Hey guys, I've discounted Cube Defender for Halloween, hopefully you can all give it a go.
I've been really happy with how Cube Defender has progressed since I've released it. I've added multiple modes (endless / challenge mode), updated and scaled the performance and improved it step by step.
I'm going to be focusing on a final update early next year to address the last few aspects of the game I want refined.
A power balancing of the various cubes
Price and speed balance for the turrets (trying to keep them a bit more balanced)
Performance optimizations in the late game (as the game expands over and over the map scales in size and this can cause framerate drops). The intention is to drop the graphics incrementally as the game scales.
Additional music and sound effects (rotating through a series of background music)
Global adjustment to animation speed and game speed overall.
I'm really excited to get this to it's final form so that everyone can get the Cube Defender experience I always wanted to show.
Content Expansion #2
Hey guys, It's been a long time coming, but today I'm releasing the next content expansion for Cube Defender. This expansion includes a new game mode, new enemies, new levels, updated balancing and overall tweaks the game to make it more enjoyable.
The release for Windows should be live now, with the Mac release coming very soon.
Challenge Mode
This update opens up a new game mode called Challenge Mode
As it's name implies, this mode is a challenge. You'll face off against wave after wave enemies as the game expands. You'll play through 30 levels, each getting progressively more difficult.
How It Works Challenge Mode shares similarities to the other game modes, but instead of playing through multiple rounds (standard mode) or forever until you die (endless mode), in challenge mode you have to complete 30 level expansions back to back.
Turret Management Much like Endless Mode where you have to maintain your turrets energy to keep them working effectively, in this mode you'll have to be aware of their health.
New enemies will spawn throughout the game that can deal damage to your turrets. Your turrets wont regenerate over time so it's up to you to either repair them or replace them entirely to keep your defences in tact.
Turret Unlocks Unlike previous modes where you purchase access to new turrets, in this mode you'll unlock them as you play. You'll need to use the basic turrets, along with good placement and correct upgrade timing to survive.
Dynamic Wave Spawners As you play Challenge Mode and the game ramps up, additional wave spawners will appear in previous zones of the map.
These spawn points have a chance to appear at the end of each level, becoming more and more frequent as the game plays on. If you look at the image above, a spawner appears in the top left section of the map which is unguarded by any turrets.
You'll get a warning message when one appears, but you'll have to find where on your map this spawner has appeared and build your defences accordingly. This should keep you continually thinking about your defences as a whole (not just the most recently expanded section)
Steam Achievements New achievements have been added to Challenge Mode. These unlock as you play endless mode, corresponding to levels 10/20/30.
New Enemies - Attack Cubes
Exclusive to Challenge Mode are the new Attack Cubes. These enemies spawn in later levels and can be devastating to your defences. These cubes attack all turrets along their path and can spawn in large groups.
As your turrets take damage from these cubes you'll need to repair them or replace them entirely. While not entirely difficult by themselves, when they are left unchecked can cause defences in your previous zones to fail.
The intention with these guys is to give you a reason to watch previous sections of the map and introduce a new element of repair and replacement.
Additional Level Combinations
To keep things interesting, I've added 12 new level varieties to the game.
These levels are a combination of easy and moderate difficulty, most having only 1 or two 2 initial spawn points in them. As the game gets polished further, additional levels will be added to increase variety.
Quick Actions Menu
While playing any of the game modes, you will now have access to a new quick actions menu on the right hand side (as seen below in challenge mode)
These give you quick access to perform certain functions. These actions are dependent on what game mode you're currently in. Here are some examples:
Restore all turrets energy (endless mode)
Restore all turrets health (challenge mode)
Upgrade all active turrets (multiple modes)
There's a premium to pay for this convenience as upgrading your turrets / energy / health this way is more expensive than doing it manually (and will restore health / energy to turrets even if they are in almost perfect condition).
Additional Notes, Bugfixes and Improvemnets
Right Click Turret Upgrade To make managing your turrets even easier, you can now right click on them to instantly upgrade them to the next level. This should save you having to manually open up the upgrading UI just to select the new turret upgrade.
Middle Mouse Movement Something I've wanted to add in for a while, middle mouse pan movement. Holding down the middle mouse button will let you pan across the map.
Performance Improvements - Bars & UI Everything that's rendered on the screen costs CPU/GPU time to calculate and even something minor like health/energy/armour bars can cause a noticeable impact on performance when there are hundreds of elements in play (especially when there are shadows involved)
In an attempt to limit the slowdown of rendering these items, as soon as you zoom out of the game map, these UI elements are hidden. This will give you an easier overview of what's happening across several sections of the map and also increase performance.
