… this is just an intermediary release which we weren’t really planning to do, but in true Puppygames style we missed our deadline and haven’t quite finished Titan yet. So instead I thought I’d just wrap up the various tweaks and bugfixes that are otherwise ongoing whilst Titan bakes in the oven.

Here are the direct uncached links for you blog-following sorts:

Windows
Mac OS X
Debian Linux (32 bit)
Debian Linux (64 bit)
Generic Linux (32 bit)
Generic Linux (64 bit)
Webstart (all OSes)

The Debian packages should hopefully install with a doubleclick, and put a shortcut in your applications menu under Games. If in doubt about whether to use Debian or not… well, you probably shouldn’t be using Linux 🙂 But just grab the generic Linux packages instead, and there’s a revenge.sh in there you can just double-click on to make it work. Provided you have either Sun Java or OpenJDK installed. The Debian packages will automatically install OpenJDK for you – I’ll figure out how to get it to use Sun Java if it’s already installed in the next release.

We haven’t yet tweaked the ordinary download page to include the Linux variants on it yet, so the Great Unwashed won’t know about them until Chaz does some twiddling.

Here’s what’s otherwise changed. Sorry about the blaster noises and character speech – we’re still working on them, and the sounds in there are just placeholders.

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: factory-not-restarting bug again
• Fixed: flickering status message when factories autocollected and turrets autoloaded
• Fixed: saturn flying gidrahs not appearing!
• Fixed: awesome medal awarded multiple times in a level
• Fixed: gidlets getting stuck on crystals

New Features and Enhancements

• Survival and Endless modes are now available to demo players too!
• Factories that shutdown with less than $10 to collect should go straight to shutdown
• Extra mines / barricades powerups no longer appear in campaign/endless mode
• Custom window sizes: pass width=xxx height=xxx on the commandline to use a custom window size (not compatible with fullscreen mode yet – sorry)
• New blaster noises! – sorry, but the old ones were of unknown provenance – still working on new ones using steel slinkies and tuning forks
• Some new ambient background sound for Saturn levels
• Linux .deb installers
• Linux .tar.gz installers

Balance

• Buffed disruptor very slightly from 16 to 24 pts damage
• Droids fire a tiny bit more frequently
• Make saturn boss a bit weedier
• Gidrah slaughter attenuation now only in effect after level ends from the state at level end
• Gidrah rush ramp-up duration now gets longer as levels progress, rather than shorter!
• Crystals a little more far-flung, and a few less crystals on Titan

Internal

• Titan colours
• Fiddled with sound attenuation parameters
• Quieter bashing sounds & building collapses now based on building size
• Fixed problem where game assumed all flying gidrahs drop bombs
• Tweaked minimum level size to ensure that (barring desktop display mode changes) levels always fit properly into a monitor
• Some new ambient background sound for Titan levels
• Fixed: Exploding gidrah bullets totally destroyed buildings in one hit!

You might be interested to know what’s on the ToDo list at the moment. Now’s your (last!) chance to add things to it!

To Do

• Fix turret targeting to use better heuristics
• Speech
• Blaster noises
• Blast mine pips
• Show total medal bonus on intermission screen
• Wraith (gid 5) for Titan
• Titan gids 4, 5, and gidlets sound effects
• Titan Levels
• Titan Stories
• Don’t do building destruction noise on sale
• Get custom resolutions working with commandline parameters
• Research screen says “all researched” at the top even if not everything’s researched. (fixed this: And it’s white, too. And in the wrong place.)
• Online hiscores?
• Turret beam angle wrong?
• Linux .rpm installers?

Please test these experimental Linux builds of Revenge of the Titans 1.64! The Debian packages should install with a simple double-click and on a normalish installation you’ll get a shortcut in your apps menu under Games. They should be compatible with your existing Webstarted profile, too.

64-bit tar.gz
32-bit tar.gz
64-bit Debian package (for Ubuntu and similar)
32-bit Debian package (for Ubuntu and similar)

I’m afraid I haven’t got RPMs to work yet. There seems to be some buggery going on inside the Redline RPM creator I’m using from within Ant that causes the architecture to get wrongly specified.

