Another day, another server

News

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)

Continue reading →

Survival Mode!

Diary, News


At last, after a couple of delays involving house moves, panicking TV stations, and the unexpectedly early completion of a new game mode, we are proud to announce Revenge of the Titans v1.61! Without further ado, here are direct download links for our blog followers (the proles get the simplecdn cached stuff with varying degrees of success).

Windows
Mac OS
Linux

Here’s what’s in the latest version:

Bugs Fixed

  • Fixed: Garbage collector crash – don’t use G1 on Java 6!
  • Fixed: selling buildings just before level end to get double money!
  • Fixed: shield generators keep getting more expensive every level
  • Fixed: Missing research link in tree: heavy blaster -> blast cannon
  • Fixed: Superfluous link between heavy blaster -> assault cannon
  • Fixed: Slot selection screen only showed Basingstoke – Earth – $0
  • Fixed: when a building is shielded, after the Invuln powerup finishes the shield sprites are gone
  • Fixed: removing droid factories, shield generators and silos didn’t reset their price

New Features and Enhancements

  • Survival mode!
  • New map generator code: better wiggly tunnels from spawnpoints to map
  • Stop gids from spawning when freeze mode on
  • New hint: don’t overspend on research
  • New hint: boss level -> save your cash!
  • Removed the turret aiming lag – didn’t like it

Balance

  • Increase initial gidrah delay based on level size
  • Increase range of disruptor slightly to 110px from 96px
  • Decreased damage of disruptor from 25 to 16
  • Nerfed multiblaster from 4 to 3 points damage
  • Nerfed spreader cannon from 4 to 3 points damage
  • Nerfed assault cannon from 8 to 7 points damage
  • Powerup drops last a bit longer before vanishing
  • Even more crystals
  • Mars gidrahs nerfed somewhat
  • Droid factory: now each droid factory can produce at most 8 droids
  • Droid factory: production rate slowed down by 50%
  • Droid factory: …but factories now only cost $1000+$1000 per factory

Internal

  • Queue gidrah route recalculations on building so they don’t all happen at once
  • Increased memory allocation for the VM to 256mb
  • Reduced max GC pause to 3ms (Windows only)

Survival Mode

Lucky registered users have a new mode to play. It is unlocked after completing the Earth missions. When you select a survival mode game, you get to choose the world (from the set of worlds you’ve seen so far with that profile), and just for fun, you can choose the rockiness of the terrain. The buildings you have available to you are the buildings you have researched so far in campaign mode.

You are expected to lose. Probably quite fast. The aliens will rapidly become overwhelmingly deadly. The idea is to get a base together as fast as you can and defend it as long as you can. Notice that you don’t earn money for killing gidrahs! The only way to get cash is mining crystals, which spawn every now and again, or pickups.

Your best time for a particular world/terrain combination are also recorded. Let’s hear some hiscores!

All Good Things Must Come To An End…

…or become a bit more expensive, anyway! But only as expensive as to be able to afford a helping of mushy peas with one’s pie and ale. The Ultrabundle is now just a tiny weeny bit more than it was, assuming you think that $2 is tiny weeny like us. It’s still ultracheap if you’ve not picked it up already, and it will get more expensive again while we experiment with prices in the not very distant future. So don’t delay! Hand over your filthy cash today!

Don’t forget the bundle lets you install all 3 of our minigames an any combination of operating systems, as often as you need to!

Ultrabundle

News

By now, some of you may have noticed the existence of a certain Ultrabundle floating around on the Puppygames site. This is an experiment to see what happens when you, er, sell stuff ridiculously cheap. The results are quite interesting. Apart from a slight problem when Markus accidentally tweeted about it just as it went live (instantly killing our server as a deluge of Minecraft fans descended upon its weedy single core 1.6GHz processor with 512MB of RAM and 10mbps ethernet connection), it seems to be doing pretty well.

