Otherwise known as, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Deadlines and Fail Gracefully”.

Ok, that’s a little melodramatic.

We were doing quite well on the sprints but then Real Life decided to place a series of embuggerances in our way. I notice that the spelling checker in WordPress doesn’t understand “embuggerance” but I assure you, it is a word.

The plan for this sprint was:

• Fix all the bugs we know of (there were plenty of issues with focus and tabbing and mouseovers, and one or two other little minor glitches)
• Steam Integration – a full Steam version of all functionality. Steam is actually not so hard to integrate as it sounds as we have an awesome Steam integration library ready-made from our previous games, and mostly it involves removing functionality that we’ve implemented already in the game for Puppygames customers.
• Serverside housekeeping batch jobs – make accounts dormant if they’re unused for a month, etc. That sort of thing. In addition the subscribers actually needed to be charged on a regular basis (not that we’d actually enable it at this point – it just needs to be there)
• The last messages widget on title screen needed wiring up, with the associated event polling stuff all working between clients and server
• And the last actually exciting feature, the Commander Screen, in which you can adjust your display name, personal avatar, army colours, change manufacturer allegiance, and request to join a faction. As well as placeholders for stats and medals.

Well, in the end, all we’ve kinda managed to do is:

• Fix the tabbing/focus/mouseover bugs. Except, infuriatingly, checkboxes
• We can log in using Steam and get our avatar displayed but sadly that’s as far as we’ve got
• The Commander Screen is visually coming on very nicely but none of the functions are wired up to the server yet and it’s not fully integrated properly yet at all, more like Chaz just trying it out first than actually functional.

What’s Our Excuse This Time?

Well, mostly, this is all my fault, because Mrs. Prince is terribly ill and I’ve basically had to take almost the entire sprint off work to look after her and the kids, whom I can assure you are a pair of devils sent to torture my mortal soul. Right now she is in hospital and everyone is very upset though the prognosis is good. I don’t know particularly how any sprint survives contact with a quarter of the team suddenly stopping working in a completely random manner, but there we go.

The next thing is that Chaz’s Windows installation has somehow managed to blow up this morning and he’s going to have to reinstall his OS, which means at least two days down the drain for him too.

Finally Riven’s mouse has died. Not his squeaky one, but his old faithful electronic one, the one he uses to point at things on screens with. This makes Windows extremely difficult to operate, it would transpire.

Whither Now?

Well, I don’t think it’s really worth releasing Battledroid this sprint because we’ve barely got anything done on it – I think it really needs another week of work on it when we’re all firing on all cylinders so to speak – so we’ll leave it. Which brings me to the exciting news of what’s happening next week, which is that we will all be exhibiting at EuroGamer Expo 2013 in Earl’s Court, London, between September 26-29! Once again we’ll be giving away two brand new Nexus 7 (2013 models) as prizes for the best hiscore we have recorded in Ultratron and Droid Assault come Sunday evening. I’ve got a new Nexus 7. It is awesome. You need to come and play.

As we’re basically all away all next week and then a couple of days to recover, I wouldn’t expect much visible progress till Friday 4th October.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I proudly present to you… the Battledroid Alpha! Available for all OSes (not currently on Steam but we’ll see about that).

• Download Battledroid for Windows (installer)
• Download Battledroid for MacOSX (zip)
• Download Battledroid for Linux (tar.gz)

Don’t get all excited now! What you see before you once it’s installed and run is just the title screen. We’ve got a seriously hectic schedule coming over the next 4 months, during which time we will release a new build every other Friday, and the development diary. Our ultimate goal is to get into beta with a minimum viable product by 22nd November 2013, at which point we will be seriously running out of money and unleash our Kickstarter project upon you all, to get the game finished and full of content.

The title screen may not look that exciting to start with but this is how we make our games: we get all the really boring stuff done first, because it has to be done, and once it’s all out of the way while we’re all fresh and full of energy, the only stuff left to do is the fun stuff, with lasers, robots, explosions, and stuff getting blown to bits! (Years ago I realised that leaving titles and menus and options till last is a recipe for misery, demotivation, and failure to complete a game).

As it currently stands, the title screen automatically creates a guest account to play Battledroid on our server, and that’s pretty much all it does right now. Most importantly however is whether you are experiencing anything out of the ordinary, like rendering glitches or connectivity issues. We’d like to hear your feedback, even as this early stage, allowing us to take it into account as we’re working on the next alpha.

