Instead we’re going to resurrect Treasure Tomb and attempt to do it justice with new hi-res graphics and other clever things. In particular we’re keen on making an integrated level editor that ordinary players can use, to, er, make all the levels for us with. Heheh.

Somewhere amongst all this I’m going to slowly chip away at Steam SDK stuff and get the achievements into Revenge of the Titans. And probably the Ultrabundle games as well. Busy busy busy!

Question: If our games cost a buck each, but didn’t have a demo, would you take a punt and buy ‘em anyway just to find out if they were fun?

I call on thee, the great unwashed, to comment.

Puppy Games is looking for a new MINION to join our tiny boutique studio. Briefly the perks comprise of:

1. Working from home.
2. Working your own hours.
3. Writing games for iOS.
4. Working for an award winning, renowned studio.
5. Generous holidays.
6. Being surrounded by beautiful women.

Only one of those statements is possibly untrue.

The conditions, disadvantanges and small print of your employment are thus:

1. Miserly pay. We don’t have lots of cash but we’ve got enough to pay you a frugal living.
2. You’ve got to be a UK taxpayer. Where you actually are we don’t care.
3. Your first job will be to port all our games to iOS, which is not as exciting as it sounds.
4. Only later will you get to do interesting stuff.

To this end we seek solicitations from UNIVERSITY GRADUATES with a PORTFOLIO OF GAMES PROGRAMMING EXPERIENCE on iOS who is able to attend an interview in Taunton within the next 3 months. You might not necessarily be a graduate, but then you’ll have a really great portfolio consisting of at least one FINISHED GAME. It would be extraordinarily beneficial if you are proficient in Java, OpenGL, and maybe C++ or C as well.

Please email your CV, either a URL, .doc, or .pdf, to cprince@puppygames.net with the subject “MINION”. Please include hyperlinks to any stuff we can check out online such as demos or video, and also include a covering letter saying what your salary expections might be so we can have a good chortle.

I’m afraid we CAN’T AFFORD AGENCY FEES so if you’re a pimp, I’m afraid you won’t get lucky this time around.

If after all the UNUSUAL JOB ADVERT HONESTY you still aren’t put off then this might be the job for you!

Over the weekend you lucky game playing types may have noticed that Revenge of the Titans got a bit of a bump up to version 1.80.12. A seemingly minor version number update – but no! This one contains the secret new buildings! Pretty much that’s all we did for this release – maybe fixed a few really minor things but I can’t remember what they were.

As usual the procedure for updating the game is simply download the latest version from where you originally got it, reinstall, and you’re done. Steam will update the game automatically, but we’re still waiting for them to make it live I think.

New building info…

Read the rest of this entry

Finally as promised, you can take a look at the source code to Revenge of the Titans here. Inside that zip file you will find:

• A src folder containing all the Java and XML source code. Yes, the package name is “worm”. It’s a long story. The whole project was codenamed Ultraworm.
• A docs folder containing some licenses and a readme.
• A libs folder containing the Java dependencies for the project.

License

Now read this carefully: you can do what you want with the contents of that zip, provided you leave the license header alone that’s at the top of each file and respect its meaning (and the licenses of the various libraries). Make your own RTS or Tower Defence game, pinch any bits of code you like from within (in which case the license header is probably in a grey area but… I don’t care much), or maybe make some mods for Revenge of the Titans itself.

What you absolutely may not do is redistribute our assets – that’s the graphics and sounds and music – without our express permission, which if I don’t know you quite well, you are unlikely to get. Although some of the sound in the game comes from the incredibly awesome Freesound.org project, the oggs and jars are still ours; if you want the original .wav files which are licensed under the creative commons license, we’ve included links to every one of them in the docs.

You may also absolutely not use the name “Revenge of the Titans”, “Puppygames”, or “Shaven Puppy Ltd” when redistributing any derivative works without our express permission, as that’d again be stepping on our trademarks.

Some bright spark might cunningly put the lot up on github or sourceforge or whatever – go ahead. Said bright spark might also produce an Ant build.xml file.

Support

This is very important: I have almost no time to actually support this source code and your many complicated questions about how it works. If you’re asking me much about how it works in the first place I suspect you shouldn’t be bothering to look at the source anyway.

Anyone who emails the support email address about the source code will be ignored, after being hung by the foreskin until sorry.

Other than that: I now apologise in advance for the extremely crappy code and terrible inaccurate or nonexistent commenting! It just grew that way. In fact it’s all been growing for 10 years and the subject of constant bodging, retrofitting, and general breaking and poor design. I have it on good authority from Markus that it’s not quite as horrible as the Minecraft code but I suspect it’s not far off.

Making Mods

The one area where I will help out is making mods for the game. However, it’s quite an advanced sort of subject, and I shall expound upon exactly how to do this in a forthcoming blog post.

Other News

I got another 2000 keys from Steam, just as we were about to run out. And finally the Steam version has been patched to v1.80.11. The Mac version is imminent.

First of all, the Steam key generator wotsit is now up and running here … and hopefully it works too. Go try it blog squadron, then we’ll fix it when we find out it doesn’t work, and then we’ll send out a newsletter.

Secondly, we got a very nice review on Eurogamer.net – 8/10 aint bad and it’s full of nice quotes too …

Hundreds of Titans will die, but still they come. As levels creep towards their end, the apparently endless spew of chomping 2D horrors finally peters out, the frown will lift from your face, the sweat will be wiped from your brow, and you will feel good.

…and…

Titans has been continually honed during approximately 38 million years in beta, and it shows.

…for example

And thirdy, worthy of it’s own post if it weren’t for the overdue Steam keys thing, we bring you breaking news…

I have photographic evidence of a Megatitan attack during a street parade in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan yesterday. An entire album of evidence!

