Tau Defense
1.1 Anniversary Update
It has been a year since Dofense was released.
Thanks to everyone who purchased and played the game. It hasn't reached wider audience, but I'm glad it has reached at least a few.
I have read your feedback over the past year about the difficulty. As I spent past year working on Gods of Defense, I've developed better understanding of game design. I wanted to address the frustration that players felt when they were stuck in the early stages of Dofense.
In the 1.1 update, I've added a progressive hint mechanism for all the main campaign levels. Every time you fail, a new hint will be presented about the strategy to adopt. After 2-3 failures you will be presented with screenshots of partial solutions. If you still keep failing a screenshot of the full solution will be available eventually. These hints are now available for the 27 levels that introduce you to the core devices of the gameplay. The Mission battles are for you to solve on your own without any hints.
There are also some minor UI updates, e.g. explanatory tooltips.
While working on this update I got a chance to replay Dofense after a long time. I really enjoyed playing it again. I really think the puzzle-solving nature combined with Tower Defense offers a unique experience. Not to mention the full-fledged level editor. I hope more players discover it. Therefore, I wanted to reduce the frustration that was causing some players to give up too early and miss the juicy parts.
Hope this will help.
And yes, you can now purchase Dofense as part of "Defense Instinct" bundle at a 10% discount. This will be a great addition to your game library.
Do let me know what you think.
Thanks,
Cheers!
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New mission with 3 new levels
New mission with 5 levels
Just added a new mission with 5 levels. They all look similar but have very different solutions.
Enjoy!
v1.0.13 - Bug fixes
- Changed the achievement grant code to address some errors
- Fixed a failure when demon hand destroys a tower that's about to relocate
- Fixed possible causes for duplicate enemy deaths
- Fixed a fatal crash that was caused when an enemy carrying core was stranded and then killed
Dev plays workshop levels
I'll be playing the new levels that players have submitted to the workshop. You can watch me loose at my own game ːsteammockingː
Out of Early access
The wait is finally over. Dofense is now ready and released.
Thank you everyone who bought the game in Early Access. With your feedback in the past 6 months, the game has improved a lot. Your purchase was a vote of confidence that was very encouraging for a first time Indie developer. I hope you will enjoy Dofense.
Since the last release a month ago, the following key things have changed.
Campaign
The newly designed Campaign differs in structure from the past. Before, the levels were organized in separate sectors. It was mainly done to manage the crystal count. The new approach organizes the levels in a branched structure so that you get to play levels with a wide range of crystal counts - from 0 to 100. It has been designed in such a way that at any time you will have several levels to choose from, in case you get stuck at one particular level. There are total 69 levels. These were shortlisted from over hundred levels that were available during the early access phase. The ones that didn't make the cut are now released on the workshop via my personal account.
Also note that, because the structure of the campaign has changed, the game progress had to be reset. So you will have to play some levels again if you played them before. There's a good reason to play them again because many of them have been revised and some of them now carry achievements.
Achievements
In the past week I've added 17 achievements. These will be awarded for achieving goals of different difficulties. I very much enjoyed designing the icons for each of them. They also give the opportunity to coax the player to explore the aspects of the gameplay that they may not have thought of before.
Performance improvement
The path finding library needed some performance tweaks to handle certain situations. The changes have made a visible difference in the overall frame rate.
I'm very happy that Dofense is finally released after such a long history of development. I look forward to adding more updates in the future. For now, I'm going to decompress and listen to your feedback.
Thanks again and hope you will enjoy Dofense.
Cheers!
Devlog: Campaign design
Just wanted to give a quick update.
The game is in the last stretch of the development. Past two weeks I've been focused on the Campaign design. All the playtime for designing the levels has helped me catch some rare bugs and I'm feeling good about the Level Editor.
Here are some details about the new Campaign
- It will have somewhere between 65 to 70 levels
- It won't be divided into three sectors like before, instead there will be a single path of level progression
- The progression is organized so that you will be able to play levels at different crystal balance, from 0 to 100. At high crystal levels you get to see real power of the towers.