To cut a long story short, and following the tradition of the Minecraft stats page (except less, hm, dynamically updated at the moment – maybe Chaz should pop that on the front page!), we’ve sold 300 Ultrabundles in the last 48 hours, and even while I typed this blog post another 3 came in. 4 sorry. Although that is something of a mockery compared to the 15,000 sales at three times the price that Minecraft made in the same time period 🙂

In traditional Puppygames style it’s not without its teething troubles of course. We’ve got a small problem with international characters in addresses sent from BMT which I’ll be thinking of a way to fix, which causes your registration not to “stick” and you have to keep registering – annoying. And Linux users using Sun JDKs are having some problems running Droid Assault, though it seems to work fine using OpenJDK here on Ubuntu.

Unfortunately… I’m just about to move house. Like, in about a few hours’ time. So I’ve got to pack this computer up right after the blog post and I won’t get back online for a few days to fix anything or deal with any troubles. Chaz will man the email support and fob everyone off (politely) until I get back online again.

In other news – we were supposed to be releasing Revenge of the Titans 1.61 tonight but I completely forgot I was moving house when I wrote the schedule. So instead we’ll release it on Hallowe’en, and after your brains have been fried in Minecraft Hell, you can unwind with a short burst of the extreme frenetic terror that is Survival Mode. Survival Mode is awesome. I think it’s my favourite bit of the game so far.

Chaz Edit: if you’re having Linux version problems there’s some help (maybe) after the jump…

Edit: and if you’re having problems with Ultratron and you have Norton installed read on too…
Continue reading →

Random Crashes! Java Fingered!

News

Well, there’s a relatively unusual event: the recent spate of random crashes with the game (all of them, I think) is actually down to the Java virtual machine crashing. After a bit of snooping, it transpires that the crash is caused by the experimental garbage collector I used in Java 6. So I’ve gone and reverted back to the very naughty Java 7 VM. Mac and Linux users are completely unaffected by this issue, so no worries on that front.

So, Windows users, you can download a fixed version of your games here:

Titan Attacks
Ultratron
Droid Assault
Revenge of the Titans

Your saved games might break, I’m not sure. Try it and see.

Old games updated, bugs squished

News

Some of you might have been receiving mysterious crashes with Droid Assault, Titan Attacks and Ultratron, whilst just sitting on the title screen. It turns out that I forgot to build the last two versions of each of these games with the resources to display the little message box to tell you to download a new version! So when the new versions got uploaded a while ago, they all, er, started to break.

If you’ve been experiencing this strange crash, redownload and reinstall your games from Puppygames.

In other news: some people have been experiencing some crashes with the latest release of Revenge of the Titans. I’ve looked into the error logs and noticed that it’s because you’re trying to use a 1.5 profile with the new 1.6 game. Sorry guys and gals, I broke it – your old profiles and saved games are no longer usable. You’ll have to create a new profile.

Also, you might have noticed the file sizes increasing slightly. I’ve reverted from using the (completely naughty) hacked Java 7 JVM in the games to using nice normal unhacked Java 6 again, and this has the pleasing side effect of the games working once more in Japan and China. Don’t ask why 🙂

Endless Mode!

Diary, News

I’ve just uploaded Revenge of the Titans v1.6 here:

Windows
MacOS
Linux

The following tweakery has been performed for your delectation and continued amusement:

Bugs Fixed

  • Again at certain resolutions the map scrolls past the edges
  • Gold medal awarded even though level made easier
  • Mysteriously reverting to earlier planet when resuming
  • info panel remains open when HUD hidden
  • Having your progress reset once you get past Earth

New Features and Enhancements

  • Add a “sell stuff” hint or two
  • Endless mode!
  • Movement animation of stop-start gidrahs looks better
  • Stop-start gidrahs move in a slightly different way

Balance

  • Crystal reduction as player gets richer slightly less severe
  • More crystals!
  • Blast cannon damage buffed to from 12 to 16

Internal

  • Much better frame rate limiting code
  • New animation commands to avoid XML duplication

As per usual, download and install over the top of your old version. Also as per usual, all your progress and saved games are invalid – bah! – that’s the perils of beta software. So I advise you start a new profile from scratch and test Endless Mode for me 🙂

