The Humble Puppy Bundle!

News

Hello all you silent eyes, you quiet followers of our sporadically updated blog! Gather round our digital Yuletide fire and listen, my little ones.

Today we have put all our games, including Sandbox Mode for Revenge of the Titans, and our two soundtracks, and even all our source code, for sale through the Humble Puppy Bundle. This glorious sale lasts from 19th December through till 26th of December, and you may name whatever price you wish for everything, as is traditional.

You will also notice that Droid Assault and Ultratron have both been updated with two-player local co-op mode. Just grab your 360 controllers and join in. Yay! Expect bugs.

And you’ll also see that Revenge of the Titans has a Christmas Mode which appears only for the festive season (from 19th December to early January or thereabouts). And Droid Assault has a special new Christmas Mission too! Which is all very silly and hopefully a bit of fun.

Charity!

It’s quite likely as readers of our bloggage that you already own all our games. What is less likely though is that you have the two soundtracks – the incredible metal guitar/electro synth six-track EP from Revenge of the Titans, and Allicorn’s 14-track OST for Ultratron of gut-thumping electronic dance music (it’s great to code to!). Even less likely is that you’ve seen the source code to all these games. Now is your chance! Now, the Humble Bundle edition of the games is worth buying all on its own just for the soundtracks, let alone the games, but if it makes over $150k (and thusly some reasonably huge five figure sum for our chosen charity, Gamesaid) we’re going to release the source code for you all to look at and have a good laugh about. Gaze back through the mists of time and see code written by an amateur almost 12 years ago, evolved into the little games you see before you here today!

And even if you’ve already got all our games – we think they’d make the perfect Christmas gift for a friend or loved one. Or even several friends and loved ones. But maybe you don’t have any friends and nobody loves you! Never mind about that – you can still give a much-needed contribution to charity. Gamesaid.org is an umbrella charity which distributes money to a number of other charities which are focused on genuinely improving the lives of kids with major disadvantages in life. You’re not buying kids white iPhones to replace the black one that Santa accidentally bought them. You’re buying things like artificial limbs, wheelchairs, and physiotherapy for kids that can’t even walk. You’re buying them the best Christmas present they’ll ever get (except a white iPhone of course).

Where have all the direct versions gone?

They have gone to videogame heaven, where they eat power pills and mine Tiberian crystals with attractively attired characters from long-forgotten 8-bit titles. We have conceded that Valve have won the distribution and payment processing war, at least insofar as PC downloadable indie games is concerned. 99% of our income comes from Steam. So with a quiet goodbye, the direct downloads of all our titles have slipped away like ships in the night to the West. There will be no further updates to the direct downloadable games – we’re using Steam for that from now on. However we will endeavour to keep the completely DRM-free versions that Humble Bundle host up-to-date.

If you’ve got a Puppygames version of our games, please get yourselves a Steam key from here – and if you really, really don’t want to use Steam, consider donating a small token of your esteem to the Humble Puppy Bundle, and grab yourselves DRM free versions.

You’ve updated your website design?

Yep, expect bugs 🙂 … and badly formatted blog stuff.

Please let us know if you find any, it’s been a bit of a rush getting everything up and running in time for the bundle. Time for bed now!

54 thoughts on 'The Humble Puppy Bundle!'

  2. Well, you know, to simply abandon DRM-free version and cease access to updates for them, and, by that, force users to use Steam was really not nice from you.
    Yes, we all understand that Steam is this and that, but we also understand that “99%” means Monopoly. And by that action you not helping. There was options to have win-win solution, for example to use Humble Widgets or Humble Store, which can provide BOTH drm-free version and Steam (or whatever) key for customer in same time. And to think – you already hosting your games in Humble platform anyway. But you decided another way.
    And that about people who paid you for games when they wasnt on Steam? “get yourself a free key” you say? Havent you ever think that that peoples may DONT want use Steam? Why bother about peoples who dot use it. They all pirates or retards or something, right? Millions of flies cannot be wrong!
    Thanks for having that last Drm-free sale at least.