This week we took it upon ourselves to completely migrate our servers from an ancient ThePlanet dedicated rig to a spiffy federation of services. Our new www.puppygames.net website now lives on a teeny tiny SliceHost.com slice, and the MySQL database has moved completely away into the Cloud. Or Amazon RDS to be precise. The new website runs APC, speeding up our rather cranky PHP code, and all of our images and downloads now live on SimpleCDN.net. SliceHost enables us to ramp the power of our server literally in a couple of hours up to something with ten times the power.

This we will need to do fairly shortly, as big things are afoot, and it is probable our new server is going to get a hammering in about 2 weeks’ time, because that’s when the final beta release comes out, which might well be the last chance to get the game at its l33t price of $13.37! Shortly after that comes… the real release! And we have an extra special surprise up our sleeves. Oh yes. More special than you can possibly imagine.

While you cogitate about that, you might want to pick up the latest beta 1.62 of Revenge of the Titans from here (direct links to avoid CDN cache):

Windows
Mac OS
Linux (via Webstart)

Continue reading →

By now, some of you may have noticed the existence of a certain Ultrabundle floating around on the Puppygames site. This is an experiment to see what happens when you, er, sell stuff ridiculously cheap. The results are quite interesting. Apart from a slight problem when Markus accidentally tweeted about it just as it went live (instantly killing our server as a deluge of Minecraft fans descended upon its weedy single core 1.6GHz processor with 512MB of RAM and 10mbps ethernet connection), it seems to be doing pretty well.

To cut a long story short, and following the tradition of the Minecraft stats page (except less, hm, dynamically updated at the moment – maybe Chaz should pop that on the front page!), we’ve sold 300 Ultrabundles in the last 48 hours, and even while I typed this blog post another 3 came in. 4 sorry. Although that is something of a mockery compared to the 15,000 sales at three times the price that Minecraft made in the same time period 🙂

In traditional Puppygames style it’s not without its teething troubles of course. We’ve got a small problem with international characters in addresses sent from BMT which I’ll be thinking of a way to fix, which causes your registration not to “stick” and you have to keep registering – annoying. And Linux users using Sun JDKs are having some problems running Droid Assault, though it seems to work fine using OpenJDK here on Ubuntu.

Unfortunately… I’m just about to move house. Like, in about a few hours’ time. So I’ve got to pack this computer up right after the blog post and I won’t get back online for a few days to fix anything or deal with any troubles. Chaz will man the email support and fob everyone off (politely) until I get back online again.

In other news – we were supposed to be releasing Revenge of the Titans 1.61 tonight but I completely forgot I was moving house when I wrote the schedule. So instead we’ll release it on Hallowe’en, and after your brains have been fried in Minecraft Hell, you can unwind with a short burst of the extreme frenetic terror that is Survival Mode. Survival Mode is awesome. I think it’s my favourite bit of the game so far.

Chaz Edit: if you’re having Linux version problems there’s some help (maybe) after the jump…

Edit: and if you’re having problems with Ultratron and you have Norton installed read on too…
Continue reading →

Well, there’s a relatively unusual event: the recent spate of random crashes with the game (all of them, I think) is actually down to the Java virtual machine crashing. After a bit of snooping, it transpires that the crash is caused by the experimental garbage collector I used in Java 6. So I’ve gone and reverted back to the very naughty Java 7 VM. Mac and Linux users are completely unaffected by this issue, so no worries on that front.

So, Windows users, you can download a fixed version of your games here:

Titan Attacks
Ultratron
Droid Assault
Revenge of the Titans

Your saved games might break, I’m not sure. Try it and see.

Some of you might have been receiving mysterious crashes with Droid Assault, Titan Attacks and Ultratron, whilst just sitting on the title screen. It turns out that I forgot to build the last two versions of each of these games with the resources to display the little message box to tell you to download a new version! So when the new versions got uploaded a while ago, they all, er, started to break.

If you’ve been experiencing this strange crash, redownload and reinstall your games from Puppygames.

In other news: some people have been experiencing some crashes with the latest release of Revenge of the Titans. I’ve looked into the error logs and noticed that it’s because you’re trying to use a 1.5 profile with the new 1.6 game. Sorry guys and gals, I broke it – your old profiles and saved games are no longer usable. You’ll have to create a new profile.