Eurogamer Expo 2010

Diary, Indie Scene


Well, I went to Eurogamer Expo 2010 this year on the Friday, thanks to Dave Hayward at the recently-merged Mudlark. Dave arranged it for us to showcase Revenge of the Titans at the Indiecade booth round the back of the show, along with a few other indies. Extra super thanks to Dave for being brilliant! Unfortunately I didn’t take a worthy camera with me so there aren’t any exciting pictures of me doing exciting things, which is just as well, as I’m not too photogenic.
Continue reading →

Titan Attacks, Ultratron and Droid Assault updated

News

Just a quickie post to say that we’ve updated the three older games. In particular we’re hoping that the mysterious crash in Titan Attacks on some Macs has been fixed – if this has happened to you (it happens when the first mothership appears) can you let us know if it’s fixed the problem? (By the way, the version number hasn’t changed)

Also, a question to the masses:

What would you pay for all three games in a bundle? What price threshold would make you just buy the lot on a whimsy?

Revenge of the Titans 1.52, and Very Cool DRM

News

I’ve just uploaded the latest and greatest Revenge of the Titans, version 1.52, which is a mostly hidden-behind-the-scenes sort of update, and lots of little bugfixes. As per usual point your browsers at the following links, and if it doesn’t say 1.52 on the title screen or the installer, that means you’re still getting the cached version from our content delivery network provider (simplecdn.net), which is annoying, because I especially purge the caches every time I do a new upload!

Windows
Mac OS X
Linux

Linux users – we are aware that Java Webstart is completely rubbish and we’d like to give you a completely standalone application with an embedded JVM in it and so on – we just have no idea how to actually do it yet 🙂

Also, we have finally finished implementing the coolest DRM ever invented.
Continue reading →

Revenge v1.51 released – you asked for it!

Diary, News

We’ve been listening to your feedback on the Revenge of the Titans beta over the last few months, and with this new update (v1.51) we’ve attempted to address some of the most requested changes. And of course there’s a load of other tweaks, not least finally the ability to sell buildings! Here are the download links…

Windows
Mac OS
Linux

Don’t forget to check the version number to make sure you’ve really gotten 1.51 installed. Here’s what’s new, changed, fixed, twiddled, and nerfed:

Bugs Fixed

  • Fixed: stuttering sound (hopefully!)
  • Fixed: HUD money updates when intermission screen is showing
  • Fixed: Reloading a turret in build mode should stop build mode
  • Fixed: Can’t reload a turret or collect a factory when in Build mode
  • Fixed: creating path for gidrahs overwrites odd ruin tiles – needs to either leave them or delete all tiles associated with the ruin
  • Fixed: dialog text not centred on game over
  • Fixed: Apostrophe key ‘ now correctly selects autoloader for build
  • Fixed: Load/Save. Again. All files now stored in user home directory.
  • Fixed: Gidlets now only immune to explosions when spawning
  • Fixed: Ruins used to block blaster fire in their bottom left corner: this is now specified per ruin for the whole ruin or in a mapping attribute

New Features and Enhancements

  • Medals
  • Ranks
  • New intermission screen
  • New ESC menu
  • Wired up ESC button on HUD
  • Completely new in-game UI
  • New Game Over UI
  • Added the in-game menu to the research/story screens so you can quit out at that point.
  • Change the way shield generators work
  • Wire up new options (to hide various GUI stuff)
  • Rockets now explode when they hit the edge of the map
  • New research GUI with all the stats and two different views
  • Sell mode
  • DEL key wired to Sell mode and middle mouse button
  • You get 10 seconds to sell a building after construction in which you’ll get 100% of the money back (like an undo)
  • Laser to be able to fire into mountains (turret needs to be able to see too)
  • Appropriate story tweaks when flying gidrahs appear re: lasers
  • Removed [X] button from hints panel – click anywhere to close it now
  • Hints now remain onscreen for 7 seconds max
  • Top HUD fades out as mouse approaches
  • Bottom HUD now hideable with toggle button (INS key)