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/BcTEOtk6-vZAfCGd_TpbQQ?feat=directlink

Pity these hapless souls who you see carried in the wake of its destructive power! I was an eyewitness, and I count myself fortunate that I lived to tell the tale! Crowds gathered on the sidewalk, amazed at its mighty roar– an echoing bellow of fury as loud as a megaphone!

The creature defeated Mario. It defeated Wallace and Grommit. It even defeated a camel and an octopus. Nothing could stand before its might!

Who, then, saved the planet earth? The alien invaders had failed to account for one thing. On this planet, H20 falls from the very sky itself. This element was the only thing that could penetrate a carapace of pure cardboardium!

I urge you to spread news of this invasion! More photographic and video evidence will be forthcoming!

your faithful correspondent,
Matt Arnold

We will indeed bring you any further updates as soon as we get them – who knows where the Titans will strike next!

News update!

Just as we we’re going to press, as they say, we’ve received further footage of the days events…

Bigger than the one we bagged in Trafalgar Square! Had that one stuffed, we did. Jolly good, eh what!

Indeed!

Ahoy there! I can put this off no longer, as a couple of showstopper bugs have been fixed. There’s a new build of Revenge of the Titans available, v1.80.11. Once again, Humble Bundlers should be downloading from their original Humble Bundle links when Jeffrey tweets that is is there (give it 24-48 hours or so), not from Puppygames (or you’ll just end up with an unregistered demo!) Have a look at what happened in this build and then I’ll explain the consequences:

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: if Smartbomb is selected, then another option on the build menu is selected, you lose the smartbomb
• Fixed: having an active smartbomb when you die leave the game in “smartbomb mode” so you got a free smartbomb upon restarting the level
• Fixed: divide by zero error at seriously high difficulties in Endless mode level generator
• Fixed: endless level 51 and above became suddenly insanely difficult
• Fixed: level generator never ends if it generates a duff level
• Fixed: clicking generate new easier level on wasn’t having any effect
• Fixed: spider droids and ticks unable to squeeze through some gaps, so they refused to move and the level never ended

Balance

• More mines!
• More barricades!
• Difficulty eased on later levels
• Brought crystals a little closer to the base
• Disruptors buffed to 32pts damage
• Lasers nerfed to 1-8pts damage / tick
• Crystal scavenging nerfed to 10%, which should encourage use of refineries a little more eh?
• Reduced agitation caused by use of droids and heavy weapons by a factor of 2 (and also, the effect of decoys)

New Features and Enhancements

• Mod support using the mods= commandline parameter! Separate jar file paths with system path separators.
• Using mods segrates you on the survival hiscore table
• Crystal scavenge rate boosted to 15% then 20% if you choose one or both refinery permabuffs (in any order)
• You can hover over a crystal now to get the amount of money left in it (reprocessors etc. notwithstanding)

Internal

• Game now uses Java 6 and is no longer Moleboxed. No more virus warnings! But we’ll have lost a tiny bit of performance and startup will be a bit slower.
• Increased memory parameters to -Xms64m -Xmx375m for 64-bit VMs
• Removed AdaptiveSizePolicy VM parameter
• Split up sound and graphics jars each into 3 smaller jars
• Games now look for a patch.jar in the game directory which is used in preference to the contents of the rest of the jars
• One nice big MSVC solution to build all the launchers executable using the same code
• Dug up some license documentation
• Did the code for the Scarecrow and Cloaking Device
• Moved loads of static final constants into XML so they can be modded
• Multiple mods loaded in order on the commandline
• Gidrahs that fail to find a route five consecutive times are killed (cause of death: grid bug)
• Diagonally moving gidrahs were allowed to plot horizontal and vertical routes but then prevented from actually executing them
• Increased hint duration from 7 to 10 seconds

Analysis

Mostly what you’ll notice about this version is that it’s somewhat easier than before. You’ve got more mines and barricades, the heavy weapons and special buildings don’t make the gidrahs quite so angry, the crystals are a little closer to the base, and the overally difficulty has been tuned down a fair amount, especially as you get past Mars. It’ll still get hard if you’re doing really well, but with any luck, more people should have more fun more of the time in this version.

A subtle (and, honestly, not particularly relevant) change to crystal scavenging sees the amount of crystal recovered nerfed from 20% to 10%. That’s only a few hundred bucks in reality, but you can buff it again by researching the two refinery permabuffs (5% each). The idea of this subtle change was to encourage refining, just a bit more.

Under the hood, the game is now being deployed using JDK6 server VM (which is what all the Mac and Linux folks have been using all along anyway, so no change there). Also on Windows we’re no longer using the Moleboxed solution, for two reasons: firstly, because various virus checkers keep on finding false positives, grrr; and secondly, because the game now has mod support, albeit in a fairly hardcore manner. To create mods you’ll need to be proficient with XML editing, making JAR files, and tweaking your commandline. Suffice to say that this is a little bit involved and will require a whole blog post explaining it all, which I’ll get around to next week, and this will also coincide with me officially releasing the source code, which you will of course need to make any sense of the modding process.

In Other News…

I haven’t been able to update the Steam depot to v1.80.11 yet because our Valve rep is either away or busy or otherwise indisposed in some way. This also means we haven’t yet got the Mac port onto Steam either. Sorry folks, there’s nothing I can do about this yet. Also: if you want to see the Ultrabundle on Steam, ask Valve As with Revenge of the Titans, we will be able to provide Steam keys for existing customers.