Also, you might have noticed the file sizes increasing slightly. I’ve reverted from using the (completely naughty) hacked Java 7 JVM in the games to using nice normal unhacked Java 6 again, and this has the pleasing side effect of the games working once more in Japan and China. Don’t ask why 🙂

Just a quickie post to say that we’ve updated the three older games. In particular we’re hoping that the mysterious crash in Titan Attacks on some Macs has been fixed – if this has happened to you (it happens when the first mothership appears) can you let us know if it’s fixed the problem? (By the way, the version number hasn’t changed)

Also, a question to the masses:

What would you pay for all three games in a bundle? What price threshold would make you just buy the lot on a whimsy?

I’ve just uploaded the latest and greatest Revenge of the Titans, version 1.52, which is a mostly hidden-behind-the-scenes sort of update, and lots of little bugfixes. As per usual point your browsers at the following links, and if it doesn’t say 1.52 on the title screen or the installer, that means you’re still getting the cached version from our content delivery network provider (simplecdn.net), which is annoying, because I especially purge the caches every time I do a new upload!

Windows
Mac OS X
Linux

Linux users – we are aware that Java Webstart is completely rubbish and we’d like to give you a completely standalone application with an embedded JVM in it and so on – we just have no idea how to actually do it yet 🙂

Also, we have finally finished implementing the coolest DRM ever invented.
Continue reading →

You may or may not have noticed our server being extremely broken lately. In fact a week ago it developed a fatal bad sector on the boot disk and exploded, taking everything with it (including lwjgl.org unfortunately which is still not back up yet). We’ve worked tirelessly trying to piece it back together in between day jobs and progress on Revenge of the Titans, and it’s popped up and gone down like a yoyo ever since, occasionally losing the odd blog post and comments in the process.

We still don’t have email (though we do still have the puppygames Gmail account, so keep using that, please!). Hopefully this will be sorted fairly imminently.

Because of the server’s unexpected demise we completely missed the August 29th date for releasing Revenge of the Titans 1.51. So what we’ve done is roll it all up into a slightly bigger release with what was going to be in 1.52, and this is now scheduled for release on 12th September. The big things in the new release are:

• You can now sell buildings! And if you’re quick enough (10 seconds), it won’t cost you a bean.
• The HUD has been completely redesigned and can be hidden from view when you need to place buildings right down the bottom
• The research screen now has a tree view as well as a categorised view, and all the building stats are available for researched items
• Introducing the Medals screen, which you can view at any time, showing you the medals you’ve earned in your war efforts so far (with a total score)

Stay tuned for updates!

My favourite game, Droid Assault, has just received a little TLC, and updated to version 1.8. This version should install correctly on Windows Vista and Windows 7, and it should also work on ATI Catalyst 10 drivers. You may or may not notice it running a little more smoothly as well, especially on slightly older hardware, though I really doubt you’ll notice it. Four other things were fixed:

• Multi-core AI was completely broken but nobody seemed to notice. They’ve had their brains ripped out and replaced with the brains from the gidrahs in Revenge of the Titans.
• The disruptor now does 50% more damage.
• The S490 droid is less annoying now, having twin blasters and moving 50% quicker.
• Registration details now fade after 30 seconds

I hope you have fun with it!

Any problems, please let me know as soon as possible. I’m off to bed now.

Well, if by “rescue” you mean “eat and then stomp the tree into the ground”, then this is an accurate headline for a slightly more mundane but much more significant event, which is the release of Revenge of the Titans 1.4! This is a tweaky bugfixing sort of release that addresses all the pesky issues that made it into the slightly rushed Mars release, and is 1,000,000 times much more betterer. The Saturn release won’t suffer these problems, oh no. That’s because we’re going to take a little bit longer over Saturn to make sure it’s not so broken this time. Expect Saturn (the 1.5 release) to be in approximately 6 weeks time. On Saturn you can expect to find rather irritating flying Titans that drop bombs. In the meantime, download v1.4 because it’s a great improvement on 1.3.

