A brief history of TA2 – Monster Mash coming soon!

Diary

Revenge of the Titans is a game with a long, convoluted and simply amazing history. It is perhaps the most incredible story never told in the entire history of computer games. In years to come a small group of distinguished historians and academics will undoubtedly discuss its development with Melvyn Bragg on BBC Radio 4’s ‘In our Time‘.

Okay, that was a lie – got a bit carried away there. But it has taken a long time.

Our tale begins nearly four years ago. Basking in the financial glow of the success of Titan Attacks we devise a plan for a new game, a game that will have all of the great bits of Titan Attacks, like shooting things and buying upgradey stuff in some kind of a shop, but that will be playable completely with a mouse. We hope freeing players from the shackles of using ‘keys’ will make a more accessible game, and spread the joy of making pixelly things explode in a glowy manner to a more ‘casual’ audience.

Work begins in earnest in the spring of 2006, with Cas beavering away in his secret underground base, deep below the Quantocks, and myself working poolside upon my Bangkok penthouse. With multi-coloured spotlights attached to computer controlled turrets tracking a variety of daft pixel monsters, the game begins to develop an odd 70’s disco feel to it. Not a bad thing at all. The below screenshots really don’t do it justice, honest…

And we decide to call the game Monster Mash. A banner is produced declaring confidently ‘COMING SOON!’…

But then, disaster strikes!

To be continued…

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Steaming Puppy pumps cool hot turrets!

Diary

Here’s an example of the colouring system we’re using in Titan Attacks 2 – Revenge of the Titans. In this case as applied to a cooling tower, a player building that cools down your overheating turrets. It’s a common problem. Building a load of these little fellas nearby though can increase their fire rate.

Here we have the cooling tower as it looks with colours applied in two schemes – night and desert. On the left we have the Colour Diddler which lets us fidddle away with the level palettes as the game is running. Neat eh?

So how this all work then?

The cooling tower is a collection of static sprites, animated sprites and emitters. The sprites, mostly white, can be coloured by the level palettes, and then this colour is affected by an attenuation colour and % the further from the center of the level they are – black in the case of the nighttime level, and a subtle red tint for the desert level colour scheme. Here’s the various sprites…

First of all we have the base. This defines the bounds of the building making it easier to tell where the player can build things and distinguishes player buildings from other stuff going on. All buildings and monsters and trees and things are drawn from the front, but the map is actually viewed from above which is perhaps a bit of an odd way to do things, but it’s a lot easier to draw poo like that. The next sprite, the shadow, also helps in making the flat front-on sprite look like it’s sitting on the ground and not just floating about in space.

That little black rectangle sits behind the main sprite animation. Inbetween these is an emitter that pumps out steam. This way the steam looks more like it’s coming out of the cooling tower rather than just from behind it. It’s hardly noticeable really. Maybe got a bit carried away there.

The main sprite, unlike the others, has two colours applied to it – a top and a bottom colour – applied as a gradient to the sprite. The top colour is specific to buildings, and the bottom is a general ‘floor fog’ colour which is applied to almost everything – buildings and monsters and trees etc. This helps in the illusion of the flat building existing in the world space wotsit. It also means if buildings overlap vertically there will be a bit of colour difference between them, making it easier to tell them apart.

Next up is the overlay sprite – this is about 50% transparent and is not affected by the level’s attenuation, meaning it’ll seem like it’s a bit glowy or reflective. Then finally on top of all that is the little glowing light animation that is synched up with the pumpy animation of the tower and the steam emitter. This sprite is neither coloured nor affected by the attenuation colour, so it’s always going to be a bright orangey red light thang.

…and if you’re really interested or just having trouble sleeping here’s how the cooling tower appearance is defined in xml…

<sprite layer="4" sublayer="1" colored="floor" attenuated="true" image="spriteimage.generic.2x2.base.01"/>
<sprite layer="4" sublayer="2" colored="shadow" attenuated="true" image="spriteimage.generic.cooling.ground.01"/>
<sprite layer="5" sublayer="1" colored="buildings" attenuated="true" animation="generic.cooling.back.animation"/>
<emitter offset="25,0" emitter="steam.burst.emitter"/>
<sprite layer="5" sublayer="3" bottomColored="floor-fog" topColored="buildings" attenuated="true" animation="generic.cooling.animation"/>
<sprite layer="5" sublayer="4" colored="buildings-alt" attenuated="false" animation="generic.cooling.top.animation"/>
<sprite layer="5" sublayer="5" animation="generic.cooling.glow.animation"/>

Phew. Any questions? Anyone still awake?

