As Christmas is not quite as active as it usually is, I have more time on my hands for Devader. My gift to you are tons of big and small changes and improvements. If you feel like giving me a small gift, I would really love a review. Hint, hint.
So what did I fix? To be honest I probably can't even remember half the stuff I've done. The first alpha was a bit of a mess, as I was mainly interested in finding out if upgrading to a new version would fix a weird game-pad input problem on Linux. I ended up just making an alpha for Windows/Linux that was way ahead of any planned schedule.
Devader was no longer running on my 10 year old Linux laptop. The new alpha uses a 8192x8192 texture atlas for all the game images. But older graphic cards do not support that size. I managed to find an acceptable solution by simply scaling down the art and switching to a different rendering style. It's a little pixelated compared to full resolution, but it works. It's unlikely to affect many players, but at least I can now still test on my laptop.
Boss music was not playing. This caused a weird issue with music stacking up. The game thought the Boss music was playing which should mean level music is turned off. After the boss battle the boss music was turned off that was never turned on, leaving level music turned on as it was never turned off. So when the next level started, both level tracks were playing. Nice. All due to a mistake where I wrote > instead of >= ... So now if you reach the Tower King you should feel the Christmas spirit.
Lightning was causing a few performance issues. In some cases a vast amount of lightning was created recursively, this has been limited by a lot.
Enemy spawning is now seeded, that means placement is not random. I had thought it was working before, but it certainly was not. Probably not something anyone noticed, but still kind of important. Choosing the same upgrades will now lead to a fairly consistent enemy spawning experience. I'm still not 100% sure it works all the time, but time will tell.
Commander Ball of Destruction & Balls of Healing are now indestructible. This could be a good or a bad thing, I am really not sure, but I've decided to try it.
Warlord The big choice after upgrades now highlights what you have selected. Still no actual visualization of what you will get, as some stuff might still be changed. Piercing Chest cannon now does more damage to smaller enemies and less to larger creatures. Shield-Field was rejecting some friendly units, this is no longer the case.
Bosses Senalux lasers now have a short build up when they rotate, no more instant damage/kills. I've also changed the bouncing bullets. In general I'm trying to reduce chaos and randomness. Unfair deaths are not fun.
Dios Illuminus Reworked the final boss again. The Warlord weapons were causing some significant issues (too easy). I've made quite a lot of changes to the attacks, giving a bit more space and some possibilities to graze bullets. It's still possible that some combinations or tools are too strong/weak. In the image below you can see what I was using to help me balance and understand the HP, blue is at full health. Hotter colors mean less HP.
Discord: https://discord.gg/AWhsvN3
Devlog - Fresh Alpha
I'm not sure if this is the right thing to do or not. But I've got a devlog over on tigsource and decided to maybe start posting here too.
Variation or Chaos
The original release of Devader has 14 different types of minor enemies that are just spiders. There are others too, but the spiders are pretty much the filler unit to add that extra bit of chaos and support the bigger enemies. In an earlier post I mentioned adding a ton of new alternatives to the spiders with different behaviors. So instead of 14 small enemies (peons) I had over 60...
A level in Devader is split into 6 waves + boss wave. Each wave has a simple definition specifying which of the 14 spiders will appear. This can look like this [2] or [1,8] or [-5]. [2] means only spider 2 can appear. [1,8] activates spider 1 and 8. [-5] allows all spiders from 0 to 5 to appear.
To prevent having to redo everything I made 4 groups out 56 peons, so 4 groups of 14. Spawning peon [1] now meant randomly selecting from the 4 groups. So peon A1, B1, C1 or D1. This turned out to be very chaotic. I then switched to seeded-random to chose which enemies would appear in which wave. So wave X would always only spawn A1 or B1, but no longer both.
The random seed is determined by the players upgrade choices. This makes sense for the game as the upgrade choices determine the outcome of the game with different final bosses and various other things.
Play-testing showed me the experience was still highly chaotic as every wave would throw something entirely new at you. The player never had time to get to know an enemy as it would mostly only appear once and then never again. So instead of per wave I now make the choice of peon on a level basis. There are 7 levels. Each level specifies 2 new peon types that can appear. So in a full run you will only encounter 14 different peons (not entirely true). This seems to be a fairly good solution, but it will need some balancing and testing for sure.
img desc: The gray creatures spawn the blue pulsating stationary explosive creatures. It can get out of hand when your main damage dealer is blocked by the outer ring, as is the case here. (fixed)
Besides the peons I had also created a huge amount of creatures I call grunts. These beasts are much larger and more menacing. To include them into the game I again used the seeded random information I had defined for each wave. Only waves without mini-bosses or bosses can spawn grunts and when one appears it reduces the amount of peons that can be spawned. It's pretty straight forward and should work nicely, but certainly needs some balancing and testing.