Performance Improvements - Scaling Both Endless Mode and Challenge Mode have unique performance considerations compared to the original Standard Mode. Unlike in Standard Mode, where there could only be a few levels played in each game round (with a few dozen enemies and turrets). In these extended modes you could be feasibly be fighting off hundreds of enemies across 30+ levels.
As part of this update I've adjusted game logic, rendering and other functionality to improve framerates when playing on massive games. This should keep frames reasonable up until 30 levels, with slight drops each level after. These performance changes should also improve the Standard Mode also.
Additional changes and adjustments
The update resolves a long outstanding bug with the level expansion system. Beforehand, the direction in which to expand in is determined at the end of the current level, this means that if you're unlucky, the path could end up folding in on itself ( expand right, up, left and then down) causing a collision. With this update, the entire level generation process is determines as soon as the game loads, ensuring that as the game plays out
Fixed bug with large maps. Previously as maps expanded the "background" image would no longer tile. This update makes it significantly bigger so visually it should look fine on large maps
Endless mode now show's the correct number of levels completed.
Turrets in Endless Mode will slowly regenerate energy over time. This energy regen will top up the turret to it's current maximum power level. This means that if a turret is on level 1 charge (1 of 3), it can regenerate up to the maximum allowed for the first charge level
Several UI changes to animation speed, movement and pacing.
New animation while hovering over turrets (to show it's selected)
Bug-fixes with endless mode achievements (incorrect triggering)
Future Plans
I'm in the progress of working out ideas and adjustments to Cube Defender going forward. A majority of the game modes and features I originally wanted to provide exist now. I'm happy to hear feedback and look forward to improving the game further :)
Upcoming Game Update
Hey everyone
Just a quick update to outline what's coming up next for Cube Defender.
I'm continuing to tweak the game, improving how it plays and overall making it feel fairer and more balanced. The next content update (which is planned for July) will contain updates to the following:
Sound Overhaul: Currently the game sounds are all in 2D, meaning you hear turrets firing from across the map. In the next update most non UI sound will be switched to 3D sounds so you only hear them when applicable.
Additional Level Combinations: Additional level combinations to bring in new variety to the gameplay. The end goal is to make these levels scale even better so that at the start of the game you'll face levels with 1 wave spawner, but in later levels you'll face several
New Achievements / Stats: Additional achievements are in the works. These will most likely be non standard ones, e.g upgrading X items in X seconds (edge cases)
Linux Support: I've been testing out the Linux port and it seems to run stably so with the next release I'll officially be supporting Linux.
Game Saves: Right now there's no real game state to store your high scores and other user data (achievements are on Steam's side and local high scores haven't been a focus). With the next update I'm looking to sync data through steam so that if you uninstall the game your scores (and later on more complex data) will persist.
I also have a few thoughts on doing the following:
Adding in additional changes to Endless Mode (providing a way for the enemies to fight back against the turrets so you have to keep repairing)
Additional new background music tracks. This will be dependent on what music I can create or find to suit the game
Additional UI tweaks and further adjustments
Thanks for the support guys. I'm keen to keep updating this game until it reaches a really solid foundation I can be proud of.
For any feedback please feel free to leave a comment or PM here on here.
Cheers
Content Expansion #1
Today I'm releasing the first major content expansion for Cube Defender. This update brings in a new game mode, several new enemies and heaps of quality of life improvements.
I'd love to hear from you guys about how it all plays now, along with any feedback :)
The new version will be rolling out to Windows users today with the Mac version early next week
New Game Mode - Endless Mode
Introducing a brand-new mode called Endless Mode.
In this mode you play a continually expanding game map back-to-back until you run out of health.
Unlike the standard mode where you play multiple smaller games, this mode lets you play until you're overwhelmed by cubes. The goal is to see how long you can survive. Along with the regular points you get from destroying enemies, in endless you get points every second with bonus points earned when completing additional levels.
How It All works Endless Mode shares the fundamentals with Standard Mode, wherein you play a level and destroy cube enemies that spawn from one edge of the map and move towards the other end.
Where this mode differs is that the game map will indefinitely expand with no end sight. Unlike in Standard Mode where games have a set number of level expansions before clearing, this mode continues forever.
You'll still build turrets and destroy cubes, but the game will get progressively harder the longer you play.
Turrets become increasingly more expensive each round
The map becomes harder to manager as it expands, you'll need to move back and forth across previous levels to ensure your turrets are still working
The turret limit doesn't change. At the beginning this will be fine as you will have plenty to spare, but as you progress to 10, 20, 30 and beyond you will have to determine where is the best place to put your turrets and how many you will need on each level to survive
Every time you complete 8 Levels you will receive a bonus of additional health, currency and score. This is the only way to regain health in this mode so getting to these intervals is key.
