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)
Bug Fixes
- Fixed: restart in survival mode didn’t erase old mobs and such
- Fixed: crash in Survival mode due to aliens not actually being done yet
- Fixed: prevent user from entering dubious characters in slot names
- Fixed: reactivate factories when crystal appears nearby in Survival mode
- Fixed: Crash in Endless on level 4 (sadly your existing Endless mode games still won’t work)
New Features and Enhancements
- Removed slightly pointless confirmation dialogs from end game screen
- Perma-unlock technology in Survival mode
Balance
- Survival: total research now contributes to difficulty factor
- Survival: alien and boss types now limited by your maximum visited world in campaign mode
- Survival: slightly slower rate of initial crystal production
- Survival: when can’t unlock any more gidrahs, difficult increased slowly
Bug Fixes
- Turrets now wait 8 ticks before finding a new target having lost one (performance issue)
- Flying gids should be able to fire bullets out of the mountains
- Tank gids bombs not detonating on hitting buildings
As usual, all comments, feedback and so on are welcome and encouraged! We’ve got 2 weeks left till the final beta, so best get your thoughts in quickly.
Well, since you asked for feedback… The only gripe I have is with the Laser. It certainly does not seem worth $22,500 in research and another $5,000 to place. In fact, these costs are prohibitively high to the point that saving up to use the Laser has lost me many battles. While the Laser is highly effective against lines of gids, such an arrangement becomes scarce in later levels. In short: the Laser is too expensive.
Additionally, I encountered spitter gids on Endless 5, which seemed really early and struck me as a possible bug. However they continued to spawn as I progressed so I am assuming this s intended behavior.
Once again, great job guys! RoTT has evolved into an awesome monolith of fun! Keep it up!
I agree about the lasers
I’ll have a think about the lasers. Thing is, they’re the only really useful form of defence versus flying gidrahs coming from over mountains, so making them too expensive is probably not such a great plan after all. I think perhaps I’ll reduce their price to build a little, maybe to $3500. After all, when tooled up with all the upgrades, it’s an awesome weapon.
When I originally designed lasers you weren’t really meant to be using them until level 35-40 or so. Are you getting them much earlier? Titan is not a walk in the park by any means, and you’re going to need these big turrets.
A while back when the Laser swept and dealt more damage, it was obvious they were overpowered, and you did the right thing to balance them. But now that they have been nerfed and no longer sweep as well as being the only defense against flying gids I feel a rebalance is in order.
The problem is that I am never using Lasers because I can get more damage, more reliably at the same cost by not researching/building Lasers.
Thanks for listening and I anticipate your decision eagerly.
I think you’re dead right and they need buffing or cheapening or a bit of both.
Oh my, a surprise! Could it be a zombie survival mode!? A new tech that allows us to take control of the titan’s minds!!!? Or possibly adding the ability to pause or REWIND the game in real-time to fix our mistakes???
I can’t wait to find out what it could be! 😀
Not a technical surprise…
Plushies! You heard it here first
One of these days we’ll get some Puppymerch sorted…
Is it me or does the game run slower than before?
i believe i can confirm that. i don’t recall having any music ‘slow-ups’ before yet now i have them :/
Ok, that’s a bit odd, as virtually nothing changed between 1.61 and 1.62 except a few minor bugs and balance tweaks.
Try running with FRAPS and tell me your framerate.
In the menus I get 60fps, in an average sized map I get fluctuating frame rates between 40-50 and during busy periods down to 30fps, particularly when gidrahs are milling around a bottle neck or there are explosions going on. There also seems to be intermittent lag spikes that hangs the game for a split second which kinda ruins the flow. I don’t know the version when the game started being slow so it might not have been a recent change. (as helpful as that is)
OS: win XP
CPU: Pentium D 2×3.4GHz
RAM: 4GB
GPU: nVidia GTS 250
Here’s a video of me playing:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=NJ54GU36
it’s on an easier map but if you watch closely you can spot the moments when the game pauses.
Be Warned !
After applying the 1.62 patch i can’t resume my campaign missions (even though it seems as i can because all of them are still available) but after choosing mission to resume i get redirected to first Earth mission.
I can confirm this issue as well.
Yes, they are indeed all broken :/ Perils of beta software etc. etc. while I have to keep changing things under the hood. I can say it probably won’t settle down permanently until the final beta release on 26th November.
Ok, my feedback
My biggest complain is The game Graphic / button is too small, centered in the screen, is there a n option to make the icons larger ?
The other things is “once I play back mission 3 I no longer able to to play 7″ and can only continue to 4? no sure it is a bug?