I see colours! TA2 development video 2

Diary, News,

Recently we’ve been updating the graphics to use a system we first tried in Droid Assault to change the colour of tiles and items for different levels. This time we’ve gone a bit further – now pretty much all the sprites are rendered out in shades of grey, and are coloured in-game according to a level palette, and these colours are also affected at the edges of the level by an attentuation colour and % value.

This lets us significantly alter the feel for every level without having to have dozens of different coloured sprites for the same object. Also objects can be excluded from the attenuation colour, giving a glowy self-illumination effect on night-time levels. Nice. Of course this would all be an effing lot easier in 3d.

More detail about such stuff in future posts.

Return to Titan

Diary, News

After a break for a bit of contract work we’re back on the case and we’ll have Revenge of the Titans ready for a Christmas release… hopefully this Christmas. We’re also playing with the idea of releasing a pre-order beta version like Cliffski of fellow UK indie Positech Games has recently done with the epic Gratuitous Space Battles. Anyone interested?

In the meantime here’s some work-in-progess pics showing the game in action in three different Earth settings…

Revenge of the Titans progress

Revenge Of The Titans Development Diary So Far…

Diary

I posted the other day about these cute little soldier units that get produced by the Barracks building. It was one of those neat little ideas that pops into my head. Usually when I’m on the bog.

The trouble with neat ideas is sometimes they don’t quite fit in The Grand Scheme Of Things. What is the point of the little soldiers? They fire little lasers which are quite good at vanquishing the weedier gidrahs, especially when there’s a whole load of them, but they’re otherwise not so good at anything with any armour. You’d be better off just buying a heavy blaster. So what’s the point of the little guys?

“Oh no!” you cry. “Don’t take the wee soldiers out, they’re so cute!”

Fear not! I figured out what I’m going to do with them. And it followed another little extra new idea I’ve had on the bog, and subsequently implemented. Angry Gidrahs!

Angry Gidrahs

Each alien spawn point emits waves of aliens, with a little gap in between each wave, until the level ends. What I’ve added is the probability that the last alien emitted in a wave is one of these so-called angry gidrahs. An angry gidrah looks like its normal counterpart, except it’s a little bit bigger, and has some sort of special attribute that makes it a lot nastier (and worth 5x as much to shoot). And with a bit of Chazification, it will also be red and smoke slightly. The frequency that angry gidrahs appear depends on how good you are. They’re a bit like mini-bosses.

So some of the things that distinguish angry gidrahs from their smaller, more serene brethren are: 5x as many hitpoints; moves twice as fast; has a weapon; has a special tactical brain; and … spawns gidlets! (Amongst other ideas) Gidlets are teeny tiny little aliens which are the counterpart to the little soldier guys. A gidlet is too small to be targeted by turrets! And they run right through barriers and minefields unimpeded. So you need little soldiers to go running after them before they reach a building and start bashing it. So soldiers by preference now chase after gidlets before they’ll start attacking the bigger gidrahs.

Because gidlets are produced in relatively large numbers and they’re so small, they only do half a point of damage to a building when they hit it as opposed to the full point caused by a gidrah. Angry gidrahs are also good and tough and can bash a building up to four times before they finally croak.

Flying Gidrahs

Also this week sees the introduction of flying gidrahs, which predictably completely ignore minefields and barriers and even rocks and just fly straight past. If they were allowed to just fly straight at the base and collide the game would probably be over in short order which wouldn’t be very fair, so these gidrahs work in a slightly different way to ordinary gidrahs. They will instead fly in a straight line straight from their spawn point directly over their target and then off towards the opposite point on the map, thence to respawn a bit later. En route they will be firing guns or dropping bombs on anything they fly over.

