Puppyblog!

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… (more…)

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editor, but if you have done you can login using your online editor account details and you’ll be able to play your own unpublished levels and campaigns as well.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.
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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!

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.

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/

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!

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.

At last, after a couple of delays involving house moves, panicking TV stations, and the unexpectedly early completion of a new game mode, we are proud to announce Revenge of the Titans v1.61! Without further ado, here are direct download links for our blog followers (the proles get the simplecdn cached stuff with varying degrees of success).

Windows
Mac OS
Linux

Here’s what’s in the latest version:

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: Garbage collector crash – don’t use G1 on Java 6!
• Fixed: selling buildings just before level end to get double money!
• Fixed: shield generators keep getting more expensive every level
• Fixed: Missing research link in tree: heavy blaster -> blast cannon
• Fixed: Superfluous link between heavy blaster -> assault cannon
• Fixed: Slot selection screen only showed Basingstoke – Earth – $0
• Fixed: when a building is shielded, after the Invuln powerup finishes the shield sprites are gone
• Fixed: removing droid factories, shield generators and silos didn’t reset their price

New Features and Enhancements

• Survival mode!
• New map generator code: better wiggly tunnels from spawnpoints to map
• Stop gids from spawning when freeze mode on
• New hint: don’t overspend on research
• New hint: boss level -> save your cash!
• Removed the turret aiming lag – didn’t like it

Balance

• Increase initial gidrah delay based on level size
• Increase range of disruptor slightly to 110px from 96px
• Decreased damage of disruptor from 25 to 16
• Nerfed multiblaster from 4 to 3 points damage
• Nerfed spreader cannon from 4 to 3 points damage
• Nerfed assault cannon from 8 to 7 points damage
• Powerup drops last a bit longer before vanishing
• Even more crystals
• Mars gidrahs nerfed somewhat
• Droid factory: now each droid factory can produce at most 8 droids
• Droid factory: production rate slowed down by 50%
• Droid factory: …but factories now only cost $1000+$1000 per factory

Internal

• Queue gidrah route recalculations on building so they don’t all happen at once
• Increased memory allocation for the VM to 256mb
• Reduced max GC pause to 3ms (Windows only)

Survival Mode

Lucky registered users have a new mode to play. It is unlocked after completing the Earth missions. When you select a survival mode game, you get to choose the world (from the set of worlds you’ve seen so far with that profile), and just for fun, you can choose the rockiness of the terrain. The buildings you have available to you are the buildings you have researched so far in campaign mode.

You are expected to lose. Probably quite fast. The aliens will rapidly become overwhelmingly deadly. The idea is to get a base together as fast as you can and defend it as long as you can. Notice that you don’t earn money for killing gidrahs! The only way to get cash is mining crystals, which spawn every now and again, or pickups.

Your best time for a particular world/terrain combination are also recorded. Let’s hear some hiscores!

All Good Things Must Come To An End…

…or become a bit more expensive, anyway! But only as expensive as to be able to afford a helping of mushy peas with one’s pie and ale. The Ultrabundle is now just a tiny weeny bit more than it was, assuming you think that $2 is tiny weeny like us. It’s still ultracheap if you’ve not picked it up already, and it will get more expensive again while we experiment with prices in the not very distant future. So don’t delay! Hand over your filthy cash today!

Don’t forget the bundle lets you install all 3 of our minigames an any combination of operating systems, as often as you need to!

We’ve been listening to your feedback on the Revenge of the Titans beta over the last few months, and with this new update (v1.51) we’ve attempted to address some of the most requested changes. And of course there’s a load of other tweaks, not least finally the ability to sell buildings! Here are the download links…

Windows
Mac OS
Linux

Don’t forget to check the version number to make sure you’ve really gotten 1.51 installed. Here’s what’s new, changed, fixed, twiddled, and nerfed:

