After many fevered, sweaty nights here in warm and humid Somerset, and probably a similar story over in Madrid where Chaz has been holed up for the last few months, I flicked the switch on FRAPS and the monster twitched into life. Behold! Some dingy low-quality video footage of the early stages of what will soon become Revenge of the Titans!
I’m afraid this is a fairly simple and benign level (level 9 in fact) so it’s not the most exciting level to watch. The game story progresses through five worlds – starting on Earth, which is basically the tutorial, and on to the Moon, then Mars, Saturn, and finally Titan itself. The background story is how Earth is launching a major offensive on the pesky Titans, and has to gradually secure each planet on the way in order to send the invasion fleet on to the next location.
On Earth, you essentially learn the ropes. Revenge of the Titans is quintessentially a real-time strategy game, based on the tower defence mechanic. At every step of the way from the beginning of the level you have to balance two opposing priorities:
- Do you look around and survey the map, or just get building right away?
- Do you build factories first and get production ramped up, or do you start by building defences?
- Do you manage your factories or keep an eye on your turrets’ ammunition?
- Do you build lots of little guns, or do you place just a few and enhance them with auxilliary buildings?
and so on.
The main differences between Revenge of the Titans and other tower-defence games are, as you may be able to just about tell from the video, that the gidrahs advance in an entirely freeform way, and your turrets once placed cannot be “upgraded”. Each alien has its own little brain trying to figure out the best route to get to your base (or whatever other building it may decide to attack… they get strategical on the later levels…). If a route looks pretty congested, they’ll start finding alternative routes and you can find yourself unexpectedly flanked.
The turrets are not directly upgradeable. This is a common theme in other tower defence games, but we’ve got a new mechanic. Instead you place a variety of little but expensive buildings down nearby them to augment their powers. Scanners increase their range; batteries increase their ammunition capacity; cooling towers increase their fire rate; reactors increase their reload speed. Some buildings have dual purposes. Reactors will, for example, increase the speed that factories produce money; they also increase the damage of capacitors, a manually-aimed weapon not shown in the video because I’m still coding the special effects for it. Shield generators can be popped down in later levels to give nearby buildings extra hitpoints. And you can lay minefields of different sorts and barricades of varying strength. And decoys to lure the gidrahs away from your valuable buildings!
All the while the game is automatically tuning itself to your abilities. Hopefully everyone will get just enough challenge to have fun. I’m trying to get it just right so that everyone can enjoy playing the game but really good players will score massive points.
I’m also thinking that the demo players who score the most points in a single game over a seven day period might just be getting themselves a free game. For all our titles. How’s about that for a bit of competition? Play to win a free copy 🙂
A tower defense RTS in the Puppy-retro style? Oooh – I can’t wait for this one!
Bless you.
A Puppyish TD Game?
I am all about it.
Bring on the demo, I’m feverish.
I’m LOOKING FORWARD TO REVENGE OF THE TITANS.
~
and the demo comp.
Looks awesome, can’t wait to see it arrive on my desktop in a shiny icon packed full of shooty goodness
Saw the video for this at The Word of Notch blog. This looks pretty damn good, I hope you don’t change it too much as it looks fantastic the way it is.
Brilliant!
One question – how can you have bases on Saturn? Isn’t it just a big ball of gas?
Bought the others, will buy this, all your games are excellent.
Cheers
Stephan
http://twitter.com/codemonkeyism
Incredibly looks really goo & interesting (~ get interested about the different support buildings) 🙂
Hopefully we will see it still this year + I’am into the mentioned competition (lets see if there are different ways to get a higher score through bonus points) ^^
Another one to add to my collection, methinks 🙂
You guys did an awesome job.
Polished, cool, frenzy, packed with a bit more of RTS elements if compared with others TD games around, all with your inimitable touch of retro-style.
I’m not a real TD genre fan, but I’m considering to buy this one. Mac OS love ASAP, please. 🙂
Looking forward! 😉
Really excited about this release. Loved the quality of your previous games, and the sharp visual style. I enjoy the occassional RTS game too, so you can count me in for this one.
Don’t mention Saturn 😉
… I think we’ll probably have floating buildings.
any news??
Just one question, to play the game is it mandatory to be connected to the Internet of I can play it on a stand alone mode without internet connection???
BTW, the demo is good and the trailer is awesome, if you can provide a link to the complete song of the trailer you will have my gratitude
You don’t need to be connected to play – only to download 🙂
For all those liking the music, it’s by Dave Sunerton-Burl / Dave S-B… http://www.myspace.com/davesbsounds
There’s no soundtrack yet, but we’re getting lots of requests, so maybe Dave will be able to sort something out.
I should clarify the connection thing – you don’t need to be connected to play…
You do though need to be connected to register the game!…
… or at least I think so, I’m not sure if there’s a way to transfer a registered copy to an offline computer. Cas can clear this up when he gets back from holiday next week.
Yes, at least with the demo, (in gnu/Linux) everytime I tried to play it I see that something is being downloaded. So I wanted to be sure is if once I have bought, downloaded and registered the game, I would need an internet connection to be able to play it.
OK, since the game is still under development, future downloads will be required to download the new parts that are developed. But, lets say I am on a train or somewhere without a connection, will I be able to run and play the game?
I’ll be looking forward to your reply next week…
keep the good work… the game looks great
hello
Mannix dude, your email address doesn’t work, I tried to reply to your email.
okai, there MUST be someone who knows where that tune is taken from, i can’t remember and it drives me mad 😛
please, hand us some infos, is it from some old game?
Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, arranged by Dave Sunerton-Burl
thx dude, i knew i know it, was thinking of some gaming music tho 🙂 thx alot.