I am trying to sort out the Steam keys thing! I’ve just been waylaid for the last week and unable to get on with serious work. I’ll notify the world with a blog post when it’s ready as there are so many of you want Steam keys. <edit> We originally stipulated that the Steam key would be a one-way conversion but this is not the case – your Steam key is totally free of strings attached.

Some people have asked, and here it is: I tweet as @princec1234 though I don’t say much.

We are in the process of talking about an iPad version of Revenge of the Titans, but we’re not sure exactly how far we can get with it just yet. We’ll keep you posted if the project gets the go-ahead.

And finally we’ve been doing lots of thinking about our next game. Or at least, some bits of it. We really want to get on and start writing it as we’ve got precious little cash spare to spend on fiddling with Revenge of the Titans forever. As of right now we’ve got about 16 months’ money to develop the next game with, less if we do the iPad port and it tanks, which it very well might if Apple decide not to feature it. So game design caps are on! Brains are boiling! Pencils are being chewed at an increased rate!

So it would seem… we are on Steam now! Humble Bundlers: Valve are working on getting the game into your libraries. Be patient, it’ll just pop up automatically when it’s ready. Puppygames customers: we’ll sort out keys for anyone who wants to use the Steam version – I’m working on a page you can use to grab a Steam key automatically as there are too many requests for me to do manually now!

I’ve got another patch waiting in the wings, v1.80.11, but I’ll release that next weekend when things are quiet. Amongst other things it increases the amount of barricades and mines you get, brings crystals a bit closer, reduces difficulty somewhat in later levels, and has modding support in it!

Quick note – we’ll be adding Steam achievements and hopefully Steam Cloud support over the next month or so. And getting ahold of Steam keys is going to take a day or two maybe. Hang in there.

We Can Haz A Forumz!111!1!

The Joy of Valve! They have given us a forum! See you there.

Here’s the first wallpaper, which is a modified version of the image that will be gracing the Steam store soon, touch wood…

Click on the image for compressed .jpg version, or you can grab an uncompressed .jpg or .png (which Windows will convert to a .jpg anyway if you set it as the desktop background, I think.

Will be putting up other sizes, and getting special versions done for those that helped with the Mac icon, soon! … though that’s a special Puppygames soon

ペイントツールSAI ftw!

There’s another wallpaper image to come as well, along similar lines, at a later date. Here’s how it looked at an early stage in PaintTool SAI, which really is the dog’s ‘nads if you’ve got a tablet, and can’t draw for toffee*, like me…

Tune in tmrw to see the finished thing!… Steam permitting.

* It doesn’t really make you any better at drawing in general, as you can probably tell by my efforts, it just makes it easier to draw smooth lines with a tablet with it’s cunning adjustable stabilizer wotsit.

Another mid-week patch of Revenge of the Titans, to v1.80.10, with a special nerfing just to annoy Sylen, who posts on this blog from time to time. Several annoying bugs fixed, including a couple of fundamental ones; and some further tweaks to balance involving heavy weapons, which were still way too powerful most of the time.

The stockpile limit’s been slashed to 5 units, which is easily enough, if you’re honest with yourself, provided you’re careful about not getting them blown up. And merely placing them makes the gidrahs… upset. Which should spice things up a little. This gave me the opportunity to put in a nice little side-effect for decoys, which now actually make the gidrahs less angry. This rather makes them a very, very important building, now.

Steam

This version is currently wrangling its way into Steam. We sort of missed our launch window so we’re just waiting for Valve to basically switch it on – it’s uploaded, it works, it’s all ready to rock n roll. Puppygames customers will be able to request a Steam key to get the Steam version of the game (which is actually of course almost identical to the Puppygames one). Likewise Humble Bundlers. I don’t actually know how this process works yet mind so bear with me whilst we work out how.

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: got rid of that annoying “missing sellMode.buffer” message in the error log
• Fixed: [0] available in mini-build panel for buildings that aren’t limited
• Fixed: droids accidentally were targeting big gidrahs preferably to gidlets
• Fixed: gidlet could get paralysed by being in same map tile as a building without actually colliding with it causing level to never end
• Fixed: online hiscores going a bit screwy (serverside fix)
• Fixed: fullscreen scrolling using the mouse when using custom viewport

Balance

• Use of heavy weapons, droids and shield generators makes the gidrahs cross
• Decoys now calm the gidrahs down
• Heavy weapons stockpiles now limited to 5

New Features and Enhancements

• New icons!
• Droids less likely to target big gidrahs or bosses deliberately if there are easier targets around
• Wraiths no longer harmed by stray bullets unless you’ve got xray tech
• Tactical gidrahs now more agitated by heavy weapons

Internal

• Droids now only scan for opportunity targets every second
• Changed Windows memory parameters slightly (64m initial heap, 256m max)
• Removed an unintentional recursion in gidrah movement AI
• Gidlets now whizz about randomly when they reach their target tile to help them hit things
• Gidrahs now removed automatically after 5 seconds of reaching their target tile without any action

Sandbox Mode

I’d quite like to put this in at some point down the line. Any suggestions for how you’d like it to work? Maybe we can collectively design a few new game modes instead of just the one. I’m quite keen on exploring the idea of a mode which allows you to upload hand-crafted ASCII maps and a set of available buildings, for other people to play against and either try to survive a set number of aliens, or play against the clock like Survival mode for hiscores. Quite complicated though and unlikely to earn any money… or maybe… horrors! … we should issue it as the dreaded DLC and sell it for a couple of bucks? That’d help fund it.

