Puppyblog!

Whilst working on our new game (do you remember, many moons ago, we had a game called Monster Mash? Well, it’s still under development, and edging closer to being fun), I cut ‘n’ pasted the A* pathfinding algorithm from the multicore brains in Droid Assault into it. The A* algorithm is used in two places in the new game: in the first instance, to ensure that your bases are accessible by at least one enemy spawn point; and in the second instance, so that the gidrahs will trundle towards the base.

The map in the new game - OK, let’s call it Monster Mash even though it’s not called Monster Mash any more - is randomly generated every level. It’s a pretty trivial random generation, which simply involves starting with a map of solid rock, and then carving holes out of it between the bases and spawn points, plus a few other random holes. The end result is pretty nice, with results ranging from about 50% rock to 90% empty. Then we plonk down up to 10 bases which you have to defend (+1 base every 10 levels) - if any one base gets destroyed you lose. And then we plonk gidrah spawn points around the edge of the map, and a few in the middle on the later levels.

Before it approves the map, the generator checks to ensure that every base is accessible to at least one spawn point. We do this by just plotting the path between them using the A* algorithm pinched from Droid Assault.

It didn’t work.

I removed some more of my remaining hair in a violent thrashy motion for a couple of hours.

“How could this be? It’s been working fine in Droid Assault for a year!” I ranted.

Except, of course, it hadn’t. It had been broken all along. All those lovely multicore droids you’d been capturing, hoping they were worth the extra points just because they had the best brains, never worked properly. It’s a miracle they ever managed to find any enemies. In fact it’s only because they have a backup brain that switches to direct attack when enemies are in direct line-of-sight that they ever got around to attacking anything.

So: it’s fixed. And while I was at it, I changed the way flamethrowers inflict damage - it’s more immediate, and the burn time is much shorter. And slowed the wear rate of droids down a little bit so you can keep them a bit longer. Enjoy the new version! Grab version 1.6 directly from Puppygames.

Chaz is going to do a bit of work on the graphics for Monster Mash over the next week or so, and as soon as it’s worth showing everyone, we’ll pop up a screenshot.

We just released Droid Assault v1.5 which fixes some of the biggest moans people have had about the game! I spent this morning playing the game and tweaking all sorts of little things. The general result is a game which is slightly more manic, very slightly easier in some respects, and slightly more fun. Here’s what I did:

• The number of enemies on each level increases slightly slower as you progress through the game, but carries on increasing for much longer. Levels now have up to 48 enemies on them! Quite insane firefights result.
• The droids under your command now start the level slightly more spread out, which might get them into more fights right at the start instead of wandering uselessly in a little room.
• The droid under your command wears out considerably faster that in did before. Booo! That sucks! Except for…
• …all of your droids are 100% repaired at the end of every level! The information screen between levels now shows their “worn out” hitpoints versus maximum hitpoints allowed, rather than how beaten up they were by blaster fire on the previous level. This means you should be able to keep your favourite droids alive for much longer and you’ll eventually have a much bigger army of cool droids!
• The boss tended to drop powerups which weren’t much use to you at the end of the level (shields, recharges). It’s now much more likely to drop better powerups.
• The length of time between resetting the combo destruction bonus has been increased from 1 second to 1.5 seconds. This means bigger combos, and therefore more transfer points!

These changes sound like small fry but having those droids kept alive longer lets you get further into the game and therefore you’re going to have even more fun! If you haven’t tried out Droid Assault yet, or even if you have but it wasn’t quite right, give it another go and see what you think.

Droid Assault recently picked up 4th place in Game Tunnel’s 2008 Action Game of the Year awards, making it our third in the Action Game category.

For those not familiar with the Game Tunnel Game of the Year Awards this is the 6th year they’ve been running, an always entertaining review of the very best Indie games in a range of categories - action, sport, sim, rpg, puzzle, adventure and strategy - always worth checking out for the odd gem you might have missed. Cheers Russell!

We’ve just added Gravitron 2 to our tiny catalogue of games. It’s a great little retro game reminiscent of Thrust on the C64, and at $5 (£3.50) it was just too good to leave alone! I bought it myself a couple of weeks ago and it’s the best vector graphic gravity based retro shooter I’ve played all year - in fact I liked it so much I thought we’d offer it up to Puppygames customers too. Expect one of our exceedingly rare mailing list letters in your inbox imminently!

Have a look at the tasty video of the gameplay if you’re not convinced:

We’ve had a fair amount of feedback from the site recently, especially since the release of Droid Assault. The majority are positive, but we do get the odd angry sounding letter. People sometimes think we are to blame for having wasted their time, cos they downloaded a demo and didn’t like it. Fortunately they have enough time to write to us to tell us.

And that’s fine, we don’t mind. We’d like to say sorry that they feel that way, and respond to any questions they have. Sometimes though they think it better to leave a made-up and offensive email address rather than a real one, and that’s really not very grown up now is it?

Here’s one example of some of the positive feedback we’ve had…

Just want to say how much I love Titan Attacks, Ultratron & Droid Assault.
They are better than sex and a bargain at the price!! You guys are awesome for matching Steam’s general indie prices. Hell, your games are better than most of the indie represented games on their servers.

It’s still a little surprising that people take the time to write to us and say nice stuff stuff like that! Makes you feel all warm and glowy inside. So a great big thank you to Ryan in Australia for that, and for letting us publish it here. And thanks to everyone else who has written in with similar messages over the last few years, and all the suggestions and constructive criticism too. Keep ‘em coming