It’s a great weekend for gaming so to that end, we just dropped the price of Colony Defense down to $4.95! Also, sign up for our newsletter for a chance to win a Mana Bomb T-Shirt!

Enjoy!
Dan

We just received word that Colony Defense for the XBOX 360 is now available on Xbox Live Indie Games! On your 360 dashboard, head over to the Game Marketplace -> Indie Games. You can also download it direct to your 360 by visiting the XBOX Live Marketplace here!.

Give it a “spin” and let us know what you think!

Dan

“A familiar premise, but Mana Bomb makes a truly fun game that will keep you on your toes…” – Cody Toothman, Gamezombie.tv 8/10

“…tower defense in 360 degrees is an innovation I can get behind!” – Tyler Treat, Bravenewgamer.com 7/10

Colony Defense for the PC is now live! We are excited to have achieved this major milestone. Thank you all for your input during the course of development. Your suggestions have helped to shape the game into what it is today. We hope you have as much fun playing Colony Defense as we did in developing it.

Purchase the game using the links on the right, or download the demo here!

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

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

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

Enjoy!
Dan

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