    1. The plan is to get Humble Widgets up on the site and/or get the games on the Humble Store… tho that probably wont happen until the new year.

      1. Whew, I’m glad to hear DRM-free versions aren’t going away entirely. If it’s possible, can you please add an edit to your blog post adding info about your plans to try and enter the Humble Store? Right now, it seems like you’re abandoning sales of your DRM-free versions while also maintaining updates to the Humble Bundle DRM-free versions, which doesn’t make any sense.

    2. Over reaction much?
      They’ve already said they’d be keeping the humble version updated and there’s already a humble widget on the front page.
      The only injustice here is them not giving long time fans like us the source code for free 😉

      1. Not really overreaction. First, there is no word in this bligpost about Humblestore, it just saying about stopping selling games drm-free as is. Second, i really dislike that “99% statements”. I seen such words before, and its usually tuens that developer not even tried to sell his game anywhere else. Where is puppygames titles on GOG.com? None of then. Desura? Only Revenge of Titans i found. Its doesnt looks like a lot o efforts was invested in promoting this games and developer comparing it with Steam sales? Sorry, this not called “drm-free sucks”, its called “we so much anticipated steam, so we just waited for it ignoring all world around
        “. its one thing when new game is sold on steam only, but developer stops standaline access once it released on steam, its simply inacceptable.
        thanks for thinking about humblestore anyway. its relieve

        1. Fortunately in this case, you’re wrong on nearly all counts. Long story short; Steam has won, we must all get over it.

          1. Oh right, Steam is won, we all doomed, lets just give up and enjoy our RENTED games? Fortunately there always will be peoples dont following everyone’s path.
            No, ofc you can love it, i dont mind. BUT if its really not that much of difficulties to keep drm-free builds on Humble Store for example, why dont do that? Everyone happy, you happy, i happy.

        2. If you read some of the previous blog posts you’d realise that they’ve been very thorough in searching for the best route to market. The game game on Desura sold so few copies that it didn’t reach payout threshold, literally 1/1000th of the steam sales for the same amount of effort.

          The game is DRM free on humble so not sure what you’re up in arms about. Also I’m pretty sure you need to be approached by humble to get your games on their services so it’s not really up to the developers.

          1. Sorry, have to agree that i dont that much of frequent reader here.
            Desura…sad news, really. But lets see on that case from another point of view.
            Developers selling Steam keys directly, on markets, in bundles -> all peoples receive is steam key (not the case for puppy, but frequent for many deals) -> peoples forced to use Steam – peoples asks for Steam keys -> developers selling Steam keys.
            Its vicious circle in action. You saying Desura is bad because sales is low. Fine, but many developers that saying that not even mention on their sites that games is available on Desura. How the heck customers will know then?

            Look at this page http://www.puppygames.net/revenge-of-the-titans
            Do you see Steam button? YES
            Do you see Desura button? NO
            Is Revenge of the titans available on Desura or DRM-free? NO
            How can developer expect great results if it looks like he forgot that he selling game somewhere? And its Developers is peoples who making situation even worse. I talked with various developers in Groupees chat (htere is such bundles selling site, which is frequently visited by developers of games featured). Most of them is sad about Desura sales, but with closer inspection it turns that almost non of them is even trying to promote their games, even if they not on Steam.

            Race the Sun developers whined and whined in their blog how bad they sales without Steam. And they not even tried Desura, GOG, bundle or at least sales until peoples suggested it in comments. Or right, live without Steam is sooo sad, especially when you just sitting with fingers crossed about Greenlight.

            On OTHER side, there is games which was selling on so “bad” Desura for significant amount of time with decent results. Like recently grinlit 3079 and 3089, developers if which basically abandoned Steam hopes long ago.

            “The game is DRM free on humble so not sure what you’re up in arms about.”
            Oh yeah? Technically such statement is same as to try to kill someone, fail on than and later say “but you alive, for that are you angry for?”.
            Yes, puppygames made such wonderful sale and willing to use humble Store. Thanks to them. But if they would not do that when all they games will be Steam-only already.
            “Also I’m pretty sure you need to be approached by humble to get your games on their services so it’s not really up to the developers.”
            Not anymore. From some time their widget and store services is pretty much open for anyone. Many-many games from previous bundles already selling in their store, not mentioning hoards of just “new” games.

