{"id":758,"date":"2010-12-13T01:36:39","date_gmt":"2010-12-13T00:36:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/?p=758"},"modified":"2010-12-13T01:36:50","modified_gmt":"2010-12-13T00:36:50","slug":"the-end-of-the-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/?p=758","title":{"rendered":"The End of the Road"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, folks, this is it &#8211; the lastest ever beta version of Revenge of the Titans, now at the heady heights of version 1.71. This is our &#8220;release candidate&#8221; &#8211; provided no bishops in hell turn up and fart in the trifles of our lives, this will then become the finished game. Well, I say finished &#8211; we&#8217;re probably likely to tweak it some more in the new year once the dust has settled.<\/p>\n<p>First things first &#8211; here&#8217;s the direct links:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/downloads\/SetupRevengeOfTheTitansDemo.exe\">Windows<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/downloads\/RevengeOfTheTitans_MacOSX.zip\">Mac OS X<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/downloads\/RevengeOfTheTitans-i386.deb\">32-bit Debian package<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/downloads\/RevengeOfTheTitans-amd64.deb\">64-bit Debian package<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/downloads\/RevengeOfTheTitans-i386.tar.gz\">32-bit generic Linux<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/downloads\/RevengeOfTheTitans-amd64.tar.gz\">64-bit generic Linux<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/applets\/RevengeOfTheTitans.jnlp\">Java Webstart<\/a> (all OSes)<\/p>\n<p>Now, on to business. What&#8217;s changed? If you haven&#8217;t already, go and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/?p=757\">have a quick read about 1.7<\/a> first, to better know thine enemy.<\/p>\n<p>The short summary is: <em>1.7 didn&#8217;t work out very well<\/em>, so I&#8217;ve reverted a few of the design decisions. It&#8217;s been such a panic getting this penultimate build together though I haven&#8217;t had time to write the usual changelog, so I&#8217;ll go through the major changes.<\/p>\n<h4>Changes in 1.71<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>The Titans stop coming when the timer runs out<\/strong> again &#8211; phew! In hindsight this was a <em>mental<\/em> idea. So it&#8217;s back to its original behaviour. To compensate for the level being rather dull once the aliens aren&#8217;t arriving any more, it will finish as before when the last one is slain&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;and you&#8217;ll <strong>scavenge the remaining crystals.<\/strong> Unfortunately it pays to dig them up the proper way &#8211; scavenged crystals make no use of silos (more on these below) and you only get 40% of the remaining value, a bit like building recycling. You also get a $500 bonus for digging them all up before the timer expires, so well worth it.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Refineries now take 15 seconds to fill up<\/strong> with money (it was 10 before). Reactors make approximately a 2.5 second difference to this time &#8211; so with the maximum useful complement of four reactors on a refinery, you&#8217;re looking at a collection every 5 seconds.<\/li>\n<li>You might be interested to know that a <strong>small crystal holds $2000<\/strong>, a medium one $4000, and a large one $6000.<\/li>\n<li>Silos have changed &#8211; they&#8217;re now called <strong>reprocessors<\/strong>, and their function is basically the same as it was before &#8211; they increase the efficiency of your refineries &#8211; but they <strong>no longer affect the capacity<\/strong>, which remains at $250. You might also be interested to know the efficiency gains are 17%, 25%, 33% and 50% for one to four silos respectively. So you could be eking $9000 out of a large crystal. Four reprocessors will cost you $2500 in outlay and you&#8217;ll get $1000 back in recycling &#8211; so you&#8217;re making $2000 profit on the venture. Place them cunningly to mine two or more big crystals and you&#8217;re looking at big money!<\/li>\n<li>I fixed a <strong>massive bug with reactors<\/strong> that caused them to make crystals spew out tons and tons of money. Strange that no-one noticed. Maybe nobody ever used them to speed up refining.<\/li>\n<li>The <strong>Titan brains<\/strong> have been given one last tweak to make them behave <strong>slightly cleverer<\/strong> than they were before, and they now swarm in quite a believable way.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Decoys are back to being really expensive again<\/strong> at $2500 a pop when I realised just how awesome they actually are. Although Titans aren&#8217;t quite so easily fooled any more, and will randomly select from the available decoys and the base (before, they always went for the nearest one, which made a single decoy effectively like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn). So now you can place, say, 3 decoys, and 75% of the rank-and-file will head for them, and the rest will pick the base.<\/li>\n<li>All sorts of <strong>annoying beeps<\/strong> have been added to the flashing warning lights. Sorry. But they do appear to help.<\/li>\n<li>The amount of <strong>crystals generated on a level<\/strong> has been tweaked, but I&#8217;m not sure if I&#8217;ve got it dead right yet. Time will tell.<\/li>\n<li>Endless level 51 no longer crashes. Yes, someone actually played that far.<\/li>\n<li>Certain sound effects ignored the game volume settings<\/li>\n<li>Fixed a whole load of emitter bugs that caused far too many particles to get emitted.<\/li>\n<li><strong>In game help<\/strong> has been <a href=\"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/revenge-of-the-titans\/help\">moved to the interwebs<\/a>. At the time of writing this blog post it&#8217;s nowhere near finished but Chaz is beavering away at it like a beavery thing, and soon it will be all shiny and sparkle.<\/li>\n<li>We&#8217;ve got a bunch of <strong>nice new sound effects<\/strong> for the bezerk, freeze, and shield powerups, and various incidental noises. If you listen closely you&#8217;ll be able to hear the Mars boss gnashing his maw. Yeeech!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Please give it a great big test. Especially interested in your thoughts on difficulty, survival mode, and endless mode.<\/p>\n<h4>Stuff I&#8217;m Considering for the New Year<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>Possibly making research <em>free<\/em>, meaning you simply get to choose one upgrade per level. To accommodate that we&#8217;ll have to dream up a bunch more intermediate research to get it to stretch better across the 50-level campaign. I can think of at least 10 more things, some of which will actually be useful in their own right, so that shouldn&#8217;t be too hard, but poor old Chaz will have to redesign the research screen. Again.\n<\/li>\n<li>An online hiscore table for Survival Mode\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The game will officially be released on <strong>14th December 2010<\/strong>. Whereupon you will also discover the surprise we mentioned. Please consider buying our games as a Christmas gift for a friend when it comes out \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, folks, this is it &#8211; the lastest ever beta version of Revenge of the Titans, now at the heady heights of version 1.71. This is our &#8220;release candidate&#8221; &#8211; provided no bishops in hell turn up and fart in the trifles of our lives, this will then become the finished game. Well, I say finished &#8211; we&#8217;re probably likely to tweak it some more in the new year once the dust has settled.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=758"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":763,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758\/revisions\/763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.puppygames.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}