Balance Changes

  • Gidrahs now get a little more urgent and fearless when the timer runs out
  • Nerfed damage bonus for alien anatomy to just +1
  • Increased research cost of a few things
  • Nerfed laser/rocket ranges a little
  • Saturn gidrahs now a teeny bit harder
  • Slightly increased saucer duration on earlier levels, decreased on later levels
  • Reduce crystals available slightly now Sell button implemented
  • Tweak tuning: game needs to be tiny bit harder tiny bit sooner

Internal Stuff

  • Completely change the way game metastate is persisted
  • Store exact representation of level instead of relying on dubious random number seed
  • Gidrah now uses 1/32th the RAM courtesy of using packed bits in ints in its tiny brain
  • Awarded a non-repeatable medal sfx
  • Awarded a repeatable medal sfx
  • New rank sfx
  • Sold sfx
  • Can’t build sfx
  • Insufficient funds sfx

And onto a few pics…

We’ve had a fair few requests to be able to see the statistics of researched buildings, and to see in some form the research connections between technologies and buildings. Here’s the new Research screen showing those stats, and the improved table and the new tree layouts…

(You can read more about the changes in Research GUI for the Tweak)

Adding the requested ‘Sell’ button required a HUD redesign, so we made some oft suggested alterations as well…

( more info here: Revenge of the HUD Redesign and Revenge of the HUD part 2 )

The old in-game ESC key menu has been given a restyling, and is now accessible from a HUD button. You can access this menu from the various Story and Research screens by pressing ESC too. Options on the Game Over screen have also been updated…

And last but not least, the Achievements dialog showing Rank and Medals…

There’s also a new Level Complete dialog – though that looks a bit pants at the mo, so wont bother with a screenshot 🙂 That’ll probably get a bit of a tidy up in the final polish stage of development.

Next up on the todo list – Cas will be adding Endless and Survival game modes, and I’ll add badge graphics for ranks before making a start on the Titan levels. The jury’s out as to whether to tackle Endless or Survival first, but right now we’re hedging our bets with Endless mode, which is like the current campaign mode, but without a story, or… an end. Just level after level of slowly increasing size and difficulty, drawn randomly from the scenery we’ve done so far, until you are defeated (and there’s only one life). We expect Endless games to take hours to play, by which time you will probably be a gibbering nervous wreck.

What happened back there?

News

You may or may not have noticed our server being extremely broken lately. In fact a week ago it developed a fatal bad sector on the boot disk and exploded, taking everything with it (including lwjgl.org unfortunately which is still not back up yet). We’ve worked tirelessly trying to piece it back together in between day jobs and progress on Revenge of the Titans, and it’s popped up and gone down like a yoyo ever since, occasionally losing the odd blog post and comments in the process.

We still don’t have email (though we do still have the puppygames Gmail account, so keep using that, please!). Hopefully this will be sorted fairly imminently.

Because of the server’s unexpected demise we completely missed the August 29th date for releasing Revenge of the Titans 1.51. So what we’ve done is roll it all up into a slightly bigger release with what was going to be in 1.52, and this is now scheduled for release on 12th September. The big things in the new release are:

  • You can now sell buildings! And if you’re quick enough (10 seconds), it won’t cost you a bean.
  • The HUD has been completely redesigned and can be hidden from view when you need to place buildings right down the bottom
  • The research screen now has a tree view as well as a categorised view, and all the building stats are available for researched items
  • Introducing the Medals screen, which you can view at any time, showing you the medals you’ve earned in your war efforts so far (with a total score)

Stay tuned for updates!

Research GUI for the Tweak

Diary

Next up for GUI tweaking is the research screen, which currently looks like this…

There’s 2 major changes to make that people have requested:

  1. to be able to view more complete info and stats of already researched items
  2. some way to tell what research item leads to what, rather than effectively having to guess

The following images are first thoughts, and quick mockups – I know they don’t make a lot of sense as to what’s being hovered on,  refineries don’t lead on to robotics etc. 🙂 … Continue reading →

Revenge of the HUD part 2

Diary

Thanks for all the feedback on the HUD changes – it seemed opinion was split between versions 1 and 2, but with the majority in favour of version 1, so I’ve gone ahead and sorted all the graphics and XML for that.