Unlike in other tower defence games we won’t be making you put down a special kind of turret to waste them. Your ordinary guns will do just fine.  Even soldiers will take a pot shot.

Wraiths

More sinister than flying gidrahs are wraiths. Wraiths are actually going to be a kind of angry gidrah, so they won’t be too common. Which is just as well! Because they can move unimpeded through barricades and minefields and, yes, walls too. It gets worse! They can only be harmed by capacitor fire, not ordinary turrets.

Gidrahs with Guns

It had to happen sooner or later. Some of those gidrahs are armed! They’ll occasionally take a pop at anything they walk past that’s in range, significantly increasing their threat level. The only useful countermeasure is to shoot them first by having a blaster with a really long scanning range. They shoot right over barricades so that won’t be any help. Or you can bung a bunch of shield generators down and hope the gidrahs walk into blaster range before the shields all get used up.

That’s it for development news for today. Over and out.

Wait! Who are these little guys?

Diary

Look! Teeny tiny little men! These guys are produced by the barracks building. They’ve got weedy guns, short range, and don’t exactly move very fast, but when you’ve got thirty of them standing in a line blocking the advancing gidrahs with hail of small arms fire they’re quite formidable!

Of course, the armoured gidrahs just trample on them and squish them. But you need heavy blasters for that anyway. I think I might have several different unit types available, generated at different speeds. These little basic guys are the grunts. I think a tank would be a useful addition to the player’s arsenal but I’m so enjoying the tininess of them maybe I’ll just give every 5th unit spawned a rocket launcher or something.

The number of little guys you can have depends on the number of bases you’ve got, which brings me to a small change I’ve made to the game so that the level begins with no bases – instead you place one where you want to place it (I imagine on the opposite side of the map from the gidrah entry points) and at that point the level begins. A base costs $500, and you’ll get the money back at the end of the level if it survives. While it stands each base awards you a good old fashioned score multiplier. Keep 5 bases on the go and you’ll enjoy a 5x score multiplier for massive points. Yay!

While I’m on about progress, I’ve put in another three buildings besides the barracks: the collector; the warehouse; and the autoloader.

The collector is a handy way of consolidating mouse clickery. Place a collector amongst a bunch of factories, and instead of having to click on all the factories individually to collect money from them, you can simply click the collector once, freeing up more of your time to panic elsewhere.

Place warehouses near factories to increase their capacity before they get full and stop producing.

The autoloader you plonk next to a bunch of turrets. As soon as any turret in range of an autoloader runs out of ammo, it will automatically reload! How handy. It is of course rather expensive.

Revenge of the Titans!

Diary, News

After many fevered, sweaty nights here in warm and humid Somerset, and probably a similar story over in Madrid where Chaz has been holed up for the last few months, I flicked the switch on FRAPS and the monster twitched into life. Behold! Some dingy low-quality video footage of the early stages of what will soon become Revenge of the Titans!

I’m afraid this is a fairly simple and benign level (level 9 in fact) so it’s not the most exciting level to watch. The game story progresses through five worlds – starting on Earth, which is basically the tutorial, and on to the Moon, then Mars, Saturn, and finally Titan itself. The background story is how Earth is launching a major offensive on the pesky Titans, and has to gradually secure each planet on the way in order to send the invasion fleet on to the next location.

On Earth, you essentially learn the ropes. Revenge of the Titans is quintessentially a real-time strategy game, based on the tower defence mechanic. At every step of the way from the beginning of the level you have to balance two opposing priorities:

  • Do you look around and survey the map, or just get building right away?
  • Do you build factories first and get production ramped up, or do you start by building defences?
  • Do you manage your factories or keep an eye on your turrets’ ammunition?
  • Do you build lots of little guns, or do you place just a few and enhance them with auxilliary buildings?

and so on.

The main differences between Revenge of the Titans and other tower-defence games are, as you may be able to just about tell from the video, that the gidrahs advance in an entirely freeform way, and your turrets once placed cannot be “upgraded”. Each alien has its own little brain trying to figure out the best route to get to your base (or whatever other building it may decide to attack… they get strategical on the later levels…). If a route looks pretty congested, they’ll start finding alternative routes and you can find yourself unexpectedly flanked.