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: stuttering sound (hopefully!)
• Fixed: HUD money updates when intermission screen is showing
• Fixed: Reloading a turret in build mode should stop build mode
• Fixed: Can’t reload a turret or collect a factory when in Build mode
• Fixed: creating path for gidrahs overwrites odd ruin tiles – needs to either leave them or delete all tiles associated with the ruin
• Fixed: dialog text not centred on game over
• Fixed: Apostrophe key ‘ now correctly selects autoloader for build
• Fixed: Load/Save. Again. All files now stored in user home directory.
• Fixed: Gidlets now only immune to explosions when spawning
• Fixed: Ruins used to block blaster fire in their bottom left corner: this is now specified per ruin for the whole ruin or in a mapping attribute

New Features and Enhancements

• Medals
• Ranks
• New intermission screen
• New ESC menu
• Wired up ESC button on HUD
• Completely new in-game UI
• New Game Over UI
• Added the in-game menu to the research/story screens so you can quit out at that point.
• Change the way shield generators work
• Wire up new options (to hide various GUI stuff)
• Rockets now explode when they hit the edge of the map
• New research GUI with all the stats and two different views
• Sell mode
• DEL key wired to Sell mode and middle mouse button
• You get 10 seconds to sell a building after construction in which you’ll get 100% of the money back (like an undo)
• Laser to be able to fire into mountains (turret needs to be able to see too)
• Appropriate story tweaks when flying gidrahs appear re: lasers
• Removed [X] button from hints panel – click anywhere to close it now
• Hints now remain onscreen for 7 seconds max
• Top HUD fades out as mouse approaches
• Bottom HUD now hideable with toggle button (INS key)

Balance Changes

• Gidrahs now get a little more urgent and fearless when the timer runs out
• Nerfed damage bonus for alien anatomy to just +1
• Increased research cost of a few things
• Nerfed laser/rocket ranges a little
• Saturn gidrahs now a teeny bit harder
• Slightly increased saucer duration on earlier levels, decreased on later levels
• Reduce crystals available slightly now Sell button implemented
• Tweak tuning: game needs to be tiny bit harder tiny bit sooner

Internal Stuff

• Completely change the way game metastate is persisted
• Store exact representation of level instead of relying on dubious random number seed
• Gidrah now uses 1/32th the RAM courtesy of using packed bits in ints in its tiny brain
• Awarded a non-repeatable medal sfx
• Awarded a repeatable medal sfx
• New rank sfx
• Sold sfx
• Can’t build sfx
• Insufficient funds sfx

And onto a few pics…

We’ve had a fair few requests to be able to see the statistics of researched buildings, and to see in some form the research connections between technologies and buildings. Here’s the new Research screen showing those stats, and the improved table and the new tree layouts…

(You can read more about the changes in Research GUI for the Tweak)

Adding the requested ‘Sell’ button required a HUD redesign, so we made some oft suggested alterations as well…

( more info here: Revenge of the HUD Redesign and Revenge of the HUD part 2 )

The old in-game ESC key menu has been given a restyling, and is now accessible from a HUD button. You can access this menu from the various Story and Research screens by pressing ESC too. Options on the Game Over screen have also been updated…

And last but not least, the Achievements dialog showing Rank and Medals…

There’s also a new Level Complete dialog – though that looks a bit pants at the mo, so wont bother with a screenshot That’ll probably get a bit of a tidy up in the final polish stage of development.

Next up on the todo list – Cas will be adding Endless and Survival game modes, and I’ll add badge graphics for ranks before making a start on the Titan levels. The jury’s out as to whether to tackle Endless or Survival first, but right now we’re hedging our bets with Endless mode, which is like the current campaign mode, but without a story, or… an end. Just level after level of slowly increasing size and difficulty, drawn randomly from the scenery we’ve done so far, until you are defeated (and there’s only one life). We expect Endless games to take hours to play, by which time you will probably be a gibbering nervous wreck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is how it was looking before…

… and here’s how it looks now….

Changes made…

(more…)

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

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

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

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

So, 2 different designs after the jump…

(more…)

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

Windows

Mac OS

Linux

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

And here are some pics…

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

(more…)

Earthlings! Your puny efforts to defend yourselves against our remorseless hordes will soon falter! Even now ten legions of our crack troops close in on your poorly defended Martian strongholds! We have resurrected the spirits of our ancient heroes to freeze the very blood in your veins!