It may be possible to add some option to choose between the two at a later date, and I’ve arranged the various buildings so that they could potentially open up from category icons in little panels of 1×3 or 2×3 building icons… but as its taken 2 and a half days of fiddling to sort the HUD out so far I don’t think I’ll have time to do that before the next release which we have planned for Sunday.

This is how it was looking before…

… and here’s how it looks now….

Changes made…

Continue reading →

Revenge of the HUD Redesign

Diary

We’re going to be making a few changes to the buildings/powerups panel. Here’s the current HUD….

First of all, and by popular demand, we’re going to add a sell button. Unfortunately there’s not enough room to squeeze it into that bottom panel, as that’s about as wide as it will go on a vertical display – the max width when vertical is shown by the dotted lines.

We could make the icons smaller to squeeze it in, but some people have also commented on the icons being too small to tell apart easily as it is, so that’s something else that would be good to address as well – magnification on hover being one suggestion.

There also needs to be a way to be able to hide the buildings/powerups panel, as it prevents building along that bottom edge.

So, 2 different designs after the jump…

Continue reading →

Saturn released!

News,

Well, we’ve finally released the Saturn levels for Revenge of the Titans under the guise of version 1.5! This has been quite a complex release, what with the addition of several completely new alien types and a whole new world, and an awful lot of fiddling with balance, bug fixing, enhancement, and so on. Without further ado, here’s the links:

Windows

Mac OS

Linux

Like last time it would probably be a good idea to play through from level 1 again with a new profile, as the amount of money available in the levels is somewhat different now, as is the cost of researching various things.

And here are some pics…

Yes, the boss is armed with a laser. No, he’s not very friendly.

Continue reading →

Titan Attacks and Ultratron receive a little love and attention

News

Hot on the heels of the recently tweaked Droid Assault, our awesome Paradroid remake, fresh versions of Titan Attacks (now v1.95) and Ultratron (v2.3) are now in place and ready for your sweaty palms.

As the sort of person who reads the Puppyblog, you are undoubtedly already aware that Titan Attacks is the best remake of Space Invaders ever in the world in space. And as we know time is space, that means it’s the best Space Invaders game of all time and that will ever be. However, if you are the Googlebot, you might not know this, and parsing this blog with your googlebot brain will hopefully make some connections of that sort.

Ultratron is our take on Robotron 2084, with the added twist of it actually being playable by ordinary human beings. And having lots of powerups, and bosses, and stuff. It’s actually nothing really like Robotron but people will keep on making the comparison, so we humour them and smile condescendingly, knowing that such people weren’t even alive in 1982 when Williams unleashed the grand master of all dual-stick shooters on an unsuspecting arcade playing population.

Hm, I’d quite like someone to make Bezerk for me…

Anyway: same deal as before – just download and install over the top of your existing ones. Registered games stay registered. Happy blasting.

New Droid Assault Uploaded

News

My favourite game, Droid Assault, has just received a little TLC, and updated to version 1.8. This version should install correctly on Windows Vista and Windows 7, and it should also work on ATI Catalyst 10 drivers. You may or may not notice it running a little more smoothly as well, especially on slightly older hardware, though I really doubt you’ll notice it. Four other things were fixed:

  • Multi-core AI was completely broken but nobody seemed to notice. They’ve had their brains ripped out and replaced with the brains from the gidrahs in Revenge of the Titans.
  • The disruptor now does 50% more damage.
  • The S490 droid is less annoying now, having twin blasters and moving 50% quicker.
  • Registration details now fade after 30 seconds

I hope you have fun with it!

Any problems, please let me know as soon as possible. I’m off to bed now.

The Trouble With Balance

Diary

I’ve been having balance issues lately. It’s not due to the giant bottle of gin I have just bought, either. Rather, it’s all about the problem of balance with the cost of stuff, crystals, and the value of the gidrahs when you destroy them.