Power-Ups
Power-ups in Devader have been very straight forward. There is hardly a reason not to pick them up, there is not much of a choice going on. Weapon power-ups stack and you get the rewards from both while they last. Power-Ups have limited ammo, it was my way of trying to make it a good idea to preserve them by not shooting. I don't think it really does, or at least it does not work on me. As picking up power-ups is a no brainer, it's not really interesting. To make things worse not having power-ups kind of sucks, as you feel a lot less powerful. If you get destroyed you lose them all so it's quite troubling. To mitigate this, I added a new feature. When you lose your bot the power-ups you are carrying are blown out and you get the chance to pick them back up. I started off by allowing weapon power-ups to be retrieved and eventually added HP + SP to the list. HP and SP add +1 capacity to health and shields.
It makes dying less punishing, but also gives you the choice of taking additional risk to retrieve what you have lost or to accept the loss. In a multi player game your allies will have to go in and collect your stuff as respawning takes a bit of time. I have not tested it yet though.
HP is special in Devader. There is a container you can pick up and it restores all your health. If you are at full health you get +1 HP-capacity. It's pretty valuable to get the latter, but if you just lose a bit of HP you miss out. You can restore HP by grazing bullets and picking it up later, but sometimes there are no bullets. My above changes lead to destroyed HP containers leaving the same remnants as if you had just lost your robot. So a destroyed container no longer restores your full HP but gives you +1 HP capacity. I noticed while playing that I sometimes rather waited for the containers to get destroyed as it was more beneficial. But waiting is not really fun. Soooo... I decided to make containers destructible for the player. This was actually something that was in the game right at the start, but at the time it didnt really work. Now it makes it a lot more interesting.
Linux issues
On a different note I received some linux-customer feedback and one player (maybe 2) have an issue with gamepad on Linux. It seems like this is not something that I am directly causing and assume it's a problem with webkit. Main issue is that I've made a huge amount of changes to the game and I am not in the most balanced of versions right now. Nonetheless after plugging through all of the above I decided to make a new version. Windows went fine, but the Linux version did not work off the bat. Turns out my older laptop no longer can run the game, due to the fact that I now have a 8192x8192 texture atlas and no longer 4096x4096. Turns out 4096 was the upper limit... So now what do I do? I currently only see one option, if it's supposed to work on older hard-ware and that is recalculating the texture atlas for every level. AAAAARGH. Not something I want to do as it will cause delays. I have no idea what can be expected from most peoples hard-ware.
Debug Build
If you want to see what I am working on, switch to the Alpha branch! There a hundreds of changes that no one besides myself has tested. There is a new robot, that might not ever be included but it's in there now and can be tested. No explanations/tutorials I am afraid. Expect some things to break or not be good. Feedback appreciated.
Discord: https://discord.gg/AWhsvN3
Just Joking! Devader won't become an RTS!
Looks like my last post (1. April) was taken seriously. To be frank there have not been many sales since (not that there were many before). I've been working on some pretty crazy stuff, but it will take some time for me to get them release-ready.
I started a small side-project that I hope will allow me to make more interesting bullet-pattern-designs for new enemies and bosses.
Then I got slightly side-tracked by this bullet-pattern-designer and started creating a small prototype for a relaxing, playful game that's actually nearly finished after not even two weeks of work. short video of the current state
Devader will transition to RTS
Devader has been out since September last year and sales have not lived up to what I was hoping for. So I've taken steps to make the best of the situation and will be converting Devader into an RTS. I have quite a few assets already made and the basic prototype works and synchronizes for a current max of 3 players.
February Update VI
It's not often you get to post an update on a leap day, I'm rather impressed with myself for pulling it off.
I've made a few updates to Devader. Some minor bug fixes and enemy adaptations. Most noticeable could be: - the menu is less "jumpy" when using a controller, it now requires you to move the stick a bit further. - recalling turrets/switching into hedgehog mode is now game-speed independent. You can lower the recall/switching time under Gamepad->Recall Warden. (I've just made a note for myself, that this option should be under Gameplay and be called "Turret Action") - if you lower the game speed (or increase it) sound effects for shots and explosions will also be played at the changed speed. When you die, time slows down for a bit and you might notice this change there too. - I've made a redesign of some destructible bullets, they now have a black outline and a colorful core
Today Devader received it's first negative review. I'm kind of sad, but also a bit excited? Better some feedback than just a refund. I would really love to resolve the issue described by the reviewer, but I don't really understand the problem. So far I have not been able to make contact.
