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!

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.

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.

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!!

Continue reading →

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!

… 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 🙂

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.

Continue reading →

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!

A slightly botched upload later, we can now reveal Revenge of the Titans 1.72.1 is now ready for download. Slightly botched, as in I rolled a natural 1 for nearly every single upload and uploaded truncated duffers as I slumbered last night, and spent the morning panicking uploading new ones. If you got a broken one, you’d probably best download again!

This will be the last patch this year – Chaz and I are going to take some time off for Christmas starting tomorrow, so support and blog approvals may be intermittent.

Humble Bundlers: your download links from www.humblebundle.com will now download the new 1.72.1 version! Please grab as soon as you can!

Continue reading →

Having been awake for about 60 of the last 72 hours I thought I would idly fix a few bugs and tweak the game in all sorts of unimaginably silly ways. Unfortunately coding till 530am does not make for great design decisions so it is quite possibly the case that I have gone and broken it all. Rather than trust my own shrivelled tired old tiny brain instead I find it easier to unleash the results, Revenge of the Titans 1.72, on you, our unsuspecting audience.

PANIC! Thanks to 100,000 Bundlers I now have literally 200 support emails to get through in my inbox. I will try to answer each one but it’s going to take some time!

UPDATE Bundlers: your download links from www.humblebundle.com will now download the new 1.72 version! Please grab as soon as you can!

Continue reading →

Well, folks, this is it – the lastest ever beta version of Revenge of the Titans, now at the heady heights of version 1.71. This is our “release candidate” – provided no bishops in hell turn up and fart in the trifles of our lives, this will then become the finished game. Well, I say finished – we’re probably likely to tweak it some more in the new year once the dust has settled.

First things first – here’s the direct links:

Windows
Mac OS X
32-bit Debian package
64-bit Debian package
32-bit generic Linux
64-bit generic Linux
Java Webstart (all OSes)

Now, on to business. What’s changed? If you haven’t already, go and have a quick read about 1.7 first, to better know thine enemy.

The short summary is: 1.7 didn’t work out very well, so I’ve reverted a few of the design decisions. It’s been such a panic getting this penultimate build together though I haven’t had time to write the usual changelog, so I’ll go through the major changes.

Changes in 1.71

• The Titans stop coming when the timer runs out again – phew! In hindsight this was a mental idea. So it’s back to its original behaviour. To compensate for the level being rather dull once the aliens aren’t arriving any more, it will finish as before when the last one is slain…
• …and you’ll scavenge the remaining crystals. Unfortunately it pays to dig them up the proper way – scavenged crystals make no use of silos (more on these below) and you only get 40% of the remaining value, a bit like building recycling. You also get a $500 bonus for digging them all up before the timer expires, so well worth it.
• Refineries now take 15 seconds to fill up with money (it was 10 before). Reactors make approximately a 2.5 second difference to this time – so with the maximum useful complement of four reactors on a refinery, you’re looking at a collection every 5 seconds.
• You might be interested to know that a small crystal holds $2000, a medium one $4000, and a large one $6000.
• Silos have changed – they’re now called reprocessors, and their function is basically the same as it was before – they increase the efficiency of your refineries – but they no longer affect the capacity, which remains at $250. You might also be interested to know the efficiency gains are 17%, 25%, 33% and 50% for one to four silos respectively. So you could be eking $9000 out of a large crystal. Four reprocessors will cost you $2500 in outlay and you’ll get $1000 back in recycling – so you’re making $2000 profit on the venture. Place them cunningly to mine two or more big crystals and you’re looking at big money!
• I fixed a massive bug with reactors that caused them to make crystals spew out tons and tons of money. Strange that no-one noticed. Maybe nobody ever used them to speed up refining.
• The Titan brains have been given one last tweak to make them behave slightly cleverer than they were before, and they now swarm in quite a believable way.
• Decoys are back to being really expensive again at $2500 a pop when I realised just how awesome they actually are. Although Titans aren’t quite so easily fooled any more, and will randomly select from the available decoys and the base (before, they always went for the nearest one, which made a single decoy effectively like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn). So now you can place, say, 3 decoys, and 75% of the rank-and-file will head for them, and the rest will pick the base.
• All sorts of annoying beeps have been added to the flashing warning lights. Sorry. But they do appear to help.
• The amount of crystals generated on a level has been tweaked, but I’m not sure if I’ve got it dead right yet. Time will tell.
• Endless level 51 no longer crashes. Yes, someone actually played that far.
• Certain sound effects ignored the game volume settings
• Fixed a whole load of emitter bugs that caused far too many particles to get emitted.
• In game help has been moved to the interwebs. At the time of writing this blog post it’s nowhere near finished but Chaz is beavering away at it like a beavery thing, and soon it will be all shiny and sparkle.
• We’ve got a bunch of nice new sound effects for the bezerk, freeze, and shield powerups, and various incidental noises. If you listen closely you’ll be able to hear the Mars boss gnashing his maw. Yeeech!

Please give it a great big test. Especially interested in your thoughts on difficulty, survival mode, and endless mode.

Stuff I’m Considering for the New Year

• Possibly making research free, meaning you simply get to choose one upgrade per level. To accommodate that we’ll have to dream up a bunch more intermediate research to get it to stretch better across the 50-level campaign. I can think of at least 10 more things, some of which will actually be useful in their own right, so that shouldn’t be too hard, but poor old Chaz will have to redesign the research screen. Again.
• An online hiscore table for Survival Mode

The game will officially be released on 14th December 2010. Whereupon you will also discover the surprise we mentioned. Please consider buying our games as a Christmas gift for a friend when it comes out 🙂

Oh noes!1!1! We’ve only gone and completely changed everything in the latest beta of Revenge of the Titans v1.7. And I really do mean changed. Pay very close attention, because the way you’ve played the game until now won’t work any more! By way of easing you into what is undoubtedly a horribly traumatic shift of tectonic proportions (and indeed, speed, judging by our tardiness), I shall first briefly explain how the previous versions played out, roughly.

What The Old Game Did

The timer starts when you place your first refinery, and the Titans start spawning. Crystals are dotted all over the shop, and so you spam your super-cheap refineries everywhere, guaranteed to make a reasonable profit from them. The timer eventually stops, and the remaining Titans start getting faster. Then when the last Titan is slain, the level ends, and any unmined crystal is lost forever. And slightly inexplicably. The better you do, the less crystals are generated for the next level, by way of curbing your brilliance a little if you’re doing exceptionally well… Continue reading →