...in a small village in Somerset, away from the ravages of the monster, life carries on as normal.
Well, almost normal. I've now migrated entirely to Linux Mint XFCE from Windows, which is a bit of a system shock to say the least, but let's not go in to that...
So what's going on now?
New Discord Server
We have a new Discord server for everyone. The old "vanity URL" Discord server is lost, and Discord simply ignored my support requests. They are absolutely useless. ...
2024-02-11 18:17:37 +0000 UTC
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EDIT: tl;dr - new temporary Puppygames Discord here.
Unfortunately we fell for a crafty ruse last night, the end result of which was completely losing control of our Discord servers (both private and public ones), and the total loss of my Discord account. (I say "we", but really, "I" fell for it).
Unfortunately this means the hacker is now masquerading as me on Discord, and Discord support are 100% useless at de...
2024-01-27 12:29:32 +0000 UTC
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So... we've finally released a private alpha test of Battledroid for you to have a blast on! This was entirely helped by my unfortunate situation (see footnote below).
This is genuinely an alpha test - there are unknown bugs, and known bugs, and a large part of the content of the game - like most of the units and so on - aren't in the alpha, while we concentrate on just making sure all the basic things are working properly as expected without any complicated cleverfangled thing...
2022-01-04 20:31:18 +0000 UTC
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Just in case you thought we had all died of the 'rona, you will be extra pleased to discover that we are very much alive and kicking, and we've been working hard all this time on Skirmish!
Apologies for the giant download that this post is, as animated gifs are pretty huge. If only Patreon wasn't so utterly archaic and horrible to use we'd have embedded video instead, but alas, it is truly ston...
2021-06-24 12:29:59 +0000 UTC
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Minions! Swivel your ghastly gazes Steamward and behold the terrible beauty of our latest Faerie Solitaire title.
It's in Early Access right now because Brian has a whole bunch of things he is going to add over the next few weeks, but we wanted to get the core gameplay out there for the great unwashed to test out.
It's a lot more hardcore than 2020-09-07 20:35:13 +0000 UTC
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What? A new game? What about the old game? Well, these are the emperor's new clothes, baby. We're taking the humongous pile of awesome code that we've so far developed for the horribly ambitious Battledroid MMOG, and using the juiciest bits to make a standalone single-player skirmish experience, with just the bit where you get to blow robots to pieces.
It's still a battle simulation - all hands-off, you just get to place your robots - but it's single player vs. increas...
2020-07-17 16:21:19 +0000 UTC
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Guess what! There's a beta test of Glitchangels ready for you to try out! Paul says this about it:
There's 20 levels, and 2 boss fights.
Some progression / stuff to unlock.
Needs lots of testing and balancing.
Needs achievements.
Needs content adding - apps / cosmetics / glitches / shop to be expanded
Needs pol...
2020-06-24 22:46:27 +0000 UTC
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It has, as usual, been too long since we last did an update! And, as usual, a picture is worth 1000 words, so let's have a few gifs to show off some of the things we've made in the last couple of months.
Little guys
Here we can see some tiny little tripedal units. The "tiny" chassis size only occupies a quarter of a game map tile - 8x8 voxels at most. They are wiped out instantly by just about anything that hits them or even steps on them, but each one can carry a blast...
2020-04-22 13:29:38 +0000 UTC
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Actual concrete progress! Here we can see four different sizes of battledroid, all staring into the sun. Dotted around them are a couple of buildings, the first ones implemented so far - the bigger ones are reactors, and the smaller ones are scanners.
Reactors are used to augment damage. When turrets are placed near a...
2020-02-28 16:15:37 +0000 UTC
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Is your brew of tea steaming before you? Has it stewed for the obligatory duration of three of your Earth minutes? Then let us continue... on to the car crash bit.
So What Went Wrong?
Toolchain
Alas, it turns out Unity is a honey trap for artists and developers. It makes a few things that are tediously difficult suddenly really very easy - "make this animated 3D model appear here and move there" is something that ...
2020-02-03 21:29:02 +0000 UTC
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What is Basingstoke?