Download Links

Windows
Mac
Linux/Webstart

What’s Fixed

• Fixed: difficulty calculation wrong way around
• Fixed: 50%/25% typo in building/research description for Silos
• Fixed: Mouse speed not persisted between sessions
• Fixed: Mars boss won’t die (general gidrah problem: when told to die they should die)
• Fixed: hotkeys suppressed when screen becomes unblocked until key is released
• Fixed: ESC from menu quits game instead of simply closing the menu!
• Fixed: spider attack sound
• Fixed: Assertion failure: removing a cooling tower
• Fixed: Can lay factory nowhere near crystals if move mouse fast enough

What’s Changed

• Allow barricades to squash trees, cars, etc
• Adjusted monetary value of Mars gidrahs up a little
• Crystals now spread out randomly
• Decoy now costs $2500
• ESC key works on research screen (and RETURN does NEXT LEVEL)
• Increased fire rate of droids a little
• Minimum range for rocket launchers
• Only show full address on first registration
• Reactors now only $500
• Stopped boss from being knocked back or easily stunned
• Spread crystals out more depending on research difficulty & attempts
• Tweak rush difficulty
• Tick queens spawn slighly more ticklets when they pop

Your Thoughts Appreciated About…

I mooted a little thought with Chaz earlier on… the gist of which is this: we’ve been working on Revenge of the Titans for, hmm, two and a half years now, and we’d like to see the back of it so we can do something even more utterly cool, like Minecraft perhaps, but with blackjack, and hookers. So I pondered this question:

What if we ditched Titan, the “world”, and made the moons of Saturn be the last “world”, ending with Titan?

And then we add the Endless and Survival modes to make up for the missing 10 levels. I’m not sure how much more we could add to the game in Titan without possibly making it feel a little… stretched, if you see what I mean. Apart from flying Titans that drop bombs, there were going to be Titans that actually shot back, and, er, that was about it, for things I was going to add in Titan itself. Perhaps we should just have shooty gidrahs on the Saturn levels already?

The Saturn levels are already going to take as long to actually physically play through as the whole of Earth, Moon and Mars combined — the levels get longer and longer to make some real epics — so would we really lose anything significant here? I know that as a gamer I’d be thinking, “More levels! More levels!” but … and it’s a big but… I know I’d probably also be thinking, “…but the new game modes would be more fun really.”

Any thoughts on what to do? Would you rather Endless/Survival modes instead of 10 more levels? Do you insist on both? Do you want us to start writing another even cooler game?

Late last night I uploaded 1.2 of RoTT. The mirrors may or may not pick it up correctly (and Webstart/Linux will probably get it wrong too – clear your cache), but you can tell what version you’ve got because the installer now says it’s 1.2 when it’s installing on Windows; and on the Mac there should be 1.2 in the program information from the Finder; and the title screen, if you look closely somewhere around the middle, should also say 1.2.

Mirrors:

Windows

Mac

Linux (Webstart)

What’s Changed

• Factories now scavenge around for patches of empty crystals instead of just stopping when their current patch runs out. Less clicking! Hurrah!
• Scanners are now more expensive at $750 (on account of just how bloody useful they are), and batteries are $500.
• The moon aliens are worth a bit less cash when they’re destroyed, and they’re slightly tougher.
• There’s been some tweaking of the game’s auto-difficulty adjustment function. If you get badly kicked in, the replay should be much more doable. It should also get harder a bit sooner as a result of the gestalt changes to pricing and such.
• That annoying bug where an alien would scurry off to the bottom left and go hide in the bedrock has been fixed. Hurrah!
• Aliens no longer self-destruct when cutting past scenery.
• The maximum useful number of scanners/batteries/cooling towers/reactors that you can stick next to a turret or whatever is now 4. Any more than that won’t make a difference.
• Fixed the laser problem when it was firing so fast its beam hadn’t finished the last shot, and wasted the ammo.
• Adding batteries to turrets now dynamically adds to their ammunition – no need to reload.
• The levels are ever so slightly smaller to begin with. A little more claustrophobic perhaps.
• The level will begin automatically if you’ve got less than $100 (and therefore cannot place a refinery to start the level)

So What’s The Best Strategy?

Well, there’s a funny thing about our games… I’m not all that good at them myself! I’ve never completed any of them fully. There are loads of far more talented gamer types out there who have done. I once got an email from someone who’d found a problem on level 75 of Droid Assault (it’s a danger stage populated entirely by laser-shielded battledroids, that are themselves armed with lasers. You can imagine what the problem was when he transferred). Level 75!! I’ve never even got to level 50 without cheating. But there we go.

