Wolcum yole! Christmas lurks just around the corner, ready to pounce on unsuspecting credit cards and weakened bank accounts. To alleviate the suffering just a teeny, tiny, weeny bit, here is a new version of Revenge of the Titans, v1.80.14, which in a few days’ time you will discover has a special Christmas treat in it.

Here are the download links (except for you Humble Bundle types, you need to go back to your Humble Bundle download links and get them there. And, er, wait a day or two for the caches to update first):

• Windows
• Mac OS
• Linux 32-bit Debian
• Linux 64-bit Debian
• Linux 32-bit tar.gz
• Linux 64-bit tar.gz

What’s New and Noteworthy?

The first thing half of you will notice is that the mouse handling is completely different. I realise that this is a fairly bold and risky thing to do to a fairly long-established control mechanism in a product that’s already very mature, but… it never really worked properly before, you see. It didn’t use the desktop mouse settings, it didn’t work with tablets, it didn’t work with some mouse drivers, it was quite frequently completely erratic in movement, and it also grabbed the mouse when you clicked on the window which is kinda rude and doesn’t behave nicely in windowed mode when it comes to alt-tabbing.

So now the mouse is no longer captured by the window, and you use either the left or right buttons to scroll the screen by click-and-drag. The right mouse button has a tiny sensitivity threshold on it, which means it should still respond sensibly to its original functions (picking up buildings to build, cancelling operations), whereas the left mouse button will immediately drag. The left mouse button of course won’t drag if what you’re clicking on would otherwise have some other effect – for example, attempting to drag whilst in range of a capacitor isn’t going to work – you need to use the right mouse button.

The reason for allowing the right mouse button in drags as well is so that you can go into build mode and still scroll the screen about with the mouse like you used to. Or smartbomb mode, etc. It takes a little bit of getting used to – especially after 4 years of the old way of just waving the mouse about – but after a few games it’s just second nature again. Of course you can still use the cursor keys or WASD to scroll anyway if that’s what butters your bread.

The next thing I’ve changed is the display context handling. Er, what’s that, you ask? Well, put it this way: if you had driver problems before, they might have gone away now and the game is more likely to run. There were a lot of issues with the nice resizable window we introduced in v1.80.13, and hopefully they’ve all gone away now, although sadly with the loss of the minimise and maximise buttons.

The powerup spawn effects (and building attack effects, etc) now use chunky fat lines to draw, and because they’re now being drawn the same way as everything else in the game, they should be proper fast on all drivers. A few people had problems with the game suddenly dropping to about 2fps whenever a powerup spawned. This should now be fixed. It looks prettier, too, I think.

Finally there’s a subtle change to the way animation works, and screen transitions. You probably noticed on the screen transitions that some sprites were rendered before others, just for a single frame, so we’d have this sort of partial display which was just noticeable. This especially irritated me because I’ve seen it about 100,000 times, and it’s been bothering me for several years (yes, really). Well, I finally got around to fixing it.

Please let us know ASAP if there are any odd issues with the new version!

So Long, Desura

This part of the post is likely to attract all manner of hate and flames, but it has to be said: Desura wasn’t working for us. We spend just as much time and stress figuring out how to release software on the Desura platform as Steam, but unfortunately make literally 1/1000th of the money. So little in fact I don’t think Desura have even managed to pay us any money yet. It doesn’t make sense for us to support Desura any more, and so we’re not. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a great client, their hearts are in the right place, but… we’re on Steam.

So my humble apologies to anyone with their eggs in the Desura basket. Contact us if you’ve got any issues.

Ultrabundle refresh being prepared

If this release of Revenge goes to plan, that is, generally seems to work properly, we’ll do a refresh of the Ultrabundle games using the same code, which will fix the same issues, etc. Fingers crossed.

To accompany the recent v2.00 release of Titan Attacks is this new trailer wot I have done…

Cas has also done a few fixes – so if you had any problems with Linux freezing, have a go and see if it’s got better.

