Battledroid Alpha and Development Diary

Diary, News

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).

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.

37 thoughts on 'Battledroid Alpha and Development Diary'

  1. Ha! A new game by you guys! (Well, we know it was coming. =). The menu loads just fine for me. I noticed during the updater though that the final update size increased as you downloaded, making it seem a bit like the runner’s paradox with the downloaded data chasing an ever increasing number. 😉

    P.S. I’m really worried about this project as Caspian said it would pretty much be the game that decides whether Puppygames ceases to be. D:

  3. looks fine here, 60 fps, no glitches, according to client, connection to server is stable, successfully automatically created guest account. in other words, for what it is, its working xD

  4. With each release I keep crossing my fingers that Puppygames will FINALLY get the mass exposure you guys deserve. Maybe this will be the one! Also, I just realized, with everybody going crazy over 30 minute rogue likes.. that’s kind of what droid assault had done years ago, isn’t it?

  5. Everything work fine on arch linux x86_64.
    At first i was thinking the installer had frozen,but after 1 or 2 min the download started.

    1. Thanks for your report! The installer detects DNS problems, and keeps trying to resolve them (pun intended). Eventually your ISP sends us the right ipaddress and the download starts, allowing you to launch the game.

  7. Hey, I read your other blog post about losing a ton of money on your games and the high development costs.

    I know iOS is out of question, but what about the 3DS or Wii U? Both systems have less of a flood for developers and many indie devs have expressed success. I’d honestly buy your games if they were ported to either system.

  8. Just a heads up, on the OSX version the cursor (pointer) is invisible. I can only click buttons by finding when they are highlighted.

    1. Seems this problem occurs on other machines as well – the GUI thinks there is a controller connected and disables the mouse pointer. Doh! As we don’t use the controller in Battledroid I think I’ll just disable that bit of code for now.

      1. I tried opening it a second time after moving the program from my downloads folder to my games folder only to have it crash on opening on every attempt. Ive got a crash report to send if your interested, I only need somewhere to send it to.

    2. Im encountering the same issue.. and a fellow lwjgl user.. if you want me to test anything just contact me directly.

      j.

  11. “Windows 7 Ultimate 64-BIT”,
    Two “NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN”s in SLI.
    32GB RAM.
    “Intel Core i7-3960X”.

    Works Fine.

    By the way, I notice there’s a button that just says “Battle”. What do you intend for it to do? Is the game planned to have an “instant battle”-mode just for fun, or something? Because that would be awesome.

  13. Windows 7 64bit
    Core i5 750
    AMD Radeon 5770 HD (1GB)
    4GB RAM
    Running just fine.

    Though the installer seemed to fail silently when started as a limited account (no UAC pop-up at least); however forcing it to start as the Administrator did the trick.

    1. Hi Bob, thanks for your report!

      Did you mean that the installer fails (the exe you downloaded in the link above) or that the updater failed (the exe that was extracted by the installer that brings the game up to date) ?

      With kind regards,
      – Riven

      1. Hi Riven,
        I’m referring to the exe that I downloaded in the link above.
        Strangely, I’ve tried uninstalling, and then retrying the install (as a limited account account again) and I get as far as the Nullsoft installer this time, but it fails when it tries to write \Battledroid\installer.jar to the Program Files (x86) directory. Again, force the installer to start with Admin privileges and all is well.
        I’ve had a look in the EventLog from around the time of the initial install, and while there is nothing related to the installer, I can see that Microsoft Security Essentials fell over at around that time – so I suppose it could have been my system having a funny 5 minutes.

        1. Thanks!

          Obscure problems involving firewalls and proxies blocking or mangling downloads and virusscanners locking/hijacking our files have caused quite a bit of headscratching on our end. It seems like the personal computer has turned into a battlefield 🙂

          There doesn’t seem to be an easy solution, so it’s great to hear running with admin privileges seems to work for you.

          – Riven

  14. Thanks for your beautiful games! I’m a web developer and hardcore videogame player, and I’m surprised that I have not heard from you until two weeks ago when I bought your Ultra bundle on Steam seriously, I love to play/collect videogames but have not heard a single whisper of your games… My point is you need more publicity if you want to boost your sales. Good move adding the Trading Cards on Steam. Your games are awesome!

      1. Sites like Gamespot, IGN, Metacritic (for reviews) and mayor retailers (to find and buy new games) such as Steam, Amazon, Gamefly, Green Man Gamming, Gamers Gate and other indie retailers, the only one that actualy sells your games is Steam and even there is hard to find, I’m sure there are limitations for selling your product in some of these places but the market is there. Take Awesomenauts for instance, is a simple silly game and I love it, you can buy it for $3 almost anywhere. Indie games are taking off since the market is so full of comercial garbage. Re-launch your old games, people will love them.