Last one is a extra wish – reserve mode to let player be the titan… but this one is just a bonus hope
Survival needs more. More options, more widgets. Difficulty selectors, type of gids you want to disallow/have lots of, amount of crystal generation you want, etc. There’s a lot of fun that could be added here, if you could build your own challenge.
Did you remove the ability to save the level you are on because the floppy disk, save game button is grayed out along with a few other ones?
I just had the idea of giving the player a small amount of cash for every achievement they unlock. Say I get the achievement for killingl a thousand titans; I should get maybe $250 or $500. It wouldn’t be enough to unbalance the game, but it would be something a little extra for doing a good job.
Save button should still be working…? Well, it works here anyway…
Good idea on medals – some of them are now worth a token prize, and some of them are worth a fairly significant prize. And each rank you attain is worth the points value of the rank divided by 10.
Well I restarted the game and the save game button is working again. I guess it was just a completely random occurrence.
Thanks on doing prizes :)!
Some suggestions for the next build:
1) Do lasers hurt ghosts? Cos ghosts seem to block lasers but not get hurt by it. Can you make it so that lasers pass through them? Actually if lasers passed through all enemies it’d be pretty cool and suddenly they’d be good again XD
2) I had a nice line of turrets with a rocket launcher by the rockets kept hitting random objects along the way like small crystals and blowing up over my turrets. Can you make it so that rockets fly over small obstacles? Cos the rocket doesn’t know not to fire at them. Either that or ensure that the rocket will hit its target with no obstacles before firing.
3) The decoy is fun to use and I’d like to use it more often but it’s too expensive really. 1500 sounds about right.
4) Can you make it so that the nanomesh walls can block all enemies even the small ones? It’d be like the super wall cos you only have 20 of them and you spent a lot of time researching it so it should be a special kind of wall.
5) The capacitors charge too slowly, on the harder levels with long streams of ghosts even if you use them sparingly you’ll end up running out of energy. I had 5 capacitors all fully upgraded and I still ended up losing turrets and having to use a berserker power up. Which would be fine except that after the power ran out there were still more enemies so I had to use more than one to finish the level. Also if the capacitor was empty when you used the power up they remained empty after the power up is finished unlike the other turrets that get a free reload.
6) There’s really no defence against the shooting aliens other than shields but they get really expensive and you have to replace them so why not make them stronger vs. alien bullets?
7) Can you make the bombs from the flying things not travel quite so far after you kill them? They tend to destroy the turret that shot them down cos the bomb still lands near it. You end up having to build turrets along side the their flight path but sometimes there are mountains in the way so it’s not possible to avoid damage so you end up using the expensive shields.
Your wish is my command, etc.
1) No. That’s a bug anyway, and will be fixed tomorrow 🙂 Lasers should pass straight through wraiths.
2) Tough 🙂 That’s how rocket launchers are meant to work. They are devastastingly powerful… but quite tricky to use. They can only be deployed safely in wide open areas.
3) Done
4) Done. They also block wraiths.
5) Hmm. I feel that they’re just about right as they are, especially loaded up with batteries and reactors.
6) Well, that’s the idea. Try and guide them towards shielded installations, and make sure you hit them at range before they start shooting.
7) Again, make sure you hit them at range. The laser is ideal for this, as it can shoot through mountains (though not over mountains) and it has a very long range.
Lots of tweaks abound! Tomorrow’s release should be a good ‘un.
woop, can’t wait
I have two suggestions for tomorrow, since you have already tweaked so much!
1) Is it possible to make my little robot buddies smart enough to get out of the way of titans? As much as I love them (and I do very much) they’re not the brightest little guys and tend to scrunch up right in the titan’s way just to die…instantly.
2) You probably won’t want to do this, but I was thinking how great it would be to be able to research as much as we want before a level instead of one thing. I’m in the middle of Mars with a good amount of cash, but I haven’t really researched very much. I could easily shell out $2500 for one thing then another $5000 for the next level of it which would be much more productive than $7500 for something that does less.
1) No, the little buggers are made in my image, and lo! they too have tiny brains. And aren’t clever enough to get out of the way, just as I am not clever enough to figure out how to program them to do so 🙂
2) Hmm that’s a bit fundamental. It’s sort of designed that you only get to choose one thing at a time to upgrade (making for nailbiting decisions about whether to hoard cash for something bigger later, knowing that you have one less opportunity to research everything). I’d like to leave that as it is for now at least.
Hmm. Once on the moon (level 20?), I found a gidrah that was stuck on the acid pool (it spawned at some point during the level, but never moved even after the pool was removed at the end of the timer).
What I had to do was to plant a building on top of him and then sell it.
Did anyone else see this rare bug?
More info: The dropped building doesn’t actually kill him, and turrets won’t fire at him in range.