            That was sure wall of text. Thanks for reading.

  4. I’m a bit skeptical towards the chosen charity. Couldn’t one be chosen that *isn’t* all about age-discrimination?

    1. Sometimes you need to choose who to help or you end up helping no-one at all. In our case, it’s disadvantaged children – the most helpless and needy and deserving of chance.

  5. Erm…the Linux version of DroidAssault doesn’t work for me. I’m trying to run it on a 64-bit RHEL 6.4 system. I took a look at droidassault.sh.log, and this is what it contained:

    ./droidassault.sh: line 48: ./bin/java32: No such file or directory

    Sure enough, there’s no JVM present. I think your droidassault.sh script has a bug in it. I removed the “false” leg, and managed to get the extraction code to run. The game still failed, so I checked the log again, and this is what I saw:

    ./bin/java64: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14′ not found (required by /home/angio/Downloads/droidassault/bin/../lib/amd64/jli/libjli.so)

    I’m guessing you’re going to tell me that my OS is unsupported, like Google does with Chrome, eh?

    1. Arse, the Linux builds are indeed broken – panic fix!

      Although your problem runs deeper than the shellscript: you need glibc2.14, which was released a couple of years ago. It’s easily found at http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/ but as to installation and what might occur should you install it… I don’t know 🙂

      1. Well, I guess I’ll have to wait until either you tweak your build to use glibc 2.12, or RHEL 7 is released. I’m not sure which will happen first.

        1. Can’t … we’re using Java 7 from OpenJDK, and whatever glibc it uses, is the one we’re stuck with.

          Can you not just plonk glibc 2.12 in the bin directory? (I don’t know much about how Linux really works under the hood so feel free to laugh at me if this is absurd)

          1. I did some googling, and I might need to create a chroot with a new glibc inside it. However, that’s far too much like real work for me to bother. I might give it a whirl in a VM though.

            1. Is RHEL6.4 really “old” or something…? Not being able to run JDK7, not being able to run Chrome… that’s a bit strange.

              1. It’s “old” in the sense that the major libraries are frozen in place, and were forked from Fedora 12, which is from 2010. RHEL 7 will be based on Fedora 19, and should be out in 2014.

                It runs Chrome, but not the latest versions. Google made a design decision to halt support at Chrome 24 or so due to the old libraries.

  6. I’ve been meaning to try your game. Suddenly Humble Bundle pops up. Thank you for sharing. I hope you’ll succeed in your future endeavour,whatever that might be! 🙂

  7. Hi guys, I just noticed that your games now require OS/X 10.7+. Is there a way for you to release a patch to get it to work on 10.6.8? If you could do that it would be greatly appreciated.

    1. I dunno if we can do that in a generic way. They did work on 10.6.8 a while back but it might require some manual wrangling with your system Java installation and maybe a tweak of the game .sh files inside the .app bundle.

      1. Thanks for the response. I shall try it out. BTW I really like the new website and kudos for the humble puppy video! Most weekly videos are just a collection of random video game footage. Yours is head and shoulders above everything that has come before. Best of luck with the next title.

  8. Got a couple friends to play your games thanks to this. Lovely games, and now also an entry to my couch co-op list of games 😀

    But I have to ask – do you ever intend to stop shitting inside Linux users’ homes? Why do your games need to create 10 directories in my home folder? Why can’t you just use $XDG_DATA_HOME/PuppyGames/stuff instead. 🙁

  9. Anyway, gents, i came here not to ask developers stop selling on Steam (albeit i think it would be better if steam-mania cool down a litte) and not to blame them being greedy something. I just wanted to say, IF puppygames is not crazy DRM-addicts and IF its not so much of bother for them to keep at least Humble’s drm-free builds up to date, then PLEASE leave for peoples who prefer to manage their games themself a way to purchase and use games without Steam. You said you going to use Humble Store? Thats fine enough by me.

