“Earthlings! Some of you are still attempting to thwart our awesome might using your puny version 1.0 turrets! Perhaps you would fare better if you downloaded the new 1.1 release and installed it over the top of your old and busted version!”

Things which have Changed

• Mouse scroll speed is now fixed
• Slightly more useful mouse speed adjustment range (default position 3 of 10)
• The gidrahs do not start their advance until you place your first refinery. Go and make a cup of tea, look around, maybe place a few defences in strategical locations!
• Going back a few levels to try a different tactic now works as you’d expect it to
• You now get a bonus for recycling at the end of a level: your buildings are all sold for 40% of their original purchase price, scaled by their remaining hit points, to the nearest 50$. This is paving the way for the SELL BUILDING button which will appear with the Mars update at the end of June.
• …but now the integrity bonus of the Moon base is smaller to compensate
• The earlier levels will be ever so slightly harder than they were before
• The game now ends at the end of the Moon (registered or not) because it’s a bit pointless playing any further at this stage, as Mars and so forth are completely unfinished placeholders!
• Hopefully the Mac crash when you place a refinery is fixed. But without a Mac to test it on I won’t know until you bug me.

We’ve been carefully listening to all the feedback we can find on the whole internet and subtly planning modifications of various sorts that will come with the Mars levels.

Quick Tips

A fair few people have commented on the amount of clicking you’ve got to do in the game. You should know the following things:

• You can click and drag when harvesting refineries, reloading, and building! Mouse down, wiggle all over factories, release, done. Likewise you can paint a line of turrets or reload them all.
• Every button on the UI has a shortcut key. The three most useful ones are R, to go to the next empty turret; E, to go to the next full refinery; and Q, to take you straight to your base. TAB will fast forward the action in dull moments.
• Right-click on a building to select that sort of building in build mode. No need to hunt around in the little icons if you can see another such building already on the screen.
• The game evolves over time. It will eventually become impossible for you to manually deal with harvesting all your refineries and reloading your turrets. Certain avenues of research will glean you buildings that will do the job for you. The game evolves from a micromanagement cross between Cake Mania and tower defence into a macro management and strategical game.

Another few tips you might want to know, if you’re struggling with the difficulty sometimes:

• Build as many refineries as can possibly fit around all the crystals you can find. It only takes two full harvests to make $100 profit!
• If you get owned, replay the level. It will be a bit easier next time around. If you’re really at a dead end, go back a level or two by going back to the title screen – your progress is preserved at each level (until you go back levels)
• Level 18 is hard. Be prepared! Make sure you’ve got plenty of money before you start it. Maybe skip a level of research.

Well, you know how it is: you toil away in obscurity for 5 years and then all of a sudden everyone wants to play your new game, all at the same time. So your server is flattened as if by a tsunami of eager Earth Commanders eager to turn the tables the advancing Titan hordes, and boom! the registration key generator dribbles its last, expiring quietly, without telling anyone.

We’re working with BMTMicro right now to get everyone their registration codes which didn’t come through. I’ve got about 50 emails to reply to and assure everyone that everything’s ok! We got all your orders in the BMT database, but they just need to be sent over to our server now. Stay tuned!

By the way – don’t play past the end of the Moon yet! Mars and so on are completely not at all done at all, with just placeholder graphics and aliens that aren’t even drawn right and have the wrong hit points etc. etc. – it’ll be very boring! Mars should be coming at the end of June, and you’ll have to deal with wraiths and gidlets!

While BMT help sort out the problems we’d just like to thank everyone massively for helping us out and for being extremely patient while we get the problems fixed. We’re reading every single little bit of feedback or commentary all over the whole internet and I’ll be making all sorts of little improvements and tweaks based directly on your feedback.

In the meantime I’ve got to hold down a day job 9 – 5 thing while dealing with all of this still – and guess what we’re doing at work? Yes, releasing a big bit of software this week, which doesn’t work yet.

Back to panicing.

UPDATE: the key generator was fixed as of last night, and looking at the stats this morning, everything’s working fine, so hopefully no more problems with new registrations. Things are slow with BMT to sort the backlog though, so we’ll manually register those today. Everything should be sorted by end of today. Phew.

UPDATE: manually registered all those that the key generator had previously failed, they should all now be working fine… and then it breaks again 🙁 currently waiting for Cas to return to fix.

UPDATE: that was me just being daft – key gen is working, database was blocked cos i was adding stuff to it manually. doh. Everyone now should have keys. Hurrah!

UPDATE: nope, not just me being daft, it’s still not quite right 🙁 Still only affecting a few people, apologies to them. I’ve manually added the recent few – all up-to-date at the mo.