I'm working on an updated trailer for Devader, with some new footage. I am interested to hear what you think. I still need to make a better recording for the "play with friends" bit. Currently just AI players and it looks a bit bland. [previewyoutube="S3Z2iqYNOJ0;full"]
February Update V
So I am going a little crazy on the updates right now... Sorry? Watching TravelDemon destroy Deity using turrets made me question a few of my balance choices again. At launch there was a sort of soft limiter to the turrets, as going down that path would remove all weapons from the Devader. Players didn't like it, but I stuck with it for quite some time. It did prevent the turrets from getting out of hand though.
Without the soft limit, turrets in masses can get crazy strong and I see no reason why they could not just dominate pretty much every path I've designed. This is not what I want, as I believe this could prevent players from trying out different strategies. I've had a solution up my sleeve for quite some time, but I did not really want to do it. The more turrets are on the field, the less damage every individual turret does. If you have less than 4 turrets, they will actually do a bit more damage than they did in the previous build (this might help out people who think turrets are bad, or if you have lost most of them). Every turret above 4 will be a little less efficient. A big bunch of turrets will still wreck most enemies, but it will slow down killing bosses and give them a bit more time to deal damage. I think it will hardly be noticeable for most players, but I hope it will improve the experience and make handling a large amount of turrets more interesting.
I've also taken (yet another) look at some of the most brutal waves, e.g. Deru on Deity was (and still is) pretty insane. I've reduced shot-speed a little, depending on how many Deru are still around. This will give a better dodge-reaction-chance.
Legolos now has 3 tentacles on Deity, seemed easier than the Hard version and I had to fix that.
February Update IV
After talking to the new record holder TravelDemon and finding out he plays on Linux, I just had to update the Linux build today. Along with that I made a small update to the Upgrade UI, hoping this will lead some players down my intended upgrade paths.
The explosives spawned by Centipedos now slightly pulsate, I hope this will make them a bit easier to spot, without completely changing the visuals. I tried using alternate colors, but did not like the result.
If you want to check out TravelDemon's deathless Deity run: [previewyoutube="REDiE2ppNzk;full"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REDiE2ppNzk[/previewyoutube]
February Update III
First of all: TravelDemon totally destroyed all previous high-scores. Looks like even Deity mode was no match for the demon. I'm impressed to say the least.
I've added some engine-noise to the tank, so far it was silent. You probably wont notice it, unless you turn down the music though. Still, I felt like it was something that was missing. I fixed an issue with the final boss on the score path. The tentacles were not getting created anymore due to an optimization I made in an earlier patch. Ups. Not game-breaking, but the boss was a lot less interesting and a lot easier because of this. Don't think anyone noticed though?
I'm still working on a new batch of enemies, to make each run even more diverse and interesting. This creature looks pretty cool, but I need to come up with an interesting mechanic/attack pattern still. If you have any ideas, I would gladly hear them :)
One reason for the new creatures is that I want to make the game more visually captivating. I'm not that happy with my current trailer (it's pretty outdated) and would like to have more weird creatures.
Only updated Windows for the time being.
February Update II
I mentioned reworking the "Tank" Devader in the last update. The tank received a new rocket launcher and is now much more viable, as you can do damage from a long distance. It's still hard to handle, but it's no longer just a gimmick. I managed to get the third highest score on Deity using the tank. Currently I hold all three Deity high scores, I hope this will change.
The rocket launcher was the second special upgrade on the "Protect" branch. Taking it was a pretty easy solution for the tank. I first felt like I could get away with just moving the remaining special upgrade up a notch. Lazy solution. But.... it did not feel right, so I had to come up with something. The new upgrade comes with a pretty drastic change to the Blinker (no more Hedgehog mode) and a less invasive one for the Warden. I hope you like the new challenge.
I did make a few other changes, but nothing too drastic.
Good news everyone: Linux build was updated this time!
February Update
- waves will no longer endlessly spawn foes, if key enemies are not destroyed - hp of some enemies reduced - added some more info text - bullet grazing visualized (+audio) only on bullets that can be grazed - a few additional enemies on Easy - some small visual changes to a few enemies - small fixes
Currently just Windows, will be adding a Linux update soon.
