Yes, that’s right, Titan Attacks is now available on Google Play. Only 10 years too late 🙂 Still, better late than never.

You have no excuse not to install it, because it’s free! Unless you’ve got one of those strangefangled Apple devices, in which case you’ll have to wait a few more days.

Of course, when I say “free”, I mean it is infested with Google’s ubiquitous advertising. Having your eyeballs assaulted by tiny adverts is a small price to play for such a neat little game that works so well on phones (and tablets), but if it upsets you at all, the well-heeled amongst you can donate a few dollars in our direction and make those nasty adverts go away forever.

I will let you know how it does in due course.

Many thanks to Jake Birkett of GreyAlienGames and Brian Kramer of Subsoap for making it all happen.

So, you’ve got 10 minutes waiting for a bus to nowhere. Or maybe you’re trying to kill time while that awesome curry simmers away. Perhaps you have eclectic tastes and prefer to play the best game on your Android phone, ever?

If any of these situations apply to you, then we have a treat for you!

Right now, at this very moment, the Humble Bundle for Android and PC #12 is entering its final weekend. And in this Humble Bundle you can find the exclusive version of Titan Attacks for Android (amongst other gems). It is not yet available on Google Play and might not be for some time. This is your one and only chance to pick it up – and happy happy joy joy you can pay what you want! Now you can’t get much of a better deal than that.

Porting was done by Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games (he wrote a little post about it here on his blog). It was painstakingly ported from Java into Monkey (totally ungoogleable name, guys) because Jake isn’t familiar with Java (a shame, because he could have maybe just converted it over to libgdx and saved a bunch of time).

Hello all you silent eyes, you quiet followers of our sporadically updated blog! Gather round our digital Yuletide fire and listen, my little ones.

Today we have put all our games, including Sandbox Mode for Revenge of the Titans, and our two soundtracks, and even all our source code, for sale through the Humble Puppy Bundle. This glorious sale lasts from 19th December through till 26th of December, and you may name whatever price you wish for everything, as is traditional.

You will also notice that Droid Assault and Ultratron have both been updated with two-player local co-op mode. Just grab your 360 controllers and join in. Yay! Expect bugs.

And you’ll also see that Revenge of the Titans has a Christmas Mode which appears only for the festive season (from 19th December to early January or thereabouts). And Droid Assault has a special new Christmas Mission too! Which is all very silly and hopefully a bit of fun.

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It’s not often we get custom made fan art turning up in the mailbox but once in a while something fantastic appears. Just lately we received some photos from one of our younger fans. Simon enjoys Lego (don’t we all!) and in his spare time he defends the Earth from alien invaders in Revenge Of The Titans. So, being a creative fellow, he decided to put the two together and make some Lego models of Titans and buildings from the game. And here’s Simon and his creations:

Check out that Titan’s big red, glowing eye! A big thanks from the Puppygames team to Simon (and Chris) for letting us show off the models.

Soooo… we all had a great time at Rezzed last weekend – thanks to all those who stopped by our booth! All in all the show seemed a success, with a friendly atmosphere and eclectic mix of games, with indie games generally seeming a bigger pull than the AAAs that were there 🙂

Unfortunately we didn’t have a huge amount of time to play other games on show, but a few new to us that impressed were Trash TV, Montague’s Mount (both of which are on Steam Greenlight – here and here) and Revenge of the Sunfish 2 which really needs to be seen in motion to appreciate how completely bats it is.

The Win-a-Nexus-7 Hiscores Competition

We were giving away a brand spanking new Nexus 7 tablet to each player with the highest score for Ultratron, Droid Assault and Titan Attacks, and it was a great success with a nail-biting finale. As we approached the end of the show the highest scores seemed unbeatable, but as the returning hiscore holders of both Droid Assault and Ultratron watched on, their records were beaten!…

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

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

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

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

Long Live Video!

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

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

But there is another thing at play.

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

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

What Does a Demo Do?

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

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

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

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

In-App Purchase

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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