The ever-interesting Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software has a blog which I read whenever he writes a new and usually very interesting article. Today he’s posted an article about another article (and, ahaha, I’m posting an article about an article about an article) about that popular internet business meme of getting 1,000 true fans.

The gist of the nested article is this: with 1,000 “true fans” of your products, you’re able to make a living if you, say, sell to said fans a product for $25 four times a year.

Jeff wisely points out that extracting $100 from someone every year is probably a bit unrealistic. He doesn’t mention I think also the difficulty of actually producing four products a year worth $25. It ain’t gonna happen. It takes us 6 months to make a game. The current one has actually taken 4 years to write but that’s a story for another blog post.

Instead, a more realistic figure is 4,000 true fans and selling one thing a year to them.

I got intrigued and wondered just how many true fans Puppygames has. So I ran this bit of SQL on our database, which is a rough-and-ready indicator:

select email, count(*)
from registrations
where ordernumber <> 'special'
group by email
having count(*) > 2
order by 2 desc

And it tells me that we’ve got 74 customers who have bought 3 or more of our games (at least, using the same email address, anyway). Bah. So we have 74 true fans by that reckoning, in 6 years of writing games. Only another 3,926 to go. That’ll take another 320 years or so.

We just released Droid Assault v1.5 which fixes some of the biggest moans people have had about the game! I spent this morning playing the game and tweaking all sorts of little things. The general result is a game which is slightly more manic, very slightly easier in some respects, and slightly more fun. Here’s what I did:

• The number of enemies on each level increases slightly slower as you progress through the game, but carries on increasing for much longer. Levels now have up to 48 enemies on them! Quite insane firefights result.
• The droids under your command now start the level slightly more spread out, which might get them into more fights right at the start instead of wandering uselessly in a little room.
• The droid under your command wears out considerably faster that in did before. Booo! That sucks! Except for…
• …all of your droids are 100% repaired at the end of every level! The information screen between levels now shows their “worn out” hitpoints versus maximum hitpoints allowed, rather than how beaten up they were by blaster fire on the previous level. This means you should be able to keep your favourite droids alive for much longer and you’ll eventually have a much bigger army of cool droids!
• The boss tended to drop powerups which weren’t much use to you at the end of the level (shields, recharges). It’s now much more likely to drop better powerups.
• The length of time between resetting the combo destruction bonus has been increased from 1 second to 1.5 seconds. This means bigger combos, and therefore more transfer points!

These changes sound like small fry but having those droids kept alive longer lets you get further into the game and therefore you’re going to have even more fun! If you haven’t tried out Droid Assault yet, or even if you have but it wasn’t quite right, give it another go and see what you think.

We’ve just added Gravitron 2 to our tiny catalogue of games. It’s a great little retro game reminiscent of Thrust on the C64, and at $5 (£3.50) it was just too good to leave alone! I bought it myself a couple of weeks ago and it’s the best vector graphic gravity based retro shooter I’ve played all year – in fact I liked it so much I thought we’d offer it up to Puppygames customers too. Expect one of our exceedingly rare mailing list letters in your inbox imminently!

Have a look at the tasty video of the gameplay if you’re not convinced:

I just released the latest version of Droid Assault, fixing three niggles that have irked players. This is what’s changed in the new 1.2 release:

• You now unlock levels after completing every five levels. This means you can now start just after any boss or danger stage! Hurrah! So when you get really far you won’t have to start quite so far back in the game, and you’ll gradually get to experience all those really vicious droids in the later levels!
• The flamethrower equipped droids now actually shoot at the enemies when you’ve captured them. They used to just wander around aimlessly and get blown up.
• And last but not least, the smarter robots now flee from bosses to the best of their fairly limited ability! It’s not foolproof but it might keep them alive a little bit longer.

So there you have it, go snag the latest version and enjoy!

The robots are here! It’s been a while coming, but we’re pleased to finally announce the release of our sixth and most ambitious game to date – Droid Assault…

The droids are malfunctioning – it’s your job to destroy them all!

Infiltrate the Omni-Corp warehouses, capture droids using your transfer beam and build up a small army of bots to assist in your mission. Along the way, modify your droids with upgrades and powerups, discover a whole range of advanced weaponry including disruptors, laser beams, rockets and flamethrowers, and fight your way through boss battles and special challenge stages too.

Version 1.1 contains a few fixes and tweaks – we’ve increased the contrast between spaces and walls, tidied up the help screen and balanced out some of the droid stats.

more screenshots…

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