Ahoy there! I can put this off no longer, as a couple of showstopper bugs have been fixed. There’s a new build of Revenge of the Titans available, v1.80.11. Once again, Humble Bundlers should be downloading from their original Humble Bundle links when Jeffrey tweets that is is there (give it 24-48 hours or so), not from Puppygames (or you’ll just end up with an unregistered demo!) Have a look at what happened in this build and then I’ll explain the consequences:

Bugs Fixed

Fixed: if Smartbomb is selected, then another option on the build menu is selected, you lose the smartbomb

Fixed: having an active smartbomb when you die leave the game in “smartbomb mode” so you got a free smartbomb upon restarting the level

Fixed: divide by zero error at seriously high difficulties in Endless mode level generator

Fixed: endless level 51 and above became suddenly insanely difficult

Fixed: level generator never ends if it generates a duff level

Fixed: clicking generate new easier level on wasn’t having any effect

Fixed: spider droids and ticks unable to squeeze through some gaps, so they refused to move and the level never ended

Balance

More mines!

More barricades!

Difficulty eased on later levels

Brought crystals a little closer to the base

Disruptors buffed to 32pts damage

Lasers nerfed to 1-8pts damage / tick

Crystal scavenging nerfed to 10%, which should encourage use of refineries a little more eh?

Reduced agitation caused by use of droids and heavy weapons by a factor of 2 (and also, the effect of decoys)

New Features and Enhancements

Mod support using the mods= commandline parameter! Separate jar file paths with system path separators.

Using mods segrates you on the survival hiscore table

Crystal scavenge rate boosted to 15% then 20% if you choose one or both refinery permabuffs (in any order)

You can hover over a crystal now to get the amount of money left in it (reprocessors etc. notwithstanding)

Internal

Game now uses Java 6 and is no longer Moleboxed. No more virus warnings! But we’ll have lost a tiny bit of performance and startup will be a bit slower.

Increased memory parameters to -Xms64m -Xmx375m for 64-bit VMs

Removed AdaptiveSizePolicy VM parameter

Split up sound and graphics jars each into 3 smaller jars

Games now look for a patch.jar in the game directory which is used in preference to the contents of the rest of the jars

One nice big MSVC solution to build all the launchers executable using the same code

Dug up some license documentation

Did the code for the Scarecrow and Cloaking Device

Moved loads of static final constants into XML so they can be modded

Multiple mods loaded in order on the commandline

Gidrahs that fail to find a route five consecutive times are killed (cause of death: grid bug)

Diagonally moving gidrahs were allowed to plot horizontal and vertical routes but then prevented from actually executing them

Increased hint duration from 7 to 10 seconds

Analysis

Mostly what you’ll notice about this version is that it’s somewhat easier than before. You’ve got more mines and barricades, the heavy weapons and special buildings don’t make the gidrahs quite so angry, the crystals are a little closer to the base, and the overally difficulty has been tuned down a fair amount, especially as you get past Mars. It’ll still get hard if you’re doing really well, but with any luck, more people should have more fun more of the time in this version.

A subtle (and, honestly, not particularly relevant) change to crystal scavenging sees the amount of crystal recovered nerfed from 20% to 10%. That’s only a few hundred bucks in reality, but you can buff it again by researching the two refinery permabuffs (5% each). The idea of this subtle change was to encourage refining, just a bit more.

Under the hood, the game is now being deployed using JDK6 server VM (which is what all the Mac and Linux folks have been using all along anyway, so no change there). Also on Windows we’re no longer using the Moleboxed solution, for two reasons: firstly, because various virus checkers keep on finding false positives, grrr; and secondly, because the game now has mod support, albeit in a fairly hardcore manner. To create mods you’ll need to be proficient with XML editing, making JAR files, and tweaking your commandline. Suffice to say that this is a little bit involved and will require a whole blog post explaining it all, which I’ll get around to next week, and this will also coincide with me officially releasing the source code, which you will of course need to make any sense of the modding process.

In Other News…

I haven’t been able to update the Steam depot to v1.80.11 yet because our Valve rep is either away or busy or otherwise indisposed in some way. This also means we haven’t yet got the Mac port onto Steam either. Sorry folks, there’s nothing I can do about this yet. Also: if you want to see the Ultrabundle on Steam, ask Valve 🙂 As with Revenge of the Titans, we will be able to provide Steam keys for existing customers.

I am trying to sort out the Steam keys thing! I’ve just been waylaid for the last week and unable to get on with serious work. I’ll notify the world with a blog post when it’s ready as there are so many of you want Steam keys. <edit> We originally stipulated that the Steam key would be a one-way conversion but this is not the case – your Steam key is totally free of strings attached.

Some people have asked, and here it is: I tweet as @princec1234 though I don’t say much.

We are in the process of talking about an iPad version of Revenge of the Titans, but we’re not sure exactly how far we can get with it just yet. We’ll keep you posted if the project gets the go-ahead.

And finally we’ve been doing lots of thinking about our next game. Or at least, some bits of it. We really want to get on and start writing it as we’ve got precious little cash spare to spend on fiddling with Revenge of the Titans forever. As of right now we’ve got about 16 months’ money to develop the next game with, less if we do the iPad port and it tanks, which it very well might if Apple decide not to feature it. So game design caps are on! Brains are boiling! Pencils are being chewed at an increased rate!