The turrets are not directly upgradeable. This is a common theme in other tower defence games, but we’ve got a new mechanic. Instead you place a variety of little but expensive buildings down nearby them to augment their powers. Scanners increase their range; batteries increase their ammunition capacity; cooling towers increase their fire rate; reactors increase their reload speed. Some buildings have dual purposes. Reactors will, for example, increase the speed that factories produce money; they also increase the damage of capacitors, a manually-aimed weapon not shown in the video because I’m still coding the special effects for it. Shield generators can be popped down in later levels to give nearby buildings extra hitpoints. And you can lay minefields of different sorts and barricades of varying strength. And decoys to lure the gidrahs away from your valuable buildings!

All the while the game is automatically tuning itself to your abilities. Hopefully everyone will get just enough challenge to have fun. I’m trying to get it just right so that everyone can enjoy playing the game but really good players will score massive points.

I’m also thinking that the demo players who score the most points in a single game over a seven day period might just be getting themselves a free game. For all our titles. How’s about that for a bit of competition? Play to win a free copy 🙂

What Makes Me Buy A Game?

Indie Scene, Ramblings & Rants

Over on a secret forum where the illuminati of indie game development hang out, someone asked this question (I say someone because technically we’re not allowed to talk about Fight Club, but this is a benign and often-asked question, and I think that this won’t upset anyone):

What REALLY makes someone buy a game? I think we should brainstorm this. I get the impression that people are too quick to rush to very simplistic judgements about this. We are clever people, what do we think?

I’ve read a ton of psychology / microeconomics / neurosciencey stuff that leads me to believe that game buying decisions are almost entirely irrational and entirely emotional.

So I had a little think about it, and fortunately I have a fresh, current experience to relate to.

I’ve just played the demo of Defense Grid, and I’m about to buy it.

I’m even writing my own tower defence game right now and I’m utterly sick of playing it already!

I want to think a bit more about what made the decision for me.

Firstly, I’m going to be flush again in a few weeks. I just landed a contract in Folkestone, 220 miles from home, but I’ll be earning £275 a day (a crap rate, far worse money than I earned over a decade ago, but still way more money than most people earn). A $20 or even $30 or even $50 purchase is now pure whimsy. I won’t even notice it – whereas before, as an unemployed bum, I’d have reluctantly said no, I can’t afford it. Even though at £13.99, which I could easily spend on a takeaway and a couple of bottles of beer last weekend when I didn’t have any money.

The takeaway and beer is an important comparison – people often get to thinking that the takeaway and beer lasts only a couple of hours, and is therefore maybe a tenth the value of a 20-hour game experience. That’s wrong. I need to eat, so does the missus. The beer is immensely enjoyable. I’d take beer over games any day. Really.

A comparison with cinema tickets is usually what follows next. And actually I think it’s almost valid, for certain kinds of game. But the fact is, a cinema outing is for the two of us, we’re paying to have the experience together. It’s (sadly) a Big Thing (especially now we’ve got a 6 month old baby). £14 of cinema tickets buys us a whole evening of different. It could buy me a game, but we won’t be playing it together. Even a multiplayer game. Even a multiplayer game that we play on one screen together. It’s not the same. There’s no occasion. So we value the cinema tickets considerably higher than the game experience. This is the emotional draw from this form of entertainment.

Games, then, probably fundamentally have to compete with this extremely powerful emotional hold that “activities” such as “going out” have. The situation of being an unemployed bum counts towards the ultimate decision but I suspect we can totally ignore the financial status of prospective customers. Customers are either rich, or they’re not going to buy a game. Or a cinema ticket. They might buy beer and a takeaway instead with what frugal funds they have. So just forget them, and forget the money equation. I don’t want poor customers who reluctantly part with $3.99 for something I spent 6 months toiling away at. I want rich customers with an appreciation of the value of the really hard work we do (ie. other people who work really hard). That’s why I’ve put all my games up at $19.95 finally and that’s where they will stay from now on.

So what made me buy Defense Grid?