In two weeks’ time, at the end of Sprint 2, expect to see the next round of functionality being added to Battledroid, which is account registration and management functions like the ability to change your email address, set a name for yourself, reset your password, etc. – more dull stuff. But important dull stuff.

So… work is underway on our new game. I’ve called it “Battledroid” for now (ahem), a name which may or may not stay. I quite like it. So by way of warning, there now follows a wall of text explaining everything.

What is Battledroid?

Battledroid is a massively multiplayer asynchronous online war fought over the blasted and war-torn landscapes of Earth in the not entirely distant future a few centuries from now. At war are various ultracorporations (whom we shall call “factions”), who vie for control of territory in order to boost their own manufacturing capabilities. Everybody who is sensible has left for more peaceful pastures in the rest of the Solar System, leaving the wars to be fought by giant armies of autonomous battledroids.

Continue reading →

So, my big news is the birth of daughter number 2, Saffron Natalie Asia Prince (continuing the tradition of strange and unusual names in our family). Born at 815am on Saturday morning and weighing a colossal 10lbs 4oz after an extremely gruelling 26 hours of what looked like a pretty nasty labour! But all’s well that ends well and baby and mum are hale, hearty and healthy, and we were all home in time for mid-afternoon tea.

Another mouth to feed! Bugger. As I have alluded to my geeky friends though, I shall know my life’s work is done when my daughters one day ask me, “Daddy, how come the Dude is also in Tron?”

This is all, of course, not spectacularly interesting to Puppygames blog readers 🙂

What might be more interesting are the following items on the agenda:

Revenge of the Titans 1.80.7

I’ve uploaded another patch, early. We need to get it as trouble-free as possible for our release on Steam next week, so I’ve just stuck to trying to fix the last few important niggles. To this end it’s there right now to download, so you can test out the couple of fixes I’ve done. Here’s the changelog:

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: super slow gidrahs

Balance

• Reduced Saturn boss armour to 4, so now damageable by more weapons; increased hitpoints by 40%

Internal

• Added a Thread.yield() in the tick() loop to see if we can reduce sound stuttering
• Added a commandline switch sleep=true to force sleeping instead of yielding for machines with persistent sound stuttering troubles
• Game now recovers gracefully from a failed Restore, no more ghostly sprites left on the game screen!

Musings on Pricing

You might have noticed that the price of Revenge of the Titans has shot up to an apparently ball-bustingly massive $27.72 – egads! That’s like, nearly as much as a takeaway curry, which will give you, like, days and days of enjoyment! (If you leave it out all night and reheat it and eat it, anyway).

This has caused much nerdrage amongst the Glorious Entitled Of The Internet, who believe that everything should be free or nearly free (and if not free, then DRM free and available from the Pirate Bay). How dare Puppygames suddenly charge full price for their shitty 8-bit retro Flash same-as-all-the-others Tower Defense game? Why would I, Angry Righteous Gamer, pay my week’s pocket money out for this piece of utter shit?

Of course, gamers know everything there is to know about economics and pricing models, because they all make and sell games for a living, and do so more successfully than Puppygames do. We are of course famously broke and never made much of a bean with our games, but it was never anything to do with the price of them. We’ve sold games from everything between $4 and $28, and if you want to know the actual truth of it, it makes no difference to our bottom line whatever price we charge. My esteemed peer Cliff Harris aka Cliffski has rather a lot of knowledge of economics and has a few things to say on the subject which you might find interesting, and which I won’t bother repeating here (hurrah for hyperlinks!).

So I’m going to let you in on a few secrets and explanations as to the method behind my madness, mostly because if you’re reading this you’re a) very likely to already be a fan of our games and supporting us already and b) it really won’t make any difference if world+dog knows our secret world dominiation plans.

Firstly: we have always said the game would be $27.72 when it was finished, and we lured your wallets open with a 50% off pre-order beta offer which we rounded down to the considerably more l33t number $13.37. Obviously our UK and European customers got some crazy price in our funny national / continental currency that was around halfish too, except we all have to pay VAT. Bah.

Secondly: if we failed to officially increase the price of the game, that would have made us bullshitters about our pre-order offer. Technically.