Cas has a Mac. It is broken. I’ve done a .icns with a 512px square image for the Mac dock thing or whateveritscalled – but no way to test. As far as I’m aware the 512px image in the .icns is only used in the dock thing and should look something like…

… so Mac users, your challenge is – can you get to preview a .icns file in your dock wotsit, is this the only place a 512px icon is used, and does it look any good, or does it look a bit poo? You can download the .icns here. Winner gets a brand spanking new yet-to-be-seen signed wallpaper with your name scribbled on it! Or something.

oh and ‘Arm of the Lord’… just the first image i grabbed from google

Here’s the last patch before the Steam release (promise!)… I was going to leave it where it was but a couple of things were bothering me, which were the ease with which levels were unbalanced by having infinite numbers of very powerful buildings, and also a performance problem specifically when the droid factory was used too much. One thing led to another, and I ended up changing rather a lot of things in small but significant ways, in the v1.80.8 patch of Revenge of the Titans. No, I haven’t quite got around to the Webstart version which is still broken (why the hell is anyone still using it? Webstart is rubbish!)

Humble Bundlers will have to wait a bit, as per usual, for the Tweet of Rosen.

The following things have been done:

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: item descriptions in HUD a bit wrong
• Fixed: central spawners appearing too close to base
• Fixed: survival mode picked up research from the wrong level

Balance

• Buffed droid factories now cost $1500
• Droid factory now produces max of 6 droids, plus 1 per reactor (before, they would just churn out a max of 10 x number of factories)
• Sergeant droids produced slightly less frequently when factories buffed by reactors (eg. 1 in 10 droids is a sergeant on a 4-reactor factory)
• More gidlets spawned when player is using droids!
• Decoys only produced at a rate of 1 per level
• Shield generators only available at a rate of 1 per level also; price now fixed at $2500
• Droid factory and heavy weapons now available only in limited quantities (1 per level), balanced by hoarding
• Less mines and barricades and tangleweb available per level – balanced by hoarding
• The various limited-production buildings now have various limited maximums

New Features and Enhancements

• Tangled gidrahs warn other gidrahs when they’re killed
• Unused buildings/barricades/mines etc. are hoarded for the next level, up to various limited maximums
• “Reinforcements” (extra buildings) arrive in Survival mode when bosses are spawned

Internal

• Default sleep=true on single core systems
• Reduced sound streaming thread delay to 1ms from 8ms and increased priority; increased streaming buffer count

Analysis

The main thing you will notice is that cool things are suddenly a bit scarce. All those lovely heavy weapons, and the droid factory, shield generator and decoys, they’re all now only created at a rate of 1 per level. And barricades and mines are suddenly, literally, a lot more thin on the ground.

Balancing this out, anything you don’t use is hoarded for the next level. As in, not used at all; not recycled. So you can, if possible, not use your laser capabilities for 3 levels, then have a level with 3 laser cannon on it. Similar with droid factories – hoard ‘em up if you don’t really need them. Maybe you don’t need mines one level? Great – save them for a fireworks extravaganza!

It remains to be seen how this affects the general balance of play, but it’s added a crafty little dimension of thoughtful resource management to the game, which I quite like, and it’s more or less independent of difficulty. It also means those buildings are pretty precious now even if you’ve got tons of cash, because you can’t just plonk down a replacement if it gets eaten by ravening monsters.

No Prizes

Bah, once again we didn’t win anything or get noticed by the cognoscenti. What we need is an army of rabid fans to hound judges of such competitions. I thought we did rather well with Revenge, especially in the, you know, gameplay, graphics, sound and music stakes, and put years of effort into making it perfect… grumble, moan, etc.

Right, that’s enough whining. I can’t wait to see the back of it! We’ve got a new game to write.

So, my big news is the birth of daughter number 2, Saffron Natalie Asia Prince (continuing the tradition of strange and unusual names in our family). Born at 815am on Saturday morning and weighing a colossal 10lbs 4oz after an extremely gruelling 26 hours of what looked like a pretty nasty labour! But all’s well that ends well and baby and mum are hale, hearty and healthy, and we were all home in time for mid-afternoon tea.

Another mouth to feed! Bugger. As I have alluded to my geeky friends though, I shall know my life’s work is done when my daughters one day ask me, “Daddy, how come the Dude is also in Tron?”

This is all, of course, not spectacularly interesting to Puppygames blog readers

What might be more interesting are the following items on the agenda:

Revenge of the Titans 1.80.7

I’ve uploaded another patch, early. We need to get it as trouble-free as possible for our release on Steam next week, so I’ve just stuck to trying to fix the last few important niggles. To this end it’s there right now to download, so you can test out the couple of fixes I’ve done. Here’s the changelog:

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: super slow gidrahs

Balance

• Reduced Saturn boss armour to 4, so now damageable by more weapons; increased hitpoints by 40%

Internal

• Added a Thread.yield() in the tick() loop to see if we can reduce sound stuttering
• Added a commandline switch sleep=true to force sleeping instead of yielding for machines with persistent sound stuttering troubles
• Game now recovers gracefully from a failed Restore, no more ghostly sprites left on the game screen!

Musings on Pricing

You might have noticed that the price of Revenge of the Titans has shot up to an apparently ball-bustingly massive $27.72 – egads! That’s like, nearly as much as a takeaway curry, which will give you, like, days and days of enjoyment! (If you leave it out all night and reheat it and eat it, anyway).

This has caused much nerdrage amongst the Glorious Entitled Of The Internet, who believe that everything should be free or nearly free (and if not free, then DRM free and available from the Pirate Bay). How dare Puppygames suddenly charge full price for their shitty 8-bit retro Flash same-as-all-the-others Tower Defense game? Why would I, Angry Righteous Gamer, pay my week’s pocket money out for this piece of utter shit?