Well, first and foremost, it’s good. It’s a really good tower defence game, even though they spelled defence wrongly. It’s not innovative in any particular way (unlike, say, the one I’m working on, which is quite different to most TD games), but the basic gameplay has been executed perfectly, and when I played it, I enjoyed myself so much that I’m going to buy it because I know I’m going to keep playing it for at least a couple more weeks. I’ve not got any other games to play right now apart from Zatikon from Chronic Logic, which I limit myself to 1 game a day of because of its hellishly addictive qualities, and I need a break from my own game.

Secondly, it’s a piece of piss to buy stuff on Steam. I’d go direct to the developers except the Steam version is integrated with the Steam achievements stuff and also Steam takes care of auto updating and I’ll even be able to just download and install it again anywhere I choose to be without having to think about it. I like that. Steam got that stuff dead right. It’s value that I’ll gladly pay for. It’s the digital equivalent of owning a shiny box with a CD in it – it feels like I’ve paid some middleman some money for something I actually feel is worth something – totally unlike my feelings about buying stuff from BFG (oh look – no hyperlink), where I feel that I’m giving BFG all the money solely because they bullied their way to the top of the search engine charts and do their damndest to make sure the developers remain unknown. They’re pure middlemen. They add nothing I care to have. I’ll even pay an extra £10 for a game to get it direct instead of through BFG.

It may come as a surprise also but I’ve never actually played a tower defence game. Apart from my own game, this is the first one I’ve played, and it’s been done so absolutely perfectly and TD is such a great concept for a game, with all sorts of decision trees one has to go through and enjoyable trial and error, it couldn’t fail to sell to me. So it was the first game of its nature I’ve actually come across, and it’s a great implementation.

(Similarly: Faerie Solitaire was the first solitaire game I’ve played since the one that came with Windows 3.11 – I would have bought it if Brian hadn’t thrown a free copy at me).

So there’s my thoughts on the matter. What makes you buy a game?

True Fans and Making A Living

News

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.

Hexstatic

Ramblings & Rants

This is the kind of thing I like listening to whilst I’m making games:

At least, when I’m not listening to Kool Keith, which is the current soundtrack during development of our forthcoming game. You should get yourself some Hexstatic – it’s great 🙂 And some Kool Keith.

How’s that new game coming on?

Chaz reckons he’s about 6-7 weeks away from finishing it. I suspect a bit longer now I’ve looked at the to-do list but it should be definitely out before the end of the summer.

Can I see some screenshots?

Not yet! We’re just a few days off of having something that we’d be comfortable with showing off. And if you’re extra lucky we might do a video of the gameplay instead!

Is it completely awesome?

Of course it is! But you’d better get an iron mouse because it’s going to take a pounding.

And yet more Droid Assault!

Diary, News

Whilst working on our new game (do you remember, many moons ago, we had a game called Monster Mash? Well, it’s still under development, and edging closer to being fun), I cut ‘n’ pasted the A* pathfinding algorithm from the multicore brains in Droid Assault into it. The A* algorithm is used in two places in the new game: in the first instance, to ensure that your bases are accessible by at least one enemy spawn point; and in the second instance, so that the gidrahs will trundle towards the base.

The map in the new game – OK, let’s call it Monster Mash even though it’s not called Monster Mash any more – is randomly generated every level. It’s a pretty trivial random generation, which simply involves starting with a map of solid rock, and then carving holes out of it between the bases and spawn points, plus a few other random holes. The end result is pretty nice, with results ranging from about 50% rock to 90% empty. Then we plonk down up to 10 bases which you have to defend (+1 base every 10 levels) – if any one base gets destroyed you lose. And then we plonk gidrah spawn points around the edge of the map, and a few in the middle on the later levels.

Before it approves the map, the generator checks to ensure that every base is accessible to at least one spawn point. We do this by just plotting the path between them using the A* algorithm pinched from Droid Assault.

It didn’t work.

I removed some more of my remaining hair in a violent thrashy motion for a couple of hours.

“How could this be? It’s been working fine in Droid Assault for a year!” I ranted.

Except, of course, it hadn’t. It had been broken all along. All those lovely multicore droids you’d been capturing, hoping they were worth the extra points just because they had the best brains, never worked properly. It’s a miracle they ever managed to find any enemies. In fact it’s only because they have a backup brain that switches to direct attack when enemies are in direct line-of-sight that they ever got around to attacking anything.