So far, what I do generally in RoTT is this:

• Now I’ve made it so that you can look around before the aliens come, I set up a few key defences along the roads if I’ve got more than $1000 in the bank.
• I never place things actually on roads if I can help it, because the gidrahs will very likely want to trample on them. Except for mines. I plonk mines in lines down the roads, and it blows them to smithereens one at a time. Mines are good.
• When I’ve done that I paint as many refineries as I can next to as many crystals as possible. I spend every last penny on refineries. This is critical to success. It only takes a second full collection to make $100 profit from a refinery.
• If (as often happens) the refineries are between your base and the gidrahs, they’re going to trample it. Get some walls up and put a few turrets behind them.
• Eventually the gidrahs are going to get through your initial defences. I usually end up putting some big guns and a bunch of upgrades next to the base, and plonking concrete in front of them. Then it’s a case of nailbiting worry and frantic reloading.
• I don’t always research something. Particularly by the Moon levels, things are getting mental. If I start a level with less than $2500 in the kitty I usually get kicked in. Sometimes you’ve just gotta save your cash. You can research something on the next level. You’re not honestly expected to be able to research everything by the end of the game. Choose your path. If it doesn’t work out… go back a few levels, maybe take a different turning.
• As for research, I get all the basic tower upgrades done first before going for heavier guns. You only need the heavy guns from level 12 onwards.
• Mines are especially effective on armoured targets or ones with loads of hitpoints. The bog standard rank-and-file gidrah can be picked off by spamming them with ordinary blasters – so don’t put heavy guns down in their way – it’s a complete waste of money and overkill.

A number of people have commented on the usefulness or not of the droid factory. The droid factory actually has a special purpose, and it’s related to what happens on Mars, where you will encounter gidlets. Gidlets can’t be targeted by turrets because they’re too small – you need to go hand-to-hand with droids. Droids are only otherwise much use against unarmoured targets as they have tiny little blasters.

Likewise you may be wondering about capacitors. Apart from how cool they are, especially with a few reactors and batteries nearby, you’ll be needing them to zap wraiths on Mars, which are invisible and therefore won’t get shot at by turrets or droids. You have been warned!

Some Reasoning about Game Design

So… why is this game so difficult for some, and so easy for others? What am I doing about it? Why are the things the way they are and not exactly howyou want them to be?

For example why’s there no difficulty selector? (In any of our games?)

Here’s my reasoning on difficulty selection. I don’t necessarily want you to agree with it, but understand what it is we’re trying to achieve with what we have: our games automatically tune for difficulty using a variety of performance metrics gathered from the player’s performance over time and on-the-moment. With a difficulty selector, people have no idea what difficulty to choose initially. I always select HARD in case EASY is boring but often I end up having a bit of a tedious time quickloading games every 20 seconds because actually, hard was too hard. Once I’ve chosen HARD, that’s it – there’s no changing it, no going back.

With auto tuning difficulty, the game starts off very easy. If you’re good – which it works out by how much money you’ve got in the bank, how many things you’ve got researched, and how many levels you’ve finished straight without defeat so far – it gets harder. Up until the point where you just can’t cope, and you get defeated. At this point, it lops a huge factor off the difficulty and invites you to try the level again. If you still get defeated, it lops even more difficulty off the level, until finally, you’re playing it as if you were a n00b right back at the beginning of the game again, albeit coping with all the new things that have turned up. The idea with the difficulty is that it slowly creeps up and if we get the balance just right, you’ll be having a fairly permanently frenetic time until you finally taste defeat. Defeat is part of this game. You are destined to be overwhelmed a few times. This is deliberate in RoTT.

Some people might be finding the game disproportionately hard even so. That’s because it’s a very deep game. There are a lot of things to juggle simultaneously – strategy, expenditure, mouse dexterity, research. You’re probably not thinking very hard. This is not a casual game! It’s not even a tower defence game. It’s an RTS, and a cunning one at that. Rethink your game!

I’m off on holiday to France now leaving all the problems that surface with poor old Chaz, so be nice to him, because he doesn’t know how to fix the server if it breaks, or any bugs.