Basingstoke is a mediocre post-war town in southern England, in the heart of what passes for Silicon Valley in our wretched island. It's just like California, honestly, only without the sun, or the money.
It is also a stealth action game that was made by us, being Puppygames, and the game is all about escaping from the eponymous town in the dead of night following an unfortunate scientific accident that triggers an invasion by the Titans, and kills eve...
2020-01-27 21:13:25 +0000 UTC
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Well, here we are at the end of 2019. I've posted in a while because I've been dead busy on all the things. Some of the fruits of our labour are shown in that little video clip above.
That's the current state of Battledroid, that is (unfortunately YouTube has compressed it rather a lot). We've got the Voxoid engine working fully within the Battledroid UI. Just today I ironed out the last of the memory leaks. As a quick recap, here's where we were two years ago:
2019-12-20 12:34:10 +0000 UTC
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Super Attack Programmer Dan was working feverishly away on the model rendering code in Voxoid over the weekend. He appears to be mostly nocturnal. Let's have a peek at his incoherent ramblings, muttered into the void of Discord as he worked...
18:58pm
Dan: I think the bare minimum to get something rendered in the spanking new model handler is done. I've got Voxel model support added, but no shader made yet. I still have to fix Voxoid so it does the threading rig...
2019-09-10 21:41:11 +0000 UTC
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Good grief, I've left it far too long to post stuff. But that's because we've been busy, doing exciting things. There's been lots of progress on Battledroid! And without further ado, here are those lovely graphics that Chaz has been making for the game which I mentioned in the last post.
1. Full scale battle! Kill, my pretties! Kill!
2. Beam weapon demonstration. Tha...
2019-09-06 23:07:50 +0000 UTC
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I spent my time this month getting Puppygames more lean. Over the last 10 years we had accumulated quite a lot of ongoing costs, some of which now have better, cheaper, alternatives and essentially we could find better ways to spend that hard-earned money you guys have been sending us.
So that that end... we've ditched Autodesk 3D Studio Max and Chaz has been learning Blender, with great results. Blender is free!
We've ditched Adobe Creative Studio and al...
2019-07-23 14:05:18 +0000 UTC
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Nearing completion of the bulk of the particle stuff in the Voxoid engine for Battledroid. We've got two types of particles so far... the usual billboard particles that face the camera which are what everyone uses, and voxel particles! They're cubes! I think they need a cool name like "vorticles", or maybe "poxels". What do you think?
The poxels have both diffuse and emissive ...
2019-06-12 20:26:22 +0000 UTC
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Hello Patroids!
Now you've all stuck around for a good while I think it's time we started giving back as much as we can. As of now, every Patreon supporter has access to all of our games!
We've retired the stingy $1 reward tier, "The Great Unwashed", and we're going to try and attract a bunch more of the Golden Throne and Ultraminions. Somehow. Ideas on a postcard hidden in a bin outside Omni-mart plz.
If you're on the $1 tier, you're still our supporter, an...
2019-05-16 12:25:06 +0000 UTC
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Much effort has gone into the terrain generator and Voxoid rendering engine in the past month! As you can see from the scene above, we've got depth-of-field into the scene, and there's some actual bump mapping finally correctly applied to the correct coloured voxels, particularly noticeable on the rocks highlighted by the mouse light there.
How Does It All Fit Together?
We've got the rocky cliff formations sorted to our liking - still some room for improvement but...
2019-04-05 09:55:00 +0000 UTC
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Do you know, I've been working on Battledroid now for 8 years. I measure its development time by noting the advancing years of my eldest daughter. She was 2 when I started it. She's now 10. She cannot remember a time in her entire life that I wasn't making Battledroid.
It's been in development for so long that bits of it have been slowly crumbling away, in the same way that finished products that need supporting will gradually crumble and need ...
2019-02-05 14:40:30 +0000 UTC
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So I've now started to be able to work on Battledroid again! Still only part-time but much more time than before. Fruits are already being borne of this labour! Multi-threaded fruits, at that, the most complicated and difficult to comprehend of all fruits.