- There will be a central track where each new level will introduce you to a new mechanic. This track will have branches that will lead to missions. This is where you will get to play some fun levels.
- Any levels that were available before, but dropped from the campaign will be available in Steam workshop through my personal account. So you can still play them.
I expect the release will happen sometime in the month of May.
Have a good weekend.
v0.14.0 - Lips, Nose and more levels
I wanted to create new artwork to have a consistent theme for different bosses. In that spirit, here is the new artwork for the Healer and the Overseer bosses.
The healing is done with a Kiss of Health!
Nothing more to say. You will have to play to see it.
...and the overseer (eye in the sky), is now spawned from a congested nose.
Can't wait to hear what you think!
New Content
- Introducing Sector 3. This sector will be a bunch of levels that you can play in any order. Each one will have a preset crystal count. In addition, these levels may have additional restrictions. For e.g., only certain tower kinds will be permitted or certain executive actions will be locked out. So the levels in this sector will be challenge problems that can be played in any order. At this moment only one level is available. More are in the oven!
- A lot of new levels in Sector 2. Total level count across all sectors: 82. More are on the way.
Other changes
- Updated the color scheme of the Demon hand.
- Low level performance optimization to reduce memory churn
- Added sacrifice animation for all enemies, as them jump into the Healing lips or the running Nose.
- Added "Edit" button to the pause menu, so you can launch an editor for any level. (builtin, workshop or sandbox).
- Added constraint editing support in Level editor (the kind of constraints that you will see in Sector 3)
- Minor improvements to the SFX for the tower interaction, continuing the soft-pop theme from the last build
- When you used to select a tower, the camera used to move to bring that tower at the center of the view. This was a bit annoying, especially if you clicked on a tower unintentionally. Removed that behaviour.
- improvements to the Sandbox UI loading time
- Increased the resolution of map preview in loadout panel
- The entries in the Sandbox UI are now sorted in newest-first order
- Added a small panel to the gate status (the one that you see when you hover over the gate), which shows the kinds of enemies to expect in the level.
- Fixed some bugs that might have prevented spawning of diggers in some levels, upon repeat play-through
- Bug fix for any lingering tower spoils
- Fixes to level editor, so that dragging of certain widgets makes consistent changes to the terrain.
Most of the coding and artwork tasks are done for 1.0 release. Now my focus is on the level design.
Have a great weekend!
v0.13.1
- Fixed the workflow of what happens after you finish playing a workshop level. (now you go back to the workshop browser)
- Improved the sound fx for tower interaction. Added pleasant "pop" audio fx for tower build actions
- changed music files to mp3 format, with huge reduction in size on disk
- Fixed a bug that was causing diggers not getting spawned in certain cases
- Tower selection ring visibility was fixed. It used to disappear in some cases when relocating
- Removed some artificial delay in UI, making it feel snappy
- Fixed tab button color changes
- Fixed spike damage FX. When enemy has shield intact, the splatter FX is not supposed to be visible
- 3 new levels in Sector 2
v0.13.0 - Steam Workshop support, New levels
The Steam Workshop support is now in!
You can publish your custom maps to the Steam Workshop right from the map editor. You just have to hit the "Publish" button.
You can also play the maps that others have created and published to the Workshop. You just have to subscribe to them and they will appear under the "Workshop" tab in the Sandbox.
The Sandbox browser was upgraded during these changes. It now shows thumbnail previews of the maps, making it super convenient to browse through your custom levels.
There might be some small issues, which I will fix in next few days.
Among other changes:
- 10 new levels. With these additions, Sector 1 now has 50 levels. More are on the way.
- Implemented jump visual FX for enemies when they move quickly to side cells as a tower is built upon them. This gives some sense of continuation to their movement.
- Fixed a bug that had broken Ghost spawning in previous build
- Added simple water ripple effect when enemies are wading through water.
I'm having lot of fun designing new levels. Let me know how you like the newly added levels.
Take care!