Of course, gamers know everything there is to know about economics and pricing models, because they all make and sell games for a living, and do so more successfully than Puppygames do. We are of course famously broke and never made much of a bean with our games, but it was never anything to do with the price of them. We’ve sold games from everything between $4 and $28, and if you want to know the actual truth of it, it makes no difference to our bottom line whatever price we charge. My esteemed peer Cliff Harris aka Cliffski has rather a lot of knowledge of economics and has a few things to say on the subject which you might find interesting, and which I won’t bother repeating here (hurrah for hyperlinks!).

So I’m going to let you in on a few secrets and explanations as to the method behind my madness, mostly because if you’re reading this you’re a) very likely to already be a fan of our games and supporting us already and b) it really won’t make any difference if world+dog knows our secret world dominiation plans.

Firstly: we have always said the game would be $27.72 when it was finished, and we lured your wallets open with a 50% off pre-order beta offer which we rounded down to the considerably more l33t number $13.37. Obviously our UK and European customers got some crazy price in our funny national / continental currency that was around halfish too, except we all have to pay VAT. Bah.

Secondly: if we failed to officially increase the price of the game, that would have made us bullshitters about our pre-order offer. Technically.

Thirdly, there’s a 50% off coupon in the game, which is the first thing you see (if you don’t know yet it’s ROTTROCKS – put this in the BMT order form). So in reality it’s still 50% off, just like it always was, give or take a few cents. This is a special offer; we can change that whenever we want. We can offer 25% off, or 75% off, or 90% off. What this does is firstly make the game as cheap as it always was, and secondly make it look like a right bargain compared to its RRP of $27. It also means we can do legitimate sales with apparently astounding savings one day in the future but still make enough money to make it worth doing. At 90% off we still make a profit of about $1 on a registration of the game and 90% off sounds bloody appealing.

Fourthly, we needed to ensure there was pricing parity with the Steam version, which will be released next week at $14.95. The special offer 50% coupon means we’re effectively charging the same price as Steam is for the game. Well, a little bit less, but then Steam comes with the real advantages which you’ll all know if you love Steam. I love Steam. Don’t be ashamed.

So you see, having a high RRP on our site might be newsworthy fail for a few angry Reddit nerds, but the reality is, the game is still obtainable for the same price everywhere, and we can tweak the offer on a whimsy and make it newsworthy when we do so at the same time as making it look like a bargain.

And that’s the method to our madness. We have no idea if we’re right, but you’re sure as shit not going to tell us we’re wrong. We’ve got the numbers to do that for us.

I’m just preparing this post during a lull in the contractions and so on while we have baby #2 (don’t know if it’s a boy or another girl yet, we like surprises!). I had v1.80.6 of Revenge of the Titans ready yesterday by good fortune, so I’ve built it and uploaded and everyone should be able to download this final version by the time you can read this.

Wait… did I say final version? Well, yes, I did, because we’re no longer in beta! This is the version we’re going to put on Steam, and so we’re “finished”, except for a forthcoming (free) expansion in a few months time adding a few more buildings, just for fun. We really ought to get on with making a new game as soon as possible, because we’re still surviving on minimum wage and that’s not going to keep us in business for long. The Humble Bundle money will run out by Christmas which doesn’t leave a very long time to get another game selling. In fact it doesn’t leave anywhere near enough time – Revenge has taken 3 long years to make. Panic!

Anyway… we’re going to increase the price to $27.72 now seeing as nobody’s buying it anyway, and hope Steam can give us another 6 months’ money with which to get something approaching playable together and released into the wild. But for now, my next couple of weeks is going to be taken up with Steam panic and new baby panic. And getting around to the huge 3 week backlog of support emails I’ve been neglecting.

Humble Bundlers: download your update from your original Humble Bundle links, not Puppygames!!

Read the rest of this entry

Laters!

…1.80.6 will be slightly delayed

That was a phrase a customer of ours once used to describe our software development ethos (back when I was developing performance management software for local government). He wasn’t being especially kind in this turn of phrase but the irony is, this is exactly what software development is all about.

So with that subtly distracting anecdote out of the way, I bring you another raft of massive changes, in the form of Revenge of the Titans v1.80.5. Update: it’s up now for both Puppygames and Humblebundlers. Humblebundlers please download from your original download location, not Puppygames!

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: refineries description showed the wrong rate (should have been $10 every 3 seconds, not $10 every 15 seconds!)
• Fixed: collecting barricades in Survival mode didn’t update the HUD counters
• Fixed: gidlets were supposed to not get hit by blaster rounds; now they aren’t
• Fixed: capacitor light beam was at the wrong angle
• Fixed: liquid sodium accidentally buffed reload rate (should have been precision engineering)
• Fixed: window size parameters behaving oddly
• Fixed: smartbombs (and rocket explosions!) weren’t working properly at all (and never have!)
• Fixed: Mars stories about capacitor, which only has Particle Physics as its prerequisite now

Balance

• Reduced building connection range by 1 tile
• All turret upgrades now half price, but also only (roughly) half as effective
• Buffed sergeant droids cause a wee bit of stun and have armour piercing rounds
• Big increase in available crystals in later levels
• Buff Titan gids
• Dropped pickups now last rather less time onscreen
• A slight nerfing to the reload time of spreader and assault cannon
• No more $100 or $250 pickups from angry gidrahs. Well, a lot less anyway.
• Nerfed blast mines down to 16pts damage

New Features and Enhancements

• You can now specify graphics scaling on the commmandline with scale=1.0 etc.
• Online hiscores in Survival mode!
• Saturn and Titan now have variations on Perlin noise for more interesting terrain generation
• Wraiths now take much more damage from armour piercing rounds and blasters buffed with Reactors
• Free to sell buildings when level not started
• Gidrahs now speed up as they approach the base!
• Gidrahs with weapons will now shoot at your base
• Lasers now switch sweep direction for alternate firing
• Blasters now stop firing at gidrahs they are not causing any damage to