Yes, we are finally pleased to announce the release of Revenge of the Titans 1.3, which now includes the Mars levels, and a list of tweaks and features as long as your arm. There’s still tons to do but the Martian levels should keep you nicely entertained for the next month or so whilst we work on the Saturn levels. In the meantime, we advise starting again from level 1 because the game has changed balance-wise quite significantly. The costs of things have been tweaked rather a lot and there are some significant changes to harvesting crystals (tip: you really, really want silos) and some changes probably required to your strategy.

Update: minor disaster with the current version… Bug: Enemies don’t appear on level 1

We’re uploading fix – should be ready in 30 mins or so

… so don’t click on these for now ...   should be ok now

Direct Download Links

Windows

Mac OS X

Linux / Webstart

t’s finally here… playable beta demo to download, and now available to pre-order at 50% final price!…

www.puppygames.net/revenge-of-the-titans

Our server is currently taking a massive hammering though, so apologies for the painfully slow download speeds – we’re looking into solutions

Update: server fell over! we have Windows version download mirror sorted now, but have had to restart the server, apologies again, we weren’t expecting quite such a massive demand

We will be releasing a pre-release demo of Revenge of the Titans very soon, honest…

In the meantime here’s a nice big pic (1280×800), ideal for putting up as wallpaper or desktop background or whatever you want to call it. If anyone wants particular sizes for desktops just comment away and your wish will be my command. As long as you say the magic word. And as long as it doesn’t involve me doing much work.

Click on the pic below for the full size image…

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Rummaging around in some dusty old project folders I came across these old mockups. Back in June 2008 we started work on a TIme Pilot ‘inspired’ game which was shaping up nicely, though we didn’t get as far as adding the Uridium style ships…

However, it felt severely limited by our old odd square format, giving you very little time to react to the enemy ships. We’ve dropped that now though and gone all widescreen for Revenge of the Titans, so maybe that wouldn’t be such an issue now.

The other problem was that it induced extreme motion sickness in a few people …

Would that put anyone off, or worth digging up one day… once Revenge of the Titans is all done? Titan Attacks 3 perhaps?

Exciting new features! Now in widescreen! New factory crystal mining thing! Zappy effects! Cheese related level names! Animated moustaches!

(more…)

After some mock-up-ing we resume work on the old Monster Mash, adding a scrolling map and dropping the lighting and grey backgrounds. Partly due to me being bored of the glowey sci-fi look we go for a jolly old medieval look…

… but we just couldn’t get arrows to look quite so much fun as blasters, lasers and rockets. Bah.

To be continued…

After Droid Assault was done and dusted, ideas were thrown around, mock-ups produced, prototypes prototyped…

… none of which were quite doing it for us. And then, wedged down the back of the proverbial sofa,  we found the little lost game formerly known as Monster Mash…

To be continued…

We had intended to write a game that would be a fun shooter, something that would appeal to ‘shmup’ fans and a more ‘casual’ audience – and we wanted to create a shooter that would feel natural to play with a mouse, and no keys. Titan Attacks could be played with the mouse but it had been tacked on at the end of development as an alternative to keyboard control, and the various mouse-only control schemes we tried with Alien Flux and Super Elvis aka Super Dudester either never seemed completely natural to us, or the ones we liked everyone else hated.

We also wanted to avoid scrolling, and not make a standard vertical or side-scrolling shmup, thinking that might put off a fair amount of people.

The problem generally was being able to handle both movement and aiming at the same time – to be able to move in one direction whilst firing in another. We sidestepped this by removing the movement element completely.

After a month of playing around with various ideas we had a pretty fun little game involving building up your defences with turrets, mines and barricades to protect your city blocks from an onslaught of funky gidrahs. Here, again, are the only surviving screenshots…

However, the game had several rather big problems…

1. We had a simple lighting system, with spotlights showing the tracking of automated turrets and under the player cursor. For this to look any good the levels had to be pretty dark, and grey. This left us stuck as to how to change background gfx sufficiently to show level progression, not helped by…

2. The fixed screen made things feel very claustrophobic, quickly filling up with buildings, the aliens appearing almost on top of them, and there was no room for any pretty background graphics.