Linux Ultrabundle Fixed

I’ve just uploaded a hacky fix to make the Ultrabundle games work properly on Linux. If anyone could let me know why Frame.isActive() always returns false on Linux I’d be grateful. Grr.

Revenge of the Titans Updated to v1.80.13

Humble Bundlers – download the update from your Humble Bundle page, not Puppygames!

Revenge of the Titans also got an update which actually changes a few things, some of which will make whiners whine, but as that’s what whiners do, we shall leave them to it. Amongst the changes is that the resolution of the game has now been fixed regardless of your screen’s aspect ratio. It was supposed to be like this before but because of a bit of a logic error it never really worked as intended. Now it does. You should find the game now resizes to any size you like when running in a window (press “P” to pause and ungrab the mouse).

Balance & gameplay changes in the game are as follows:

• The overall difficulty level of the game has been slackened off a tiny bit. You will be able to hoard a little more money before things get really tough. But hoarding money is not the way to win this game anyway. Spend it on defenses! Or as we like to call them here in Blighty, defences.
• Battledroids and repair drones have been nerfed, and are now produced in slightly fewer numbers.
• The repairs that repair drones do now actually cost you money. The repair cost is 10% of the basic value of the building per hitpoint restored. The base, having no cost as such, costs $750 per hitpoint.
• It’s now running under Java 7 on Windows, and should see about a 20% boost in performance, which you won’t notice really unless your machine is marginal in the CPU area.
• Fixed a few typos here and there
• Fixed a bug where you the difficulty was not being attenuated when you were being kicked in by the Titans. This has been in for ages! I did think it was a little odd that people were complaining quite so much about difficulty – turns out the little tweak that was in there to allow players to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat was broken!
• Nerfed boss hitpoints a little
• Any of you running on Steam will be delighted to know that we have added Steam achievements and Steam cloud support!

That little lot is bound to upset loads of people but, well, you know, they needed fixing. You’re unlikely to really notice unless you were heavily into repair drones, or you were finding the game too hard – in which case, give it another spin, you’ll probably get a lot further before you hit the Easier Level button.

After a bunch of false starts, bodged uploads, and some really annoying library wrangling between LWJGL versions, we have finally unleashed the updated Ultrabundle games, Droid Assault, Titan Attacks, and Ultratron. Existing customers can download nice brand new ones from the usual Puppygames locations (keep your old versions hanging around in case, eh?).

AZERTY keyboard users: sorry, but Ultratron is currently going to be pretty tricky to play as it uses WASD – we’ll upload a fix to this in an update probably next week.

What’s Changed

Titan Attacks has received a giant graphical overhaul and grown up into what we now call version 2.00. Now not only does it look timeless it also looks sharp and modern. A nice trick if you can do it 🙂 Three cheers to Chaz for making it look so much more… nice.

Now in widescreen, sort of…

Before and after…

There have also been a few small gameplay tweaks. Firstly, it’s now basically mouse controlled, because that’s how everyone normal plays it, although you can still use the keys if you’re desperate or stuck on a laptop. The mouse however allows you to move the ship at whatever speed you like. This means the ship speed shop item has been replaced with a different upgrade – “Addon recharge” – which governs the speed at which all your addons reload and fire. You’ll probably want to be upgrading it last. Finally, the ship only starts with one bullet, which is a bit more traditional, and gives you an early thing to aim for in the upgrades.

You’ll also notice now that the window is fully resizeable to any size you so desire, and we’ve added a much-asked-for world select screen!

Droid Assault recently already underwent the big graphical overhaul in the previous 1.90 release, so now with 1.90.1, we’ve done a few refinements to it. The maximum zoom of some of the droids was causing some performance issues and sometimes looked a little crazy so it’s been capped. The laser beams and flamethrower and flames have had their effects thoroughly revised. The game has become slightly easier too, with the droid you are controlling given 50% more hitpoints than before. So, a bunch of little tweaklets which should make for a very slightly nicer experience. Still haven’t put fast droid switching back in yet though – sorry.