Internal

• Hint to clear level of crystals for a bonus not shown till level 5, when it’s actually possible
• Quadtree collision manager replaced by much faster and simpler cell-based collision manager
• Gidrahs now all have consistent model for getting more difficult

Analysis

Well, as far as fundamental changes to gameplay go, this is possibly more significant even than the last big change from 1.7x to 1.8x. The bulk of the tuning and tweaking and enhancement has gone on to make so that a single central base defence of super-buffed-up turrets is now going to be much harder to achieve. Your upgrades now only cost half as much – but they are now only half as effective. And as before they seem to get more significant the more you add of a particular type… this is going to leave you with some tough choices as to how to buff your turrets. With limited space for upgrades now, and them only being half as effective, you’re going to have to buff certain turrets in certain ways to get the best out of them.

The multiblaster has never really gotten much love from people. I suggest you give it another go: it’s far better value for money than three ordinary blasters when it’s been upgraded a bit with a companion or two. And I’ve finally implemented a tiny bit of useful turret AI: if a blaster detects that its shots are simply being deflected from the target, it will stop firing and choose another target! This was the multiblaster’s biggest downfall – emptying a whole clip into an armoured gidrah, doing very little useful.

A final important change is that the gidrahs will speed up when they get close to your base – which means waiting for them to get all the way to the base means they’re going to come at you fast. You might still manage Earth and Moon and most of Mars without changing tactics too much but by Saturn I don’t think you’ll be able to hold them off with a single fat cluster of turrets. You’ll need to pick them off en route. With any luck the new balance should require you to build two or three powerful clusters of turrets.

Other things of note: people who’d like to see loads more of the map might want to try using a custom window size (width & height) on the commandline, followed by a new parameter, scale=xxx, where it normally uses 2.0. You can try 1.0 to get 1:1 pixel scaling, which makes the map very hi-res, but you might need a fairly powerful machine to cope.

Hiscores

Yes, real online hiscores! I want to see those times creeping up. Monkey! Knife! Fight!

Just a quick update to say I’ve patched Revenge of the Titans to v1.80.4, mainly to fix that crash bug you all noticed – I will get around to the huge pile of email the last couple of releases are generated tomorrow, honest – and tweak the balance slightly. This week I’m mostly going to be working on recording all your lovely Survival mode hiscores, Steam achievement integration, and possibly putting Sandbox mode in if there’s time.

Someone clever has noticed that it’s a total waste of time actually planting more than a single refinery before level 5 (just to actually start the aliens coming). In fact it’s probably not even worth bothering to research them until level 5 though the game does sort of hint at it being important. Hm. But then you can get a bit of a headstart with the efficiency research. Decisions, decisions! You know, I have no idea myself what the best path through this game actually is. Survival mode hiscores will reveal all.

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: crash researching lasers and disruptors
• Fixed: powerup counters appearing when collecting a powerup when the HUD is flipped down

Balance

• Collectors now $500
• Cooling towers now $500
• Difficulty now slighty biased in favour of cash in the bank (ie. the more you hoard instead of use, the harder it gets)

Internal

• Halved streaming audio buffer size as it doesn’t seem to have had any effect

… but just before I go, the Revenge of the Titans Windows and Mac v1.80.4 patches are there now, and the Linux ones are in the queue uploading very slowly. The crash bugs are fixed (phew). Humble Bundle versions will probably take about another 12 hours to appear. Full scoop and proper update announcement around then.

More tweaking – and it turns out a few fairly serious bugs! I’m proud to announce the v1.80.3 patch of Revenge of the Titans. Get your new versions as per usual from the same place you got your original copy. Yes, Humble Bundlers, I mean you. Especially the ones that keep installing the Puppygames version and then expecting it to be registered. Grr.

Humble Bundlers: please wait until it’s officially announced by Humble Bundle Inc. – Jeffrey’s still uploading things at the moment

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: strange vertical streaks when barricades blown up
• Fixed: advice to use powerups that you had even when you didn’t have any
• Fixed: ever escalating difficulty when collecting powerups – whooops!
• Fixed: danger around turrets was miscalculated when adding/removing ghosted buildings
• Fixed: danger around turrets was miscalculated when adding/removing scanners
• Fixed: tooltips had a hover active
• Fixed: exotic powerups no longer appearing since 1.80.2!
• Fixed: failing to start audio on Windows
• Fixed: X-ray scanners not picking up wraiths very well

Balance

• Adjust boss hitpoints based on initial distance to base
• Disruptor nerfed back down to 32pts damage
• Laser nerfed back down to 12pts damage
• Survival mode tweaked more
• Increased relative turret danger amounts
• Nerf bosses in survival mode
• General reduction in boss hitpoints
• Angry gidrahs a tiny bit more wary of turrets
• Some Saturnian and Titanian gidrahs got bigger brains
• Heavy blaster and blast cannon now have armour piercing rounds, but do a bit less damage
• All weaponry now costs less
• Reprocessor now $750
• Reactors don’t decrease fire rate any more
• Multiblaster now tiny bit more powerful
• More crystals on later levels

New Features and Enhancements

• Show bullet stun duration in stats screens
• Disruptors now dangerous to own buildings! (Unless you research disruptor shielding) Barricades are unaffected
• Stop plinky beeps after a few seconds
• Increase gidrah speed with danger except on tangleweb
• Gidlets no longer hit by large weapons fire
• Survival mode to only enable those items that are researched at the point the world is completed
• Blasters once again cause a bit of stun now

Internal

• Danger radius of turrets increased by 1 tile radius
• Discovered reason for audio not working – wasn’t MSCVR90.dll after all, was a broken OpenAL32 dll
• Found deeply buried bug in emitters causing the red streaks in barricade explosions
• Flush prefs on options screen closing
• Doubled streaming audio buffer size

Analysis

Quite a lot of balance changes in this version, which are quite subtle, and possibly experimental. If you all mostly like it, they’ll stick,

The most obvious and immediate change you will notice is that turrets are quite a bit cheaper. Revenge is a game about blowing things up with lots of turrets and it’s a bit of a shame if you can’t afford lots of them, so they are now generally a fair bit cheaper than they were. Hopefully this will encourage a little more use of the big guns.