3. We hadn’t really thought through any kind of level/world progression at all. The game was fun, but… it didn’t really go anywhere.

…and then Cas’ wife suddenly left him. And ‘crashed’ his brand new pickup truck into a tree. And demanded all of his money. Development abruptly stopped.

…and then a game of the same name was released (a generic tower defence game), after we’d mentioned Monster Mash on this here blog, many moons ago. An unfortunate coincidence.

Not that that should have made any difference, but when we did resume development we decided to start something fresh (on what would end up being Droid Assault) rather than tackling the above problems of our now nameless game.

To be continued…

…with less words and more pictures In the meantime, notice anything different here?…

We’re not really going for accuracy in geographical locations – but should do something about that cactus.

Added and updated a whole load of things recently – it’s looking pretty slick. The HUD now has working ‘quicklaunch’ icons and tooltips on the bottom bar for buildings and powerups, and an alerts panel top right the other right (doh!), that also lets you quickly scroll to the building in question.

Also added new Earth level colours, new explosion particle effects, capacitor effects, powerup collect and activation effects, new extra glowey bullets, monster death effects, mini droid units, and a whole load of new weapons and buildings, and a big bad boss for level 10… all of which I’ll try and squeeze into a new vid soon.

More screenshots… (more…)

Sometimes an IM chat just doesn’t cut the biscuit when it comes to describing weird bugs – in this case the bizarre interaction between explosion particles and a floor setting which is meant to make little bits of shrapnel bounce about when they hit it. Instead it acts like a big gluey magnet. But only sometimes. And smoke, which should float upwards generally, has decided to head east instead. Creating a set of test emitters, a few screen grabs and a quick scribble helps narrow down the problem…

Dropbox is what we’re now using to zap these test images back and forth between us, and it comes highly recommended if your doing any kind of remote development thing.

With any luck Cas will get that little pesky fella sorted soon, and then I’ll post some video of things exploding in a gratuitous manner.

… and here’s the state of the vid so far. Plus first hear of game music by Dave Sunerton-Burl!

Been working on a bit of video recently that will hopefully end up in the game titles if Cas can work out getting Ogg Theora decoding onto an OpenGL texture in background threads. I have no idea what that means. If not it’ll just end up in some pretty promo vid kind of thang on Youtube.

Well it makes a nice break from working on GUIs anyway, on which we will be posting shortly. Here are a few rough snaps for now… and in the words of the great Rolf – can you tell what it is yet?

Revenge of the Titans is a game with a long, convoluted and simply amazing history. It is perhaps the most incredible story never told in the entire history of computer games. In years to come a small group of distinguished historians and academics will undoubtedly discuss its development with Melvyn Bragg on BBC Radio 4′s ‘In our Time‘.

Okay, that was a lie – got a bit carried away there. But it has taken a long time.

Our tale begins nearly four years ago. Basking in the financial glow of the success of Titan Attacks we devise a plan for a new game, a game that will have all of the great bits of Titan Attacks, like shooting things and buying upgradey stuff in some kind of a shop, but that will be playable completely with a mouse. We hope freeing players from the shackles of using ‘keys’ will make a more accessible game, and spread the joy of making pixelly things explode in a glowy manner to a more ‘casual’ audience.

Work begins in earnest in the spring of 2006, with Cas beavering away in his secret underground base, deep below the Quantocks, and myself working poolside upon my Bangkok penthouse. With multi-coloured spotlights attached to computer controlled turrets tracking a variety of daft pixel monsters, the game begins to develop an odd 70′s disco feel to it. Not a bad thing at all. The below screenshots really don’t do it justice, honest…

And we decide to call the game Monster Mash. A banner is produced declaring confidently ‘COMING SOON!’…

But then, disaster strikes!