Ultratron, being the oldest and simplest title, has simply received the ability to resize the window and a little bit of a title screen overhaul. A few tiny weeny tweaks have been made to the powerups – the spidroid powerups will now remain onscreen indefinitely for you to pick them up. Shooting the freeze powerup pauses the enemy robots momentarily, and shooting the three-way powerup causes your shots to split into three! This can give you an incredible amount of bullets flying around on screen but of course you are fairly hampered in your movement and aiming by the need to shoot it. That’s about it for Ultratron.

Unfortunately we’ve sort of lost the ability to redefine the keys along the way which might be a bit of an arse for those of you with AZERTY keyboards or other abominations. We’ll probably have to come up with a fix for that before the forthcoming Steam release.

All software is subject to the strange force of entropy that causes stuff that previously used to work fine to suddenly not work any more. This is an embuggerance which programmers live with on a daily basis, as it appears to occupy about 80% of our miserable time just keeping on top of it.

And so it would seem that some of our stuff has been broken by the Great Rug of Entropy deftly yanked from beneath its wobbly feet. Allow me to describe the symptoms, causes, and possible cures.

Linux

The Debian Packages Won’t Install On Ubuntu 11

Indeed they won’t, because Canonical in their infinite wisdom added some more checking into their .deb unpackager which disagrees with the sadly out-of-date Debian package maker we use. You can actually force it to accept the .deb files we provide (there’s some fancy commandline thing that works – please enlighten me in the comments and I’ll update this post with the solution). If you don’t fancy doing that then the good old .tar.gz files still work as normal.

Java 7 Breaks All Our Games On Linux

Oracle have just released the shiny new Java 7. Hurrah! It’s considerably faster than Java 6. Unfortunately it breaks all our games, and also, it has some serious crashy bugs in it at the moment so generally I’d advise not upgrading to Java 7 for a few months just yet. Unfortunately some Linux distros – notably it would seem Arch Linux – have automatically upgraded Java, and now the games don’t work. The solution is to roll back to Java 6. I advise you to use OpenJDK rather than the Oracle one, as it seems to work better.

Mac OS X

Problems with Lion

There may be some problems with Lion not working, but so far nobody’s come up with a concrete set of problems and/or solutions. We do know that Java is not installed by default in Lion, and so what should happen, on a brand new machine, is that the first time you run one of our games, it’s supposed to go and download Java. This is of course a crappy solution and it’s entirely Apple’s fault. They will be releasing a deployable solution soon which we’ll take advantage of just as soon as we can. If you have any troubles, comment below and tell me and I’ll update this post.

Windows

Surprisingly there appear to be no problems with Windows except possibly with that Razr mouse thing which appears to misbehave. And some of you still can’t figure out how to install new graphics drivers. It really is criminal that Windows still ships on OEM machines with drivers that simply won’t play 50% of the available games out there.

Other News

We’re just putting the final touches to the new version of Droid Assault which has many incremental improvements. We could easily massively expand it into a really quite big and deep sort of game but we’re unsure of the potential market for games like Droid Assault any more so we’re holding off further development on it. But right now the plan is to release it as we have it, which is basically the same but much more polished and improved in various subtle ways, and then think about what to do next. Well, what to do other than give the same treatment to Titan Attacks and Ultratron, which also near completion. All three titles will be making an appearance on Steam soonish, but as with Revenge of the Titans, you will be able to get free Steam keys for all of them if you buy them direct from Puppygames.

So we can cross another cheevo off the list: Revenge of the Titans is now available in actual physical form, in boxes lovingly drawn by Chaz, in actual shops! If that isn’t cool enough, said boxes also come with a double-sided hi-res poster inside and also the full-length music EP and also a free Steam key and also the Mac version is included as well!

How cool is that eh? I’ve got 3 of them here at home, still wrapped in their cellophane.