Turret energy system as explained below
Turret Energy System Turrets will now rely on energy to operate. This new resource is spent every time the turret shoots and will eventually deplete with enough time (dealing less damage from 1x damage at full power to 0.5x when exhausted)You'll have to upgrade, destroy and recharge your turrets to ensure they're operating at peak effeciency (with upgrades improving their maximum energy capacity)
Turret Dead Zones As the levels expand you will start to see more frequent dark blue tiles appearing. These are Dead Zones and they prevent any turrets from being built on them. These zones are infrequent at the start but become a significant consideration later on when each new level creates more of them.
You'll need to determine when's the best time to build your turret as you'll never know when that tile might become a dead zone.
Endless Mode Achievements & Leaderboards New Steam Achievements have been added for Endless Mode. You'll unlock these as you play endless mode (these are mostly based on how many levels you've been able to unlock while playing in a single session).
A new leaderboard has been added just for Endless Mode. Compete with others to see who can get the highest score in Endless.
Performance With Endless Mode, it's possible you'll have hundreds or thousands of cubes, effects and turrets at once. While this has been performance tested, you may notice FPS drops when playing for a long time (there's not much that can be done, there's a physical limit to how many things can be calculated and drawn)
New Enemy - Magnetic Cube
This high level blue colored enemy periodically sends out a magnetic wave. Any turrets hit by this wave instantly drop their current target and focus on this cube. Where this cube becomes dangerous is with it's high health and slow movement. While your turrets are distracted focusing on this cube, others can slip past and race towards the edge of the map.
You'll need high damage / multiple turrets to destroy these cubes quickly so you can focus on faster and more damaging enemies.
New Enemy - Spawner Cube
The orange colored spawner enemy itself isn't overly dangerous (with a modest attack, defense and health), but where it makes up for its own average stats is the fact that when destroyed it will randomly spawn additional cubes at the point of impact. What cubes are spawned are based on the current level (with harder and more numerous cubes being spawned in the late game).
You'll want turrets both in front and behind the path of this cube (so you can catch any spawns that pop out once you destroy it).
Additional Features and Improvements
Along with this update are a whole heap of features, optimization and bug-fixes that help really polish up Cube Defender to make it more enjoyable. Here's a few of the highlights.
Tutorial System
I've added a brand-new tutorial system as an option when you start the game. If enabled, key parts of the game will cause tutorial messages to be shown.
These messages freeze time, zoom you into the action and then provide a useful message. Here are a few places where you might see these:
- Once when a new enemy cube type is spawned
- When letting the first cube escape
- When a turret runs out of energy (in endless mode)
These helpful messages should help highlight what's important without being overly intrusive.
Turret Upgrade Models
Previously when turrets were upgraded, they became more powerful, but visually they looked the same. This made it hard to keep track of which turrets were upgraded and which ones weren't.
In this update, all turrets will visually change when upgraded. For example, here is what the Simple Turret looks like when it's upgraded.
Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 Simple Turret
Redesigned Start Screen
I've re-designed the start screen so that as soon as you load up the game, a sample level is automatically played in the background. This level spawns enemies, spawns turrets and effectively plays itself. I've added several camera angles too so while you're interacting with the menus (or just sitting in the game screen) you'll have something fun to look at :)
Redesigned Help Screen
The help screen has also undergone a few changes, with the most noticeable addition being the new Endless Mode information.
Redesigned Game Select Screen
The game selection screen has been re-designed to accommodate several new features
- Ability to select between a Standard and Endless game
- Selection of difficulty on Standard Mode
- Selection of both Tutorials and Disabling Sound as options
Other Changes
- Better randomization for the levels and game rounds based on difficulty. Instead of being a definite 3 game rounds per session, the number of rounds and the number of levels inside the round will be randomized based on difficulty (with higher difficulties having longer game maps)
- When playing the game you can now press the escape key / back key to dismiss any currently opened menu . This will make it easier / more natural to close the menus now. You can also press any area outside of the menus in order to close them.
- Better scaling of difficulty for wave spawners. Beforehand each spawn point could spawn a wide variety of cubes. This means that if you're unlucky you could have some really strong enemies back-to-back. Now, each spawner moves through levels, with each level it's pool of applicable enemies it can spawn is updated. This means that at lower levels the spawners will spawn more basic enemies and as the game progresses, the spawner will increase in difficulty with new enemies being spawned.
- Boss spawns no longer spawn for easy mode
- Adjusted the speed of several animations (explosion, message display, movement). All of these have been sped up to better match the pace of the game
- Some level adjustments for balance
- Additional performance optimisations for animations, calculations and overall improved on some legacy AI code
New Enemies Update!
Hey everyone, just a quick update to let you know what I've been working on the past few weeks and what's coming next.
New Upcoming Enemies
I've been working hard on introducing additional enemies into Cube Defender.