To be continued…

Here’s an example of the colouring system we’re using in Titan Attacks 2 – Revenge of the Titans. In this case as applied to a cooling tower, a player building that cools down your overheating turrets. It’s a common problem. Building a load of these little fellas nearby though can increase their fire rate.

Here we have the cooling tower as it looks with colours applied in two schemes – night and desert. On the left we have the Colour Diddler which lets us fidddle away with the level palettes as the game is running. Neat eh?

So how this all work then?

The cooling tower is a collection of static sprites, animated sprites and emitters. The sprites, mostly white, can be coloured by the level palettes, and then this colour is affected by an attenuation colour and % the further from the center of the level they are – black in the case of the nighttime level, and a subtle red tint for the desert level colour scheme. Here’s the various sprites…

First of all we have the base. This defines the bounds of the building making it easier to tell where the player can build things and distinguishes player buildings from other stuff going on. All buildings and monsters and trees and things are drawn from the front, but the map is actually viewed from above which is perhaps a bit of an odd way to do things, but it’s a lot easier to draw poo like that. The next sprite, the shadow, also helps in making the flat front-on sprite look like it’s sitting on the ground and not just floating about in space.

That little black rectangle sits behind the main sprite animation. Inbetween these is an emitter that pumps out steam. This way the steam looks more like it’s coming out of the cooling tower rather than just from behind it. It’s hardly noticeable really. Maybe got a bit carried away there.

The main sprite, unlike the others, has two colours applied to it – a top and a bottom colour – applied as a gradient to the sprite. The top colour is specific to buildings, and the bottom is a general ‘floor fog’ colour which is applied to almost everything – buildings and monsters and trees etc. This helps in the illusion of the flat building existing in the world space wotsit. It also means if buildings overlap vertically there will be a bit of colour difference between them, making it easier to tell them apart.

Next up is the overlay sprite – this is about 50% transparent and is not affected by the level’s attenuation, meaning it’ll seem like it’s a bit glowy or reflective. Then finally on top of all that is the little glowing light animation that is synched up with the pumpy animation of the tower and the steam emitter. This sprite is neither coloured nor affected by the attenuation colour, so it’s always going to be a bright orangey red light thang.

…and if you’re really interested or just having trouble sleeping here’s how the cooling tower appearance is defined in xml…

<sprite layer="4" sublayer="1" colored="floor" attenuated="true" image="spriteimage.generic.2x2.base.01"/>
<sprite layer="4" sublayer="2" colored="shadow" attenuated="true" image="spriteimage.generic.cooling.ground.01"/>
<sprite layer="5" sublayer="1" colored="buildings" attenuated="true" animation="generic.cooling.back.animation"/>
<emitter offset="25,0" emitter="steam.burst.emitter"/>
<sprite layer="5" sublayer="3" bottomColored="floor-fog" topColored="buildings" attenuated="true" animation="generic.cooling.animation"/>
<sprite layer="5" sublayer="4" colored="buildings-alt" attenuated="false" animation="generic.cooling.top.animation"/>
<sprite layer="5" sublayer="5" animation="generic.cooling.glow.animation"/>

Phew. Any questions? Anyone still awake?

Recently we’ve been updating the graphics to use a system we first tried in Droid Assault to change the colour of tiles and items for different levels. This time we’ve gone a bit further – now pretty much all the sprites are rendered out in shades of grey, and are coloured in-game according to a level palette, and these colours are also affected at the edges of the level by an attentuation colour and % value.

This lets us significantly alter the feel for every level without having to have dozens of different coloured sprites for the same object. Also objects can be excluded from the attenuation colour, giving a glowy self-illumination effect on night-time levels. Nice. Of course this would all be an effing lot easier in 3d.

More detail about such stuff in future posts.

After a break for a bit of contract work we’re back on the case and we’ll have Revenge of the Titans ready for a Christmas release… hopefully this Christmas. We’re also playing with the idea of releasing a pre-order beta version like Cliffski of fellow UK indie Positech Games has recently done with the epic Gratuitous Space Battles. Anyone interested?

In the meantime here’s some work-in-progess pics showing the game in action in three different Earth settings…