Many thanks to Iceberg Interactive for publishing the game phyically for us. We’re hoping that they make a bunch of money on it, because we’d like a nice simple retail partner we can turn to when we need them, and if this works out, it will be them.

Follow Up : For A Buck

A very interesting selection of responses to our previous bit of bloggage about selling games for a buck. Just to cure any wild speculation about things, I should say there’s no way we can sell games for a buck – it costs us $1.50 to process a single sale as it is*, so we’d actually be paying you money to, er, take digital goods “away”. This would lead to brain meltdown and financial apocalypse.

Even assuming we could process the fee for nothing, we don’t actually get enough visitors a day to sell enough copies even at the (very unlikely) conversion rate of 100% to make minimum wage. Obviously minimum wage might be ok if you are 21 and live with your parents but unfortunately I’ve got an entire family to look after in good old Blighty and it’s not getting any cheaper to live here!

Still, it was interesting to see the number of people who would impulse buy a game based on the strength of a video and / or a review of the game from some trusted source somewhere on teh internets. There were a few people who won’t even throw a dollar at anything – presumably not even a bag of crisps – unless it’s a dead cert, but I suspect that though vocal these people are absolutely a minority and I’ve got the figures to back it up! Revenge has been selling on Steam for 3 months now without a demo just fine. And just ask Apple how their pricing policies and refund policies have worked out for everyone. So, sorry guys, but if you won’t even throw a dollar at something to try it out for yourself, your options are becoming increasingly limited and at the end of the day you’re probably just cutting your nose off to spite your face. Well done! You saved a dollar! You can watch TV tonight all night again as a reward.

* We’ve just been informed that BMTMicro, our payment processor, are going to be able to reduce their fee from about $1.50 to 70c on games priced under $5 – so we’ve updated the price of the Ultrabundle and the games within to $4.97 to see what happens!

Paypal, Amazon Payments and Google Checkout

If you’re reading this then chances are you’re a fan and already bought something from us anyway, but BMTMicro have now added the ability to buy our games really easily using Paypal, Amazon and Google Checkout! Unfortunately right now Amazon are still insisting on getting address details but BMT I think are working on convincing them they don’t need that info for a registration.

What We’re Doing Now

So: Chaz is moving house, so he’s going to be incommunicado and otherwise busy for a month or so. While he’s doing that, I’m tarting up the Ultrabundle games, making them finally display in fully freely resizable windows (about time eh!). Droid Assault has gotten a much more thorough working over, with varying levels of zoom depending on droid scanner ranges, and tweaks to gameplay, weaponry, droids, and difficulty. I’ll be releasing the new Droid Assault update soon.

I think it’s ok to tell you that the Ultrabundle games will be available on Steam at some point in the not-too-distant-future, and like Revenge of the Titans, you will be able to get free Steam keys for them as soon as they’re released. So don’t let that get in the way of buying the Ultrabundle now 😉

After I’ve gotten the Ultrabundle games sorted for Steam, we’re going to start work on a new game. This isn’t the game we were originally planning to do next – we think that game is going to take about 2 years to get to releasable state and we’ve only got money for a year left. Instead we’re going to resurrect Treasure Tomb and attempt to do it justice with new hi-res graphics and other clever things. In particular we’re keen on making an integrated level editor that ordinary players can use, to, er, make all the levels for us with. Heheh.

Somewhere amongst all this I’m going to slowly chip away at Steam SDK stuff and get the achievements into Revenge of the Titans. And probably the Ultrabundle games as well. Busy busy busy!

Puppy Games is looking for a new MINION to join our tiny boutique studio. Briefly the perks comprise of:

1. Working from home.
2. Working your own hours.
3. Writing games for iOS.
4. Working for an award winning, renowned studio.
5. Generous holidays.
6. Being surrounded by beautiful women.

Only one of those statements is possibly untrue.