        1. We did! As you noticed they’ve all come out on Steam over the last year, and that’s most of the market these days. They were on Gamersgate and made the square root of bugger all, same with Gamefly. Amazon are outrageously shady so we won’t deal with them. Green Man likewise.

          1. Noticed the hover-over captions on the More Games screen are layering over the Do You Want to Know More? button (lol@the reference!) regardless of resolution fullscreen or windowed.

            Enjoy your games (at least until I get to the point at which they make me go all Francis XBOX on my mostly innocent mouse).

  15. Everything looks great so far. The only issue I’ve noticed is when you click any of the text input portions of the create account tab, then hit delete, it exits the game. No where else, that I’ve noticed, seems to close upon hitting delete. Thanks for giving us the chance to help you guys out with Alpha access.

  16. OSX 10.5.8 ha ha! my computer doesn’t even pretend to launch it. i just need a new computer. if only to play Battledroid.

    congrats on your progress! it’s exciting to see.

    storying telling is a big part of how i connect with a game. most of your games thus far i’ve been able to able connect to story wise, tho not the main driver for a lot of them ..don’t really need a lot of story arc in a shooter. Revenge of the Titans has a pretty good story – and that probably has to do with it’s success. my favorite is still Droid Assault, even though the story isn’t the predominate reason i play the game. i like shooting robots.. with robots. being the main reason.

    from what i can see here, it seems like you guys are painting an exciting new world for us to reck havoc in. i also would like my favorite bot available as a foam head. then we could form like… Battledroid paintball teams, or head butting tournaments or what have you. maybe you[re not trying to invite that type of energy.

    1. Cosplayers welcome 😉

      We’re going to be in the same universe as RotT and DA and TA again, with Omni-corp and Botverks and Dr. Zap and so on featured. As it’s an MMO there’s not really an actual story beyond the backstory of a world fought over by corporations.

      And yeah, you really need to upgrade than ancient old rig.

  17. I got sound and music working. When using tab to change typing fields in the Register screen, it will minimize the register window. It still technically works, because the cursor is in the next field when you open it back up. Registration either doesn’t work or assumingly not finished, since it doesn’t respond after clicking register. Upper right hand buttons “work” but have no info (Besides sound). Nothing else works (as expected). Hope that helps. Looking forward to this.

  18. I wanted to see how it ran on my 2009, $300 bottom-of-the-barrel laptop, kind of a stress test sort of thing, so here we go. (Win7 64, AMD Athlon 64 TF-20 1.6 Ghz, ATI HD3200)

    From the top:
    + Installer downloaded fine
    + Grabbed admin privileges fine
    + Installed without a hitch
    + Updater ran smooth, even if whipping my craptop at 100% cpu
    + Main window showed up, one thing here: if the progress bar stops for more than a few seconds (like at the end), the window shows as “Not responding” for a tick. Just an observation.

    – Cursor was a single black pixel, quite hard to see. I believe somebody already pointed that out.
    – Mouseover events (causing SFX and/or tooltips) occurred for the “More options” menu items, even when it was closed. Also happened on the left side of the screen, don;t know for what menu though.
    – SFX and music volume sliders didn’t seem to work, don’t know if simply not implemented yet. The sounds and music worked though 🙂
    – I did see some weird graphical glitches, not sure if unintentional though. Kinda like CRT distortion on the menu items, very brief, very hard to get a screenshot. One seemingly surefire way to reproduce is to go into Register window and press tab to get out of it. The top menu bugs out for a split second. That on purpose?

    Altogether, it ran quite smooth, even if strangling my toaster of a computer, will test this out tomorrow on my beefy desktop.

    Can’t wait to see this happen! Big fan of you guys!

    1. Alright, so I tested it on my desktop, things went better:
      (Win7 64, AMD Phenom II 955 BE 3.2 Ghz, ATI HD 4670)

      Ok, first thing I noticed is that either MS Security Essentials was having a really bad day or just hates your installer, as the installer would not run until I uninstalled MSSE. No malware warning message or anything, just MSSE silently running in circles it seems. Bout time I replaced it with something better anyway.

      So after that, everything went fine and dandy, no problems what so ever, except for the GUI issues I pointed out previously. I can now see the actual distortion effects, quite neat! I can say that what I saw on my laptop was not the intended effects, but they work fine on my newer video card. I know that the supported GL on my laptop is out of date.

      Congratz on your nice shiny front-end, waiting for next alpha!

  19. Mac OSX 10.8.4

    NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 128 MB

    4 GB RAM

    Intel Core 2 Duo 2,4 GHz

    I can’t see the cursor, but everything else works fine.
    Also, I get the whole program, which downloads some files, but it doesn’t say something like “Battledroid Installer”.
    I’m looking forward to see what the game is about.

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