I’m just preparing this post during a lull in the contractions and so on while we have baby #2 (don’t know if it’s a boy or another girl yet, we like surprises!). I had v1.80.6 of Revenge of the Titans ready yesterday by good fortune, so I’ve built it and uploaded and everyone should be able to download this final version by the time you can read this.

Wait… did I say final version? Well, yes, I did, because we’re no longer in beta! This is the version we’re going to put on Steam, and so we’re “finished”, except for a forthcoming (free) expansion in a few months time adding a few more buildings, just for fun. We really ought to get on with making a new game as soon as possible, because we’re still surviving on minimum wage and that’s not going to keep us in business for long. The Humble Bundle money will run out by Christmas which doesn’t leave a very long time to get another game selling. In fact it doesn’t leave anywhere near enough time – Revenge has taken 3 long years to make. Panic!

Anyway… we’re going to increase the price to $27.72 now seeing as nobody’s buying it anyway, and hope Steam can give us another 6 months’ money with which to get something approaching playable together and released into the wild. But for now, my next couple of weeks is going to be taken up with Steam panic and new baby panic. And getting around to the huge 3 week backlog of support emails I’ve been neglecting.

Humble Bundlers: download your update from your original Humble Bundle links, not Puppygames!!

Here’s what made it into the final release:

Bugs Fixed

Fixed: lasers now no longer blocked by crystals when firing at aerial targets

Fixed: droid bullets didn’t cause +1 damage after researching Biology

Fixed: at high difficulties, some gidrahs suddenly stopped moving so the level would never end

Fixed: droids caused serious performance degradation because of a brain glitch

Balance

Dropped pickups now last very slightly longer on the earlier levels

Cooling tower now less effective on shotguns, lasers, rockets and disruptors…

…and more effective on multiblasters

Disruptor nerfed to just 3 shots and 24pts damage

Rocket explosion radius nerfed to 48px from 64px

Rocket minimum and maximum range increased by 32px when plastic charge patterns researched; this should prevent rockets damaging their turrets so easily!

Heavy weapons now have very long reload times

Buffed sergeant droids weapons to ap 4, dam 8, stun 8 and doubled fire rate

New Features and Enhancements

You can now scroll past the edges of the map finally! The edges now fade out to black.

scale commandline parameter now works in fullscreen modes too

Droid AI now makes droids attack any target in range if primary target is not yet in range

Droid AI now causes droids to prioritise normal aliens if they are significantly closer than gidlets

Droid AI now ignores targets that can’t be hurt, similar to turrets

New graphics for sergeant droids and buffed droids

Lasers and disruptors will now also stop firing at targets they can’t damage

Saturn boss is now immune to laser fire

Titan boss now immune to disruptors

Clicking on a turret in build mode no longer reloads it

Internal

Weapons now express fire rate in rounds per minute, plus rounds per minute per cooling tower

Droid AI was unbounded; now limited to max. 128 steps per frame

Much improved font display & quartered texture memory requirements

Analysis

The most significant change you’ll immediately notice is that you can now scroll past the edges of the map (and it’s got this natty looking cool fade to black as well which makes the whole game look moodier and scarier). This sort of makes the flip-down HUD controls a bit redundant, but what the hell, they can stay in for now. At last! You can plonk turrets and things right at the bottom of the map with ease.

I’ve twiddled with how various upgrades affect turrets: some turrets respond best to certain sorts of upgrades. The multiblaster, in particular, is now very good with lots of cooling towers; the laser turret was always best with scanners; and so on. As usual the very best effects are achieved with the full complement of four of one particular type – so you’ve got a bit of a balance and tradeoff to work out there.

I’ve fixed the performance problem that using lots of droids caused. And the droids have received a fair bit of attention in the process. They should be noticeably more useful, though still probably not a total replacement for turrets. On Survival mode they are easily one of the best value buildings to buy though.

You can twiddle the scale parameter on the commandline for fullscreen mode now. You might be amused to try out scale=1.0 briefly but the graphics are naturally at scale=2.0 so they will be tiny and illegible, and I suspect performance might be a bit grim.

I made pickups a tad easier to grab, but they’re still going to be particularly tricky on later levels. This is deliberate. Harvest some crystals, you lazy sod!

Oh and the game may now be playable on G4 and G5 Macs… but I have no way to test this as my G5 died. Any takers? It’s likely to be fairly slow on everything except the fastest G5s mind.

So there we go. Steam release 7th March. Source code to follow in April I think.