The conditions, disadvantanges and small print of your employment are thus:

1. Miserly pay. We don’t have lots of cash but we’ve got enough to pay you a frugal living.
2. You’ve got to be a UK taxpayer. Where you actually are we don’t care.
3. Your first job will be to port all our games to iOS, which is not as exciting as it sounds.
4. Only later will you get to do interesting stuff.

To this end we seek solicitations from UNIVERSITY GRADUATES with a PORTFOLIO OF GAMES PROGRAMMING EXPERIENCE on iOS who is able to attend an interview in Taunton within the next 3 months. You might not necessarily be a graduate, but then you’ll have a really great portfolio consisting of at least one FINISHED GAME. It would be extraordinarily beneficial if you are proficient in Java, OpenGL, and maybe C++ or C as well.

Please email your CV, either a URL, .doc, or .pdf, to cprince@puppygames.net with the subject “MINION”. Please include hyperlinks to any stuff we can check out online such as demos or video, and also include a covering letter saying what your salary expections might be so we can have a good chortle.

I’m afraid we CAN’T AFFORD AGENCY FEES so if you’re a pimp, I’m afraid you won’t get lucky this time around.

If after all the UNUSUAL JOB ADVERT HONESTY you still aren’t put off then this might be the job for you!

Over the weekend you lucky game playing types may have noticed that Revenge of the Titans got a bit of a bump up to version 1.80.12. A seemingly minor version number update – but no! This one contains the secret new buildings! Pretty much that’s all we did for this release – maybe fixed a few really minor things but I can’t remember what they were.

As usual the procedure for updating the game is simply download the latest version from where you originally got it, reinstall, and you’re done. Steam will update the game automatically, but we’re still waiting for them to make it live I think.

New building info…

Continue reading →

Finally as promised, you can take a look at the source code to Revenge of the Titans here. Inside that zip file you will find:

• A src folder containing all the Java and XML source code. Yes, the package name is “worm”. It’s a long story. The whole project was codenamed Ultraworm.
• A docs folder containing some licenses and a readme.
• A libs folder containing the Java dependencies for the project.

License

Now read this carefully: you can do what you want with the contents of that zip, provided you leave the license header alone that’s at the top of each file and respect its meaning (and the licenses of the various libraries). Make your own RTS or Tower Defence game, pinch any bits of code you like from within (in which case the license header is probably in a grey area but… I don’t care much), or maybe make some mods for Revenge of the Titans itself.

What you absolutely may not do is redistribute our assets – that’s the graphics and sounds and music – without our express permission, which if I don’t know you quite well, you are unlikely to get. Although some of the sound in the game comes from the incredibly awesome Freesound.org project, the oggs and jars are still ours; if you want the original .wav files which are licensed under the creative commons license, we’ve included links to every one of them in the docs.

You may also absolutely not use the name “Revenge of the Titans”, “Puppygames”, or “Shaven Puppy Ltd” when redistributing any derivative works without our express permission, as that’d again be stepping on our trademarks.

Some bright spark might cunningly put the lot up on github or sourceforge or whatever – go ahead. Said bright spark might also produce an Ant build.xml file.

Support

This is very important: I have almost no time to actually support this source code and your many complicated questions about how it works. If you’re asking me much about how it works in the first place I suspect you shouldn’t be bothering to look at the source anyway.

Anyone who emails the support email address about the source code will be ignored, after being hung by the foreskin until sorry.

Other than that: I now apologise in advance for the extremely crappy code and terrible inaccurate or nonexistent commenting! It just grew that way. In fact it’s all been growing for 10 years and the subject of constant bodging, retrofitting, and general breaking and poor design. I have it on good authority from Markus that it’s not quite as horrible as the Minecraft code but I suspect it’s not far off.

Making Mods

The one area where I will help out is making mods for the game. However, it’s quite an advanced sort of subject, and I shall expound upon exactly how to do this in a forthcoming blog post.

Other News

I got another 2000 keys from Steam, just as we were about to run out. And finally the Steam version has been patched to v1.80.11. The Mac version is imminent.

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!