So: it’s fixed. And while I was at it, I changed the way flamethrowers inflict damage – it’s more immediate, and the burn time is much shorter. And slowed the wear rate of droids down a little bit so you can keep them a bit longer. Enjoy the new version! Grab version 1.6 directly from Puppygames.

Chaz is going to do a bit of work on the graphics for Monster Mash over the next week or so, and as soon as it’s worth showing everyone, we’ll pop up a screenshot.

New Version of Droid Assault

News

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.

Droid Assault a winner in Game Tunnel 2008 awards

Advocacy, Indie Scene, News, Reviews,

2008 Action Game of the Year

Droid Assault recently picked up 4th place in Game Tunnel’s 2008 Action Game of the Year awards, making it our third in the Action Game category.

For those not familiar with the Game Tunnel Game of the Year Awards this is the 6th year they’ve been running, an always entertaining review of the very best Indie games in a range of categories – action, sport, sim, rpg, puzzle, adventure and strategy – always worth checking out for the odd gem you might have missed. Cheers Russell!

Gravitron 2 Now Available on Puppygames

News

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:

Big Thanks for Feedback

Advocacy, Ramblings & Rants

We’ve had a fair amount of feedback from the site recently, especially since the release of Droid Assault. The majority are positive, but we do get the odd angry sounding letter. People sometimes think we are to blame for having wasted their time, cos they downloaded a demo and didn’t like it. Fortunately they have enough time to write to us to tell us.

And that’s fine, we don’t mind. We’d like to say sorry that they feel that way, and respond to any questions they have. Sometimes though they think it better to leave a made-up and offensive email address rather than a real one, and that’s really not very grown up now is it?

Here’s one example of some of the positive feedback we’ve had…

Just want to say how much I love Titan Attacks, Ultratron & Droid Assault.
They are better than sex and a bargain at the price!! You guys are awesome for matching Steam’s general indie prices. Hell, your games are better than most of the indie represented games on their servers.

It’s still a little surprising that people take the time to write to us and say nice stuff stuff like that! Makes you feel all warm and glowy inside. So a great big thank you to Ryan in Australia for that, and for letting us publish it here. And thanks to everyone else who has written in with similar messages over the last few years, and all the suggestions and constructive criticism too. Keep ’em coming 🙂

Droid Assault 1.2 Released

News

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!

Game Tunnel Gold for Droid Assault

Reviews

Droid Assault picked up a Gold Award in the Game Tunnel June Monthly Round-Up, as did Ultratron and Titan Attacks when they were reviewed, making it our 3rd Gold Award in a row. Oddlabs’ Tribal Trouble also got gold, so that’s all the games we currently feature 🙂

We were just pipped to the post this month by Jon Mak’s Everyday Shooter, which I’ve yet to play as there’s no free demo and I’ve got a feeling it’s not going to work on my old laptop. Bah. Were pretty chuffed anyway with joint 2nd in a month which featured some big games – new releases from Rake in Grass, Grubby Games, Pi Eye Games, the follow up to Gumboy Crazy Adventures and the Penny Arcade Adventures game. This month also sees a welcome return to the panel format, which is always a good read, even when Cas isn’t on the panel stirring things up.

Droid Assault released!

News

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!

Droid Assault 1.1 screenshot

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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Time to clean up the hiscores table

News, Ramblings & Rants

Lately we’ve been rather miffed by the amount of really bad language on the online hiscores table (and what we thought was cheating but turned out to be a MySQL driver glitch).

Now hear this: the online hiscores table is viewed by children and we’re really not going to accept any more of this stuff any longer. You will find yourself banned permanently (and all of your hiscores deleted permanently too) if you abuse the facility.

We get a lot of complaints from concerned parents about this. If you’re a concerned parent, you may be pleased to know we’ve finally implemented the hiscores cleanup feature to get rid of the stuff you don’t want your kids reading. Also, the latest versions of Titan Attacks and Ultratron now have an option to completely turn off online hiscores for good measure – see the Options screen.

Only an email of the most grovelly kind will get us to unban you.

You have been warned.