The damage dealt by the heavy blaster and blast cannon is now reduced, and compensated for partly by their being much cheaper than before, but also because they now fire armour piercing rounds. The aim of this change is to make it generally the case that deploying bigger blasters to take out smaller gidrahs with lots of hitpoints is not really the strategy we want you to employ. The big blasters are for armoured targets. To take out targets with lots of hitpoints, you want to be using the multiblaster, which now does a teeny smidgen more damage, or the heavy weapons.

A lot of people noticed that by about Saturn the generally successful survival technique was to make a cluster of maxed out big guns near the base (where all the aliens eventually have to come). This may no longer be the case, as the gidrahs in Saturn had their brains increased a bit and will now generally all go for your refineries first, choking your money supplies. Along with the nerfing of the blast cannon, waiting to see the whites of their malevolent glowing eyes may not be a viable tactic any more. The gidrahs are also a bit smarter about avoiding bigger guns. Obviously, if they have no choice, then they have no choice.

I’ve made a tweak to Survival mode which you may or may not like (apart from further heavy difficulty tweaking): you now play survival mode using only the technology you unlocked on the last level of each world. This makes for some interesting decisions about your research path if you’re attempting to get Survival hiscores. I will possibly be looking into a Sandbox Mode in the future which is basically like Survival but with all technology unlocked.

I’m not massively sure about all the various balance changes, so I’ll just throw it out there to you all and see what you think. Your campaign is compatible still with 1.80.x but you might want to start an experimental new slot to see how it goes.

I haven’t yet had time to sort out the online hiscores stuff (which also requires Chaz to do a bit of GUI work and he’s busy on Steam stuff and the like) – maybe next version. I bet that’ll be next weekend when you all find tons of bugs. But be warned! I’m due baby #2 on the 28th February and all bets are off if it turns up early

A] FLEE

B] ATTACK

C] DOWNLOAD

Yes, hot on the heels of v1.80.1 we already have Revenge of the Titans v1.80.2, which is really just a little bit of a tweak to address a couple of really annoying things that slipped past my bleary code-worn eyes. Well worth the download. Not least because if you don’t it’ll nag you to download forever.

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: shipped 32bit MSVCR90.dll this time – whoops
• Fixed: powerups counters would show zeros when HUD hidden and shown
• Fixed: mines / barricades counters would shown 10 when should have shown 0 when HUD hidden and shown

Balance

• Made game easier overall – too many people getting stuck!
• Survival a little bit harder

New Features and Enhancements

• Batteries no longer slow down reloading rate

Internal

• Gidrahs recalculate their paths a little less enthusiastically
• Slight adjustment to spawn delays in Survival

With any luck, I’ve finally got to the bottom of the sound not working on a few of those Windows machines out there. Turns out I accidentally shipped a 64-bit dll in the last patch instead of the magic 32-bit one that would have fixed everything. Hm. I could in fact make a completely separate 64-bit version for Windows I suppose. Maybe that’ll confuse the great unwashed.

I Can Haz Done A Playthrough

Behold, a playthrough of levels 1-10 (15 minutes long). As you can see, I got my arse handed back to me on a plate, and not very gently either, on level 10, because I got a bit too cocky. But at least it shows the fighting spirit so lacking in today’s impetuous and lazy youth with their short attention spans and lack of investment in their own entertainment eh? Get off my lawn, Earth Boss!

I shall be uploading my Moon playthrough in a bit, which took me a fair amount longer to do, though I managed it all in one go without getting kicked in by the Titans

Full Steam Ahead!

I’ve only got a few things on my to-do list now for Revenge of the Titans, like a little graphical glitch when barricades get attacked and online hiscores integration… which is good, because it means I’m now working on the Steam client integration, which will see the unique medals in the game used as Steam achievements, and I’ll be storing the hiscores in Survival mode hopefully on Steam too. Not sure yet if the Steam cloud integration is going to work out properly for us or not yet – possibly in a patch.

Thanks to all you lovely beta testing user types, we’ve recorded and squished no less than 13 bugs in Revenge of the Titans, and tweaked the balance just a teeny bit. The freshly-baked result is v1.80.1, available at the usual locations – install over the top of the old one. As usual Jeffrey will be taking care of the Humble Bundle versions, however, it takes 2 hours for the files to upload to his server, so there will be a little wait for you. I’ll update the server notification message when Jeffrey confirms it’s all uploaded (that’s the thing that tells you there’s a new version available on the title screen)

Unfortunately due to a bit of an oversight, er, once again it’s possible that you might lose your progress, but only if you’re on Windows. But wait! There is a remedy. You know how there’s this revenge_of_the_titans_1.80 directory in your user home folder, in which lies all your saved games and prefs and such? Well, just rename that folder, prepending its name with a single period “.” character. Then all will be well.