  10. I’m one of those crazy people who would prefer you not to put all your eggs in one Steam basket (I have titles spread around Steam, Desura, Humble and the odd game elsehwere). I personally far prefer games that have DRM free versions or are already DRM free. Will Steam versions of your games require the Steam client to run, or can they be run outside of it?

    I would make the case for not simply saying “Steam won!”. All you’re doing is help create a monopoly, which doesn’t benefit anyone.

    1. The monopoly was made by the consumers in this case. It wasn’t us that wasn’t buying direct, it was all the consumers. Trust me, we would really have liked to sell direct from our site more easily (we’re going to give it one last gasp with the Humble Store and see how that pans out).

      You need Steam to run Steam games, of course. They should run offline.

      1. Yeah, its pretty easy to say things like that once you joined Steam, but that would you say if Steam said “puppygames will be never sold here”. All that Steam greatness is so warm and cozy when you selling on Steam. But when you thrown outside, all that “i will not purchase game not on Steam” feel mush less fun.
        You saying again that its not you, developers, to blame. Its customers, as always. Customers is bad and stupid. And they really are. But once you remove Drm-free builds from sale you cannot reject responsibility for created monopoly anymore.

        “we would really have liked to sell direct from our site more easily” – from that i heard, where is no way to sell its directly easier then Humble Store. You just uploading builds manually and thats all. Fo most stable games? not alphas, which dont updaten daily i dont see any problem in that.

        P.S.P_P…
        It was so close…but its not happened. Anyway, thanks for offer of source.

  11. I just tried out Ultratron on Windows for the first time, and it looks like the online high scores are borked. I got a message about the payload size being too large.

  12. Hi,

    So puppygames’ hb is over and it is only at about 127.000$. So no games’ source code?

    El Salvador

  13. Sorry the source code release level wasn’t reached. I was looking forward to reading the code…I’m amazed at what you’re doing with Java!

    1. Yeah, I was pretty bummed about not getting the source code. Guess that’s what I get for being a cheap bas****!

  15. Will the Christmas mission, and achievements only be unlocked during the holiday period? That thing is balls hard. I’ve only gotten past two of the Ultrayetis so far.

  16. Oh no, please find it in your heart to release your source code via BSD or whatever open-source license you wanted, we were ever so close. 🙁

      2. Looking forward to Alpha Sprint #5! And Battledroid’s patcher isn’t connecting. I’m sure you already know this, but I wanted to give you a heads up in the case that you didn’t!

  17. Aargh. I wish I had known that “there won’t be any further update to the direct downloadable games,” as I would’ve bought that bundle. Thing is I bought all four of those games through your site so I could have DRM-free versions as well as Steam keys.
    Of course, I have the DRM-free versions on my hard drive, but you won’t be updating them. So…it seems *really* weird to ask this, but would it be possible for me to get a free Humble Bundle key for each game that I bought, or will I have to purchase each one again once they get on the Humble Store in order to have updated DRM-free versions?

    1. They’ll be on the Humble Store, if you really really want DRM free versions, but you know… nothing wrong with Steam really.

      1. Yes, I really really want DRM-free versions. And what seems unfair here is that, had I paid, say, one cent for that bundle, I would have updates to those versions, but having bought them through your site, I can no longer get those updates unless I buy the games again once they’re on the Humble Store.

        1. don’t worry, I’ll get you some DRM free Humble versions. Just drop Alli a line about it: support at puppygames dot net. He’s off work till Monday tho’

  18. I bought these via the Humble Bundle and just wanted to say they are great! And hey, it’s also for charity! Anyhow, really dug the games as casual platformers, and they are making me finally set up a Steam Big Picture box. I’m amazed that you’re doing it in Java and was hoping to see how you architect it by peaking at the source code.. Unfortunately we didn’t hit that mark, but maybe we’ll get a peak at it in the future. Thanks!

  19. I’m looking forward to seeing the code behind your awesome effects. Know that there is a great interest, at least from a small part of the community!

  20. I love your games. 🙂

    I’m looking forward to read the source code, if you can find it in your hearts to kindly release it, although the threshold was not quite reached.

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