First of all, I have a feeling that there are too many crystals on most worlds, which let you harvest an awful lot of cash that way. Secondly, I have another feeling that silos may be just too damned useful. The difference between having silos around all your refineries and not having silos is pretty drastic. So I think they’ll be first up against the wall when the nerfing revolution comes. Which will be around the time of Saturn. Silos will become somewhat less effective – I think I’ll reduce their efficiency increase to just 10% (down from 25%) per silo. And there will be a smallish reduction in crystals. In fact there will also be a reduction in crystals if it appears you’ve got a whole lot of cash in the bank, too, as you’re clearly doing rather well.

Also, the amount of money that can be harvested by shooting gidrahs is pretty massive. This sort of lends itself to a gameplay balance issue whereby the player doesn’t have a whole lot of incentive to bother collecting crystals, especially if you get the aliens cornered in a tight spot and can keep them at bay using minimal firepower and expense. Or alternatively the collection of crystals can be trivial if they’re behind the choke point on the map, meaning you’ll come away from a level with $30k in the bank.

The difficulty range was supposed to work best in the range of $0-$15k or so, but clearly it seems I’ve got to extend it to cater for up to $30k. And so I shall 🙂

Work on Saturn continues, with suicide exploding gidrahs working nicely, and the code for flying aliens in, but they don’t yet drop bombs. And we can’t seem to get a good graphic for it yet, so to distract himself, Chaz is doing the scenery instead, which revolves around toxic waste and pumping machinery. I tried a nice simplex noise fog shader for some cool weather effects but discovered it was too slow, so that’s on the back burner again and unlikely to see the light of day.

And finally, I got around to fixing the three older games, Droid Assault, Titan Attacks, and Ultratron, after leaving them broken for over a year (the wouldn’t work on ATI cards, and also wouldn’t install on Windows Vista or Windows 7 properly). I’ll upload nice fixed versions this weekend with any luck.

Rest in peace, Teazle

Diary
Teazle the dog

Teazle in the snow

It is with great sadness that I have to report the death of Teazle, the most lovely dog in the world, who was with us for 12 years. Teazle was the other puppy behind the name of Puppygames (Smudge was the other, but she passed away many years ago now). We’re all very very upset and won’t be doing any work for a few days. We miss you, Teazle x

The Tech Tree

Diary

Some kind soul on the ever-lovely RockPaperShotgun made a lovely tech-tree graphic. I’ve not checked it for accuracy thoroughly but I thought it’d be worth sharing with you all.

You will be horrified and dismayed to discover that the really cool exotic weapons, the laser, rocket, and disruptor, will now cost a staggering $15,000 to research in the Saturn release. They are the pinnacle of offensive technology! They’re supposed to be really hard to get. At least, early in the game.

Lasers and rockets have also been nerfed very slightly in the forthcoming release. Lasers will do a teeny bit less damage, and rockets only explode when they hit their actual target location (as opposed to anything in their path). Also, rockets will cause splash damage to any nearby buildings! This means you will have to be very careful to place them such that gidrahs won’t slip behind them and amongst your valuable buildings, causing it to start raining rockets down on your own base! The sword has two edges, etc, etc.

All three exotic weapons now cost a huge $5000 to buy as well, reflecting the fact that with two of them you can pretty much defeat any level with relative ease. You still can, of course; you just need to be rich enough to afford to 🙂

Droids and turrets had a “big” AI overhaul; they now select new targets every 2 seconds, which means if something more suitable to shoot comes along, they’ll switch to it. Droids fire a bit more rapidly now, and move a smidgen more quickly as well.

And lastly autoloaders are somewhat cheaper at just $750. You know you want them! Sit back and watch the battle take care of itself 🙂

In other news, Chaz has been hard at work on Saturn, and he’s got Saturn wraiths done, and is currently finishing off suicide bombers. These little critters start off slowly, then accelerate towards their target, whereupon instead of biting, they explode causing splash damage to all buildings nearby! Better shoot them from a great distance. Fortunately being explody they are quite easy to pop.