Puppyblog!

Cliffski, erstwhile Bat’leth-wielding UK indie games entrepreneur, has blogged about an experiment we’ve been conducting called ShowMeTheGames.com. Well, I say “we”, really it’s all Cliff, and we’re just throwing a bit of money at it and participating. So far it seems reasonably successful. Go and take a look at the other games – there are some real gems in there. In fact they’re all good – there’s bound to be something that floats your boat, and every one of those indie game developers in there is to some degree or another as skint as we are or not far from it. Buy a game for someone else this Christmas, if not for yourself!

In other news, we’ve released Revenge of the Titans v1.63, which you can get directly here:
Windows
Mac OS X
Linux (sorry, still not done package thingy yet – next release!)

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: Survival level selector allowed you to select one more world than you had actually completed

New Features and Enhancements

• Medals are now worth bonus $$$!
• Ranks are now worth $(points/10)
• New bashing and building destroyed noises
• Lasers now fire through wraiths
• Gidlets and wraiths can no longer penetrate nanomesh
• Slightly larger maps

Balance

• Laser, rocket, and disruptor turrets now only $3000 each
• Decoy now only $1500
• Silos now rather less amazing at stretching resources further (10, 12, 16, and 25% for 1-4 silos)…
• …but silos now cost a flat rate of $250

Internal

• Back to using the tiered server compiler for Windows to claw back a bit more performance
• Perform a full GC between levels
• Wired up more shortcut keys on medals screen
• Displays monetary bonus for a particular medal underneath points value
• Crystal spawn noise occurs at the end of the res-in effect now
• Attenuated colours updated only half as frequently
• Gidrahs brains now only half as fast at calculating routes
• Titan boss now has a disruptor, with variable range depending on difficulty
• New animation command to cause a gidrah to fire its weapon
• Fixed various bugs to do with completing the game causing crashes
• Fixed crash where if you restarted a level after dying you immediately died when the aliens started spawning
• Tweaked tactical brain so it targets the base as well as turrets
• Fiddling with the speech for the General and so on – sounds rubbish so far

Yes, the speech for the General and ZX-bot sound just awful but we’ve not managed to finish it or get it even half-right yet.

Some Notes About The Balance Changes

You might be interested to hear about the reasoning for the changes to silos: I noticed that upon researching silos (and knowing exactly how they work so I’m pretty good at using them in the most efficient way possible), my refinery takings for the level shot up. This is all well and good, because it means a canny player who knows this will research silos as soon as possible and then be able to progress through the levels at a reasonable level of difficulty thanks to the big cash infusion. However – anyone who doesn’t know this trick was going to be at a major disadvantage, and having a pretty crap time progressing really slowly. The reason is that silos unbalance the game too much in their previous form.

So now, silos are a simple flat-rate upgrade, and have a much more modest effect on the efficiency of crystal refining. With four silos, you’ll manage to eke out just 25% more from a factory (rather than the 100% it was before!). However the outlay is now just $1000 for the four silos instead of $2500. You can still be cunning in your silo placement – putting them next to factories that have access to the most crystal – but the effect is a bit less dramatic unless you get a really lucky configuration. But every penny counts, so it’s always worth doing – especially as your silos are recycled if they’re not damaged and you’ll get $400 of that $1000 back at the end of the level.

Just for your information, there are three sizes of crystal in the game, containing $600, $1200, and $1800 respectively. You can work out the maths yourself

Also you’ll notice a bit of cheapening of the heavy weapons and the decoy. Seemed a shame to spend all that money researching them and then not ever have quite enough cash to justify splashing out on a few eh?

Also take special notice that nanomesh is now gidlet and wraithproof. Very useful. There are nearly enough to surround your base! Nearly.

I’ve just noticed that the bug where factories don’t start up again in survival mode when a crystal appears next to them has come back – doh. I’m also aware of the (very rare) occasion that a gidrah seems to get stuck sometimes and you have to drop something on his head to kill him. If this happens to you, save your game and send the save file to me!

The Next Release

The next release is 1.64, the final beta release, which will include the long awaited Titan levels. After that there will be a strange quiet period, where we sit and listen intently for bugs and last minute pleas for absolution or clemency, and then we’ll release the finished game. Phew.

Well, I went to Eurogamer Expo 2010 this year on the Friday, thanks to Dave Hayward at the recently-merged Mudlark. Dave arranged it for us to showcase Revenge of the Titans at the Indiecade booth round the back of the show, along with a few other indies. Extra super thanks to Dave for being brilliant! Unfortunately I didn’t take a worthy camera with me so there aren’t any exciting pictures of me doing exciting things, which is just as well, as I’m not too photogenic.
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… and we wuv them back, too, for they have interviewed me. And yes, I speak the truth, it does appear that we’ll have a pre-order demo ready in a couple of weeks, and it’ll be 50% off, and the full game will appear in the summer!

Best get back to the drudgery of the day job first though.

Bah.

