Chaz and Alli have been beavering away hard on our new “roguelike survival horror” game, Basingstoke, and now’s the time to show you an official teeny sneak peak of the game so far. Feast your eyes upon the video, and then read on, with the caveat that everything is in developmental flux and subject to changing beyond recognition at any moment…
What’s This All About Then?
I use the term “survival” fairly loosely. And “roguelike” come to think of it. First of all, you’re definitely going to die, and this is going to be quite a challenging game. The Steam achievements really will be achievements!
It’s roguelike in two senses, which are: that when you die, that’s it, game over; and each game has randomly generated levels. The levels are made up of a number of randomly selected prefabricated sections joined together cunningly to create a mix of familiar and unfamiliar.
So the objective is to ultimately escape Basingstoke, like any right-thinking individual. There are more reasons than usual to escape, as well: this is the Basingstoke after the Titans have invaded Earth. It’s full of even more unpleasant things than normal! And nearly all of them are deadly, which is admittedly a decidedly worse situation than normal in Basingstoke.
We plan to be posting a bit more regularly about progress, so stay tuned 🙂
That looks like Unity
As long-time Java aficionados with fingers in many Java game-related pies, even famous ones such as Minecraft, it may come as a surprise to find out that this is our first game not made in Java. It’s Unity!
Alli likes Unity because it’s a lot easier than doing things from scratch in Java, and Chaz has similar sentiments, and so they’ve jumped straight in and this is how far they’ve got since May – pretty neat, eh? That means I’ve been relegated to doing VAT returns, writing inflammatory blog posts, play testing and suggesting things.
When’s it ready?
A good question… like everything else we do, “when it’s done”. Hopefully Q1 2015 – a few months later than planned but then we want to do the best we can with it and make sure it’s awesome.
Looks absolutely fabulous guys, can’t wait to play this! Good luck with the next few months!
Damn this looks good! Nice work guys!
Mmm… Unity, huh? Could this come to PS4 and Vita then? =)
Absolutely could, yes 🙂
Oh, mmm… okay, well… wanna take my money NOW, in advance? It’s fine to me. =D
This is so exciting! I absolutely LOVE the creatures in Revenge Of The Titans, and it’s going to be awesome to get the chance to experience them a little more up close and personal!
On the topic of the lovely creatures, have you ever considered designing and selling Vinyl toys of them, or possibly even Plush dolls? I’d happily spend money to send my friends’ children to bed with snuggly Titans. 🙂
We have thought about that as it happens but the market for them is probably a bit… er… small.
What happened to the battledroid ??? some new information pls?
Battledroid also progresses! I’ve spent the last three months or so writing the user interface system for it in such a manner that I can actually build the UIs myself now without Chaz. We had a huge bottleneck with our old system (which had been kicking around since 2005) in that the only person who could string UIs together was Chaz. Now Chaz is working full-time on Basingstoke (and will be for the next 5-6 months or so) we had a bit of a problem looming which was that work on Battledroid would have ground to a halt and I’d sort have been stuck doing odd jobs and pottering about. Now it’s at the stage where I can simply carry on building the Battledroid client on my own, which is exactly what I’ve been doing 🙂
Last night I put in the code to handle hyperlinks in text areas. Sounds trivial, no? Ended up taking me 11 hours! But now it works, and it’s awesome.
We plan to release bloggage of Battledroid in about 2 weeks’ time (and reveal our Patreon campaign to the wider public) and thereafter every month. Basingstoke will get a monthly update too, so with any luck, something new on the blog every fortnight.
I’ve had a bit worried about the game when it was relatively silent… Battledroid looks amazing therefore, I am grateful for any information about it. Thank you very much & keep up the good work sir ^_*
^ this ^ glad to hear Battledroid isn’t off the table. Bassingstoke looks great too!
Looks really interesting. Definitely going to get this. I hope there will be a lot to do.
Look’s pretty awesome Cas. Can’t wait for the full game. Is there a way to do a limited demo? This would probably do well on Kongregate to generate interest in the full game. And Kongregate supports Unity.
I don’t think demos are a very good idea these days really. Video is the new demo, if you get me.
See, I don’t understand this. I’ve been burned too many times buying games without trying them that I ended up not enjoying at all. I just can’t get a feel for a game from a video.