Along with the standard cubes you've seen so far, you'll also have to content with a few new enemies and their unique mechanics
Parent Cube - When this cube is defeated it spaws additional cube enemies from where it died. These cubes will keep you on your feet as you need to not only keep them from the end of the path, but also ensure you can deal with their spawned cubes when it dies.
Attraction Cube - This slow moving and low damage dealing cube might seem weak, but it's power is that is causes turrets it passes by to drop it's current target and focus attention only on it. This will mean you'll need to place turrets away from the main path to ensure it can't be ensnared by this new enemy.
This one requires a significant amount of time to balance to ensure it's common enough to cause annoyance, but not so common as to be overwhelming.
Additional Cubes - I'm still working on a range of
other* cubes that may make it in this next release, or may be left for a subsequent update. I'd like to add a whole heap of cubes each update, but these all need to be balanced so each one feels distinctive.
Additional Tweaks / Improvements
There have been continual tweaks to the game overall, including some balance tweaks, adjustments to the higher difficulties and a few bug fixes to resolve a few edge cases.
Overall I'll continue to balance the game as new enemies, turrets and level types are introduced to ensure the game feels fair :)
When's It Coming?
I'm aiming for a mid April release date for these changes so I can properly balance and hunt down any issues.
I'm keen to hear anyone's feedback about enemies overall, along with any suggestions about additional enemy types / mechanics.
Cheers guys :)
Upcoming Additional Content
Hey everyone
Just a quick annoucement about the next upcoming content update for the game.
I'll be working on introducing new features, along with continually tweaking the experience overall.
An additional cube enemy with its own gameplay mechanics ( multiple of these in the works, but they all need to be balanced and tested)
New level combinations (along with more work on creating more dynamic patterns to make each game feel more unique)
Additional steam achievements
New sound effects and background music (eventually with the end goal of making sounds in the game "location specific" so that you only hear effects when you're next to the sound source)
These changes will most likely come out at the beginning of March, if not earlier.
Feel free to send me a message if you have feedback about the game. I'm always keen to hear from you guys :)
Cheers
Version 1.3 (Steam Achivements & Leaderboard support)
Hey everyone
I've been busy working on additional features for Cube Defender and this content update brings in support for both Steam Achivements and Steam Leaderboards
Achivements
As previously mentioned in the last post, I've been working on adding in a range of achivments you can unlock while you play. There are currently 21 Achivements to unlock. Some of these achivements are straight forward, while other ones will take several playthroughs.
Some of these achivements are stats based (e.g number of cubes destroyed overall), while some of them are situational (e.g unlocking all turrets in a single playthrough). Have a look out for these achivments next time you play :)
Leaderboards
Leaderboard support has also been added. These leardboard will keep track of metrics you generate through your Cube Defender playrthough including:
Total Player Score
Number Of Cubes Destroyed
Number of Levels Completed
The leaderboards will help you rank your progress again other Cube Defender players. For now there are three primary leaderboards, but more may be added in future updates so you can more easily see your progress.
There are additional plans for more achivements down the track. These will most likely be a combination of progressive elements such as tracking how many cubes you've destroyed with the rocket launcher, along with stand alone achivements like destroying X number of cubes from bullet ricochets.
An end goal will be to have around 50, with additional achivements being pushed out in the regular content updates for the game.
Feel free to reply to this post if you're interested in seeing certain types of achivements or if you're keen on additional leaderboards.
Cheers
Upcoming Steam Achievements
Hi guys
Just a quick annoucement to keep you all updated with the latest games updates coming over the next week or so.
I'll be integrating the first round of Steam Achievements into the game!
Going forward I'll be periodically adding in new achievements to bring new challenges to the game.
My overall goal with achievements will be to balance them in such a way that most players will be able to unlock them all over time e.g
Destroy 1000 cubes
Unlock and upgrade all turrets to their final forms
Beat hard mode
Complete normal mode in under X minutes
I'll be expanding on achievements as the game grows, with some unique achievements hooked to how quickly you can destroy cubes, how efficient your turret building placement is and other factors.
Keep an eye out for this update soon
Cheers
Version 1.2.2 (Mac Update)
Just a quick update guys.
The Mac version of the game has been updated to include all of the quick build UI changes. Both Windows and Mac should be almost identical by this release.
Going forward, Windows versions will be pushed out on schedule with a corresponding Mac version a few days later (as these need to be built and distributed manually through steam)
Cheers
Version 1.2.1 Quick Build UI Adjustments
Hey guys
This update is a a quick follow-up adjustment to the layout of the Quick Build UI.
I've switched up the design from having the icons at the bottom to now having them in the top left (plus adjusting their sizing, backgrounds and other minor aspects)
This layout change should keep these buttons away from the game notifications shown at the bottom of the window and overall make them more useful.