Thirdly, there’s a 50% off coupon in the game, which is the first thing you see (if you don’t know yet it’s ROTTROCKS – put this in the BMT order form). So in reality it’s still 50% off, just like it always was, give or take a few cents. This is a special offer; we can change that whenever we want. We can offer 25% off, or 75% off, or 90% off. What this does is firstly make the game as cheap as it always was, and secondly make it look like a right bargain compared to its RRP of $27. It also means we can do legitimate sales with apparently astounding savings one day in the future but still make enough money to make it worth doing. At 90% off we still make a profit of about $1 on a registration of the game and 90% off sounds bloody appealing.

Fourthly, we needed to ensure there was pricing parity with the Steam version, which will be released next week at $14.95. The special offer 50% coupon means we’re effectively charging the same price as Steam is for the game. Well, a little bit less, but then Steam comes with the real advantages which you’ll all know if you love Steam. I love Steam. Don’t be ashamed.

So you see, having a high RRP on our site might be newsworthy fail for a few angry Reddit nerds, but the reality is, the game is still obtainable for the same price everywhere, and we can tweak the offer on a whimsy and make it newsworthy when we do so at the same time as making it look like a bargain.

And that’s the method to our madness. We have no idea if we’re right, but you’re sure as shit not going to tell us we’re wrong. We’ve got the numbers to do that for us.

Laters!

…1.80.6 will be slightly delayed 😉

Just a quick update to say I’ve patched Revenge of the Titans to v1.80.4, mainly to fix that crash bug you all noticed – I will get around to the huge pile of email the last couple of releases are generated tomorrow, honest – and tweak the balance slightly. This week I’m mostly going to be working on recording all your lovely Survival mode hiscores, Steam achievement integration, and possibly putting Sandbox mode in if there’s time.

Someone clever has noticed that it’s a total waste of time actually planting more than a single refinery before level 5 (just to actually start the aliens coming). In fact it’s probably not even worth bothering to research them until level 5 though the game does sort of hint at it being important. Hm. But then you can get a bit of a headstart with the efficiency research. Decisions, decisions! You know, I have no idea myself what the best path through this game actually is. Survival mode hiscores will reveal all.

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: crash researching lasers and disruptors
• Fixed: powerup counters appearing when collecting a powerup when the HUD is flipped down

Balance

• Collectors now $500
• Cooling towers now $500
• Difficulty now slighty biased in favour of cash in the bank (ie. the more you hoard instead of use, the harder it gets)

Internal

• Halved streaming audio buffer size as it doesn’t seem to have had any effect

A] FLEE

B] ATTACK

C] DOWNLOAD

Yes, hot on the heels of v1.80.1 we already have Revenge of the Titans v1.80.2, which is really just a little bit of a tweak to address a couple of really annoying things that slipped past my bleary code-worn eyes. Well worth the download. Not least because if you don’t it’ll nag you to download forever.

Bugs Fixed

• Fixed: shipped 32bit MSVCR90.dll this time – whoops
• Fixed: powerups counters would show zeros when HUD hidden and shown
• Fixed: mines / barricades counters would shown 10 when should have shown 0 when HUD hidden and shown

Balance

• Made game easier overall – too many people getting stuck!
• Survival a little bit harder

New Features and Enhancements

• Batteries no longer slow down reloading rate

Internal

• Gidrahs recalculate their paths a little less enthusiastically
• Slight adjustment to spawn delays in Survival

With any luck, I’ve finally got to the bottom of the sound not working on a few of those Windows machines out there. Turns out I accidentally shipped a 64-bit dll in the last patch instead of the magic 32-bit one that would have fixed everything. Hm. I could in fact make a completely separate 64-bit version for Windows I suppose. Maybe that’ll confuse the great unwashed.

I Can Haz Done A Playthrough

Behold, a playthrough of levels 1-10 (15 minutes long). As you can see, I got my arse handed back to me on a plate, and not very gently either, on level 10, because I got a bit too cocky. But at least it shows the fighting spirit so lacking in today’s impetuous and lazy youth with their short attention spans and lack of investment in their own entertainment eh? Get off my lawn, Earth Boss!

I shall be uploading my Moon playthrough in a bit, which took me a fair amount longer to do, though I managed it all in one go without getting kicked in by the Titans

Full Steam Ahead!

I’ve only got a few things on my to-do list now for Revenge of the Titans, like a little graphical glitch when barricades get attacked and online hiscores integration… which is good, because it means I’m now working on the Steam client integration, which will see the unique medals in the game used as Steam achievements, and I’ll be storing the hiscores in Survival mode hopefully on Steam too. Not sure yet if the Steam cloud integration is going to work out properly for us or not yet – possibly in a patch.