Well if it isn’t cliche to write about “how busy we’ve been” or “how the holiday’s keep us from getting real work done” then it should be. I won’t do that to you, so if you want to hear that go read all the other blogs doing that.

On to the exciting stuff…. We’re in talks with publishers right now to get Colony Defense out there to the masses. HOOORAY!!

You know what that means? Aside from some last minute bug squashing, Colony Defense is DONE!!!! So keep your fingers crossed for us, and hopefully you’ll be able to pick up Colony Defense very very soon from your favorite digital distribution platform. It may be a couple of months behind our target, but we’re not pulling a Blizzard here, months does not equal years. I hope your holidays were great, but I’m holding out for Christmas in January this year.

-Jason

I wound up putting a major upgrade in visuals and playability in the game play UI. I’ll try and get a screen shot up soon but the meat and potatoes of it is that now the tower cost shows on the “build tower” buttons. If it’s white text, your good to go without having to do any math and if it’s red, you don’t have enough credits, yen, clams, or dollars to purchase the tower. This is not something we invented! As a matter of fact, it is such an obvious thing to do, I’m embarrassed we didn’t think to do it sooner. Meh. The graphics have been boosted a LOT as well and it really does all mesh to give a much better game play experience. Can’t wait to show it off!

Oh yeah…. all, ALL, AAALLLL of the planets are done. 34 of those bad boys. We are getting close folks!

Well, it’s been so long since my last post I figured I would let everyone know what is happening in Colony Defense land. We are now about halfway done with textures for all the planets and paths. There are 34 levels in total so this is a pretty big deal.

Also, we have changed up the way you advance through the campaign. At first we were giving the player access to every tower type in the game from the beginning. This had the side effect of making some of the earlier levels to easy for experienced players and also too confusing for players new to the genre. You now unlock tower types as you progress through the campaign and I think it plays out a lot better now.

I know I’ve said it before, but hopefully we can get a new video out soon to show off some of the amazing progress we’re making.

Until next time,
Dan

When we first started this game, I knew that sound was going to be a major milestone, and I was afraid. I spent a great deal of time worrying about it in fact. I began lurking in game development audio forums looking for inspiration and above all, HELP! That is where I met Daniel. He had a post up offering to help out on audio for those that needed it. I contacted him and long story short, sound and music is now complete!

We communicated goals and ideas entirely via email. I know that sounds like a crazy way to discuss audio but I think it turned out very cool. When you are specifying audio requirements via email, your typing things like, “initial very short crackle to simulate a charge followed by metallic shrawng”. Whats awesome is, the stuff we would get back from him would either be dead on or even better than what we had in our heads. We weren’t polluting his ears by having any audible cues as a base line. It was really fun to get audio builds in and then grin the whole time listening to them. We are totally glad to have worked with him, and we wish him all the success he’s due.
Thanks Daniel!

Here is some contact info for Daniel. If you need some audio work done, you owe it to yourself to contact him.
Daniel Gooding
contact@danielgooding.me

Until next time!
Dan out

Hey! We added a few new screen shots for your viewing pleasure.

Enjoy!
Dan

We’ve had our noses to the grindstone completely these last few weeks. A demo is incredibly close to release. Stay tuned.

So I haven’t posted in a few days. There is a good reason, I assure you. Among about fifty other things, I’ve been laser focused on getting my planets looking good. The biggest problem I’ve come up with is how to compress the normal maps and have them still look good. For those who care, here is what I’m doing now.
Use a DTX5 compression / format for the surface format of the texture. I know, I know, this leaves artifacts galore. Now, change your normal mapping shaders to re-normalize the texture lookup values. I went from “your moms so ugly…” to “Wow.. she’s hot” in one line of shader code. Also, my file sizes went from 16 megs with NO mip maps to 5.4 megs WITH mip maps.

I think I’m happy.

Dan

I’ve have a banner weekend polishing up Colony Defense. Everything was smooth sailing except for one little thing. I could not get XACT to act the way I thought it should when trying to fade out a music track. As it turns out, the way I thought it would work was way off base. It’s really pretty simple and I’m posting this in hopes that someone else will get some use out of it. When you create a music category, limit it’s instance to 1. Set the fade in and out times to whatever you want. Now, in code, just play a piece of music any time you want. If a track is currently playing it will “automagically” fade out and the new music will fade in. Where I was getting tripped up was I kept stopping the current track before I played the next one. This gave the effect of an abrupt stop on the current track and an immediate, full volume start of the new track. Other than doing some RPC variable craziness, the way this works turns out to be a very nice way of not having to worry about whats currently playing. It “just works”.

Dan

I’m spending the day getting the talent point system in place. I thought it might be a good idea to share what we’ve come up with so far so here goes.

So, you can get up to two talent points per level if you can keep all the planets population safe. You will be able to fill up the entire tree if you can keep ALL your population intact for the whole game. Good luck with that by the way.

The talents are divided up into four distinct tracks. Each talent in a track can be upgraded a maximum of five times. You will need to max out the first item in a track before you can reach the next.
Track 1

Track 2

Track 3

Track 4

So there you have it. These values are what we are starting with and may / will get changed during out play testing. But at least you can see where we are headed.

Dan