Having said that, in this particular case it’s not a relevant point as I’ve enjoyed all your games and would happily buy whatever you serve up!
Sometimes the discovery is part of the value of things. I pay to see awful films… just so I can form my own opinions of them. Prometheus, I’m looking at you 😉
Prometheus! What a beautiful looking unnecessary mess of a film. A least, that’s what I discovered.
I can get a pretty good sense of a game from watching gameplay/review videos. For me, It’s an enjoyable first step in thinning out the herd of interesting sounding games. I grew up on demos, I like the idea, but at best they’d make me angry for being too withholding, and at worst they’d give too much away.
As somebody who lives very close to Basingstoke I find this game rather humorous.
As someone who was born in basingstoke and managed to escape later in life, i also find this game rather humorous.
Good Morning,
I myself was born and raised in Basingstoke, what I would really like to know is what inspired you to use Basingstoke town as the basis of your game?
Kind Regards
effigy22
Well, when we were making Revenge of the Titans, I had the misfortune of living and working in Basingstoke (at Sony, which all things considered is not a bad place to work actually). My scrappy little back garden backed on to the M3. I was there for a whole year – I’d do 8 hours at Sony then come home and put in another 8 hours on Revenge of the Titans. It nearly killed me 🙂
Anyway, at some point we had to choose an initial starting “city” for the Titans to invade, and Chaz thought that it might be fitting that Basingstoke was first up against the wall when the revolution came.
I would like to pay for this immediately.
I love puppygames’s games. I first read about revenge of the titans in PC gamer like years ago and only recently decided to buy it (a bit late, sorry). I loved it so much that I bought Ultratron, Droid Assault and Titan Attacks the next day. I normally buy my games only when there’s a steep discount (steam/humble store), but I’ve read your other post and I’ve decided to buy Basingstoke at full price on day one. Now that I think about it, I would have paid USD 20 for Ultratron and still think it’s worth it. Keep up the good work guys!
#1 puppygames fan from China (very likely)
Basingstoke looks very good so far and I’m looking forward to another game in the Titanesque universe and art style, I hope everything goes well with the development of it and with Puppygames in general.
I’m in love you with you guys. You’re gamers who build games YOU want to play. I can’t wait for this one guys. It looks simply great. Keep at it – I’ll gladly part with my $ for your creativity and game craft.
Now is always a good time to plug our Patreon efforts 🙂
It’s sad to see that Puppygames has financial troubles (not unlike some of us out here) First came across you guys when ROTT was in beta, and fell in love with that game immediately; couldn’t pay for it fast enough. Still play it after all these moons, although I’m still a bit miffed that you nerfed the droids as they were easily the best (and most fun) bit of tech, seeing nigh on a hundred of the little guys swarming the screen… so when I heard about Battledroid, I was itching to play. I still am, as I know that your games are lovingly crafted with care and attention…. but I’m a little puzzled by the decision that you made to go f2p with it. I’m not sure if it’s financially astute to do this in the long term. Basingstoke looks great, so it’s on my list of ‘must-play’ as well. Anyway, long story short, finish both these games please… I have one-off cash payments to exhange for them each!
Well… thing is I suspect that short-term, free-to-play gaming is not a financially brilliant move, because free-to-play games take a long time to really start earning their keep. Apart from the ongoing costs of the servers and software maintenance, free-to-play games rely on casting a very wide net for a very long time and awaiting the sorts of people who really get into the game to turn up and start investing their time and money into it. I suppose it’s a bit more like panning for gold than fishing for whales.
Battledroid is also slightly nerfed from the perspective of a f2p goldmine as well in that I’ve taken great pains to keep it balanced so it’s not “pay-to-win” and also to keep it fun for everyone no matter how little (or nothing) they want to pay for it. It’s hopefully going to attract enough hardcore fans to keep it thoroughly alive. I say “hopefully” but really I mean “must” and we’ll be doing everything in our powers to attract the sorts of people who are going to really appreciate it and want to spend some money supporting it in exchange for Cool Things. And of course there’s the Patreon effort for early adopters, serious supporters, benefactors and angels. Gotta raise that figure to $5k a month! Yikes.