One thing that all games do when the start up is load a bunch of resources in. Most games take a fair amount of time doing this, because they have a lot of resources to load. Most games try and do some sort of animat...
2019-01-13 11:58:12 +0000 UTC
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So... I got a bit caught up with things being hectic at work and haven't had a lot of free time to do fun stuff like blogs. Hence a two-month hiatus. However, what little time I've had, has been put to good use.
Here are the things wot we have been up to.
Battledroid
The voxel engine for Battledroid, "Voxoid", is... finished! It now does all the things. It draws models, it does shadows, it does vast numbers of particles (that are lit), we've got effectively unlimited poi...
2018-11-22 12:13:21 +0000 UTC
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More WIP droid animation tests from Chaz. Trying out various different sizes of battledroid from small to medium.
We're having to rethink the tiny footprint robots a bit... in the "original" Revenge of the Titans, "gidlets" and "droids" were these tiny little units that were so small that they could just slip through barriers and they could walk through occupied tiles and each other with impunity. In 2D you can get away with this and it looks perfectly fine. In 3D, when stuff starts to walk th...
2018-08-17 13:05:56 +0000 UTC
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Thought you'd like to see this :) Just rough testing done by Chaz to test out how the robots might be animated while walking etc.
2018-08-14 11:37:30 +0000 UTC
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Many moons ago we were making a game called Treasure Tomb. This was way back when we were still using our slightly weird square 320x320 window resolution format for games.
Treasure Tomb eventually didn't happen - largely because my life was a total and utter trainwreck at the time due to a nasty divorce and we didn't really focus properly for a few years. We decided at the time that we should stop work on it and try and turn it into something a little quicker to make (Treasure...
2018-08-09 10:25:34 +0000 UTC
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Cas: voxels!
(bumpmapped voxels!)
Dan: exam + cold
don't expect much until the 20th
Cas: snif snif
snot covered voxels!
Dan: do you want to see my pile of snot papers?
lol
Cas: only if they're made from voxels
Dan: atoms OK?
they're like small voxels.
Cas: not square enough
Dan: dammit what's th...
2018-08-06 11:41:05 +0000 UTC
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Cas: mornin
Dan: I'm stuck in a sleep/eat/schoolwork cycle...
Cas: feck 😦
we going to have something to show on Friday?
Dan: I should have some time to work on the SSAO tonight.
I'm not sure what you'd call showable
Most of the stuff we have are technical improvements.
Cas: that's ok so long as we can talk about it
besides if you get the SSAO working wi...
2018-08-03 11:54:14 +0000 UTC
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Dan: Fucking skype mining bitcoins
Cas: bitcoins!?
Dan: How else do you make a chat app use 100% CPU on 5 out of 8 cores?
Seriously
Discord uses less CPU power while focused than skype does in the background
Anyway...
I'll add GPU profiling and finish my optimizations when I get home
Should be home 14-ish
Cas: cool. Don't be scared of the massive refactor ??
there's more to come ...
2018-07-31 15:43:52 +0000 UTC
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25th November 2017
Cas: voxels!
Dan: Been busy the entire day and that doesn't seem to be changing very soon...
Cas: booo
Dan: booo indeed
27th November
Brian: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/380372019251773444/384622340...
2018-07-25 10:24:21 +0000 UTC
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23rd November 2017
Cas: hola
Dan: harro
Cas: SSAO!
if I have time tonight I might try to design some more reasonable rocks & floor voxes
Dan: I'll try to get SSAO working
I'll try reconstructing the normal from the depth buffer
I think it'll be good enough and will avoid us having to write out the normal during the forward pass
Cas: can the normals...
2018-07-24 17:56:08 +0000 UTC
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So finally Chaz has started to have a look at how Battledroid might look. Right now he's experimenting with voxel editing tools - the one you can see there in the screenshot is MagicVoxel.
We're figuring out how to join bits of rocks and such together to make nice scenery. Starting with canyon / desert scenery, which seems to be a nice fit. Those wee robots there aren't mobs, just pretending to be scenery for scale comparison.
I had a bit of an idea for you Patroids... who would be inter...
2018-07-04 00:01:11 +0000 UTC
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