The to-do list currently looks like this:

• Alien stuck in corner of map inexplicably
• Double music playing on start of world
• Research screen
• Twiddle story xml around
• Research tree
• Replay Level button on Game Over
• Clearer “reloading” timers
• Some unique landmarks
• Shift-click on a building to switch to Build Mode using that building (if still available)
• Increase barricade / mine limit with silos?
• Add ammo counter to capacitors?
• Medals screen
• Show medals earned on complete level dialog
• Put in a load of tips
• Hiscores screen
• Different sfx for factory shutdown klaxon, base attack, base critical
• Bezerk effect
• Freeze effect
• Mars
• Saturn
• Titan

Over on a secret forum where the illuminati of indie game development hang out, someone asked this question (I say someone because technically we’re not allowed to talk about Fight Club, but this is a benign and often-asked question, and I think that this won’t upset anyone):

What REALLY makes someone buy a game? I think we should brainstorm this. I get the impression that people are too quick to rush to very simplistic judgements about this. We are clever people, what do we think?

I’ve read a ton of psychology / microeconomics / neurosciencey stuff that leads me to believe that game buying decisions are almost entirely irrational and entirely emotional.

So I had a little think about it, and fortunately I have a fresh, current experience to relate to.

I’ve just played the demo of Defense Grid, and I’m about to buy it.

I’m even writing my own tower defence game right now and I’m utterly sick of playing it already!

I want to think a bit more about what made the decision for me.

Firstly, I’m going to be flush again in a few weeks. I just landed a contract in Folkestone, 220 miles from home, but I’ll be earning £275 a day (a crap rate, far worse money than I earned over a decade ago, but still way more money than most people earn). A $20 or even $30 or even $50 purchase is now pure whimsy. I won’t even notice it – whereas before, as an unemployed bum, I’d have reluctantly said no, I can’t afford it. Even though at £13.99, which I could easily spend on a takeaway and a couple of bottles of beer last weekend when I didn’t have any money.

The takeaway and beer is an important comparison – people often get to thinking that the takeaway and beer lasts only a couple of hours, and is therefore maybe a tenth the value of a 20-hour game experience. That’s wrong. I need to eat, so does the missus. The beer is immensely enjoyable. I’d take beer over games any day. Really.

A comparison with cinema tickets is usually what follows next. And actually I think it’s almost valid, for certain kinds of game. But the fact is, a cinema outing is for the two of us, we’re paying to have the experience together. It’s (sadly) a Big Thing (especially now we’ve got a 6 month old baby). £14 of cinema tickets buys us a whole evening of different. It could buy me a game, but we won’t be playing it together. Even a multiplayer game. Even a multiplayer game that we play on one screen together. It’s not the same. There’s no occasion. So we value the cinema tickets considerably higher than the game experience. This is the emotional draw from this form of entertainment.

Games, then, probably fundamentally have to compete with this extremely powerful emotional hold that “activities” such as “going out” have. The situation of being an unemployed bum counts towards the ultimate decision but I suspect we can totally ignore the financial status of prospective customers. Customers are either rich, or they’re not going to buy a game. Or a cinema ticket. They might buy beer and a takeaway instead with what frugal funds they have. So just forget them, and forget the money equation. I don’t want poor customers who reluctantly part with $3.99 for something I spent 6 months toiling away at. I want rich customers with an appreciation of the value of the really hard work we do (ie. other people who work really hard). That’s why I’ve put all my games up at $19.95 finally and that’s where they will stay from now on.

So what made me buy Defense Grid?

Well, first and foremost, it’s good. It’s a really good tower defence game, even though they spelled defence wrongly. It’s not innovative in any particular way (unlike, say, the one I’m working on, which is quite different to most TD games), but the basic gameplay has been executed perfectly, and when I played it, I enjoyed myself so much that I’m going to buy it because I know I’m going to keep playing it for at least a couple more weeks. I’ve not got any other games to play right now apart from Zatikon from Chronic Logic, which I limit myself to 1 game a day of because of its hellishly addictive qualities, and I need a break from my own game.

Secondly, it’s a piece of piss to buy stuff on Steam. I’d go direct to the developers except the Steam version is integrated with the Steam achievements stuff and also Steam takes care of auto updating and I’ll even be able to just download and install it again anywhere I choose to be without having to think about it. I like that. Steam got that stuff dead right. It’s value that I’ll gladly pay for. It’s the digital equivalent of owning a shiny box with a CD in it – it feels like I’ve paid some middleman some money for something I actually feel is worth something – totally unlike my feelings about buying stuff from BFG (oh look – no hyperlink), where I feel that I’m giving BFG all the money solely because they bullied their way to the top of the search engine charts and do their damndest to make sure the developers remain unknown. They’re pure middlemen. They add nothing I care to have. I’ll even pay an extra £10 for a game to get it direct instead of through BFG.

It may come as a surprise also but I’ve never actually played a tower defence game. Apart from my own game, this is the first one I’ve played, and it’s been done so absolutely perfectly and TD is such a great concept for a game, with all sorts of decision trees one has to go through and enjoyable trial and error, it couldn’t fail to sell to me. So it was the first game of its nature I’ve actually come across, and it’s a great implementation.

(Similarly: Faerie Solitaire was the first solitaire game I’ve played since the one that came with Windows 3.11 – I would have bought it if Brian hadn’t thrown a free copy at me).

So there’s my thoughts on the matter. What makes you buy a game?

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!