Here’s what’s fixed, new and notable:

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: survival crash when only completed Earth missions after 40 minutes
• Fixed: functions keys keyboard shortcuts now work
• Fixed: crash when > 9 powerups
• Fixed: Linux shellscript saved logs in two slightly different locations
• Fixed: powerup numbers sometimes out of sync with button enabledness
• Fixed: multibarrel technology description
• Fixed: tangleweb shouldn’t slow down flying gidrahs, gidlets, or wraiths
• Fixed: gidlet spawned on tangleweb got stuck and couldn’t move
• Fixed: hover effects not being removed when right-clicking to pick up build mode
• Fixed: building effects now hidden when can’t build because hovering over other UI elements
• Fixed: couldn’t click when hovering over top HUD element
• Fixed: missing dot in settings folder name on Windows
• Fixed: exploding gidrahs not going off

New Features and Enhancements

• Option to not degrade difficulty when level restarted (for hardcore perfectionists only!)
• Lasers either target ground or air targets but not both at the same time
• Lasers targeting air targets only hit air targets but can fire over mountains etc.
• Battle postmortem in mission failed screen tries to offer a few hints

Balance

• Slightly easier Earth levels, slightly harder later levels
• Survival mode slightly harder
• Special offer on Decoys! Now only $1500!
• Your inventory of powerups now contributes to the overall difficulty of a level. Hoard them at your peril!

Internal

• Refactored powerups cycling code so it’s saved in metastate
• Included MSVCR90.dll in Windows build; seems that OpenAL-Soft requires it and it isn’t present on some systems
• New internal version number invalidates all slots (and hence, progress)
• Replaced StringBuffers with StringBuilders

Sorry these blog posts are so boring these days! Hopefully I won’t have to do any more emergency fixy things in the near future and I’ll be able to do a bunch of more enlightened and interesting bits of wisdom, like a postmortem, musings on the Humble Indie Bundle, how much money we earn, and what the next game’s going to be. You’d all like that, yes?

Well, this has turned out to be an unexpectedly massive release. Massively changing the game at this stage is, some would say, the work of a man two sandwiches short of a picnic. Well, we’re like that. And, I’ve eaten all the rest of the sandwiches, too. And here it is: Revenge of the Titans 1.80. (1.80? Eh? Something to do with Linux package version numbers. Grrr)

Puppygames customers, get the download here. Our new CDN seems rather better than the old one so there shouldn’t be any cache troubles.

Humble Bundlers will be able to download from their original download links – there may be a tiny delay whilst Humble Bundle Inc. upload the new builds from our servers but by the time you read this announcement I hope this will have been done.

Read the rest of this entry

Happy new year, blog following types! We have been hard at work doing all sorts of magical things, and the first fruits of our labour are now ready. Behold, proper Linux distributions for Ultratron, Titan Attacks and Droid Assault! You should be able to simply double-click to install .deb files on Debian based systems, and for other Linux systems, you’ll have to unzip the .tar.gzs and figure it out yourself. I can’t manage RPMs yet I’m afraid. Webstart still works, but it’s crap, so stop using it

I shan’t link them all directly here because there are many files involved. Instead, just head on over to the relevant downloads pages (linked above).

There are a couple of small internal changes:

• The location the games save their savedgame files and so on is now all lowercased, and spaces have been replaced with underscores, which makes it a little easier to deal with from commandline shells. Unfortunately this also means your existing prefs and savegames, er, won’t be where they’re supposed to be. Ah well. It’s an excuse to play them from scratch, no?
• On Windows I’ve finally gotten sick of the Creative OpenAL drivers breaking all our games, so I’ve renamed our OpenAL dll, and now there won’t be any confusion as to what it’s supposed to be using. Please note we haven’t done this yet for Revenge, that’s coming out in a week or so
• And finally I’ve fixed an accidental breakage in our “DRM” which was causing the games to not failsafe properly in the event Puppygames is hit by some form of low-orbit ion cannon.

We’ve also added a couple of nifty features which got lifted out of Revenge of the Titans, which work on both Windows and Linux:

Specifying Viewport Coordinates in Fullscreen Mode

Adding the following voodoo to your commandline:

vx=<integer> vy=<integer> vh=<integer> vw=<integer>

will put your game into a fullscreen mode where the viewport (the bit that shows the graphics) is specified by the coordinates you give. This is useful for multimonitor setups which fool our games into thinking you’ve got one giant monitor. You can screw things up completely like this, so just be aware you can hold down ESC for a couple of seconds to quit any of our games.

Specifying Alternative Save Game Paths

This is particularly useful as it works across all operating systems – which means you can point all your games at Dropbox and they’ll sync across all your machines automatically. For example, add this to your Windows shortcut commandline paying careful attention to the quotes and slashes:

"home=\"c:\My Dropbox\""

and similar voodoo for the Linux commandline.

The whole commandline needs to be enclosed in those outer quotes, by the way; hence the internal quotes being escaped with backslashes.

What Else Have We Been Up To?

We have also been extremely hard at work making Revenge of the Titans a better game for everyone. This includes shooting a few sacred cows and generally radical alteration to the entire game, which we have fearlessly done, even though some of you will no doubt spit flames over it.

The main things that are changed are:

• Research is now free
• There are another 20 research items, and another (small) building, “tangleweb”
• You no longer have to collect money from refineries, nor reload turrets. It’s all automated.
• More balance changes than you can shake a stick at to accommodate these fairly radical changes

Although you won’t be able to see it for another week or so, I’m entirely confident the new game is far more awesome than it ever was. At first I worried that removing all the manual clickery was just going to lead to a dull game… it turns out no, it doesn’t change the game at all, it just makes your mouse finger hurt less. It’s still completely mental, but now the difficulty levels are very finely tuned to your actual abilities and how you want to play the game, rather than you always being broke and at risk of sinking ever deeper into the spiral of fail.

In short, you’re gonna love it. Patience!