Dev Log

[larsiusprime]

Aaaaand we’re back! So sorry I’ve been offline, I think some construction workers next door cut my cable or something.

Anyways, I’ve got some good news to report! I’ve been working on my usual list of programming and content tasks, making good progress there, but today I’d like to take a post and dedicate it entirely to a big fat art update. I’ll re-post this content in a blog post later, but I just added a new blog post today (I wrote it about a week ago but couldn’t post due to busted internet) and I’d like to give it a few days before I kick it off the blog’s front page.

So, first off, let’s show you some sexy cutscene arts. Rest assured I’ve been working on a lot more things and stuff besides this, and I’ll get to posting about the rest of it later.

“Before” is on the left, “After” is on the right. Click to embiggen.

So, there’s a couple of things at work here. First, we’ve got new backgrounds. Next, you’ll notice that with a few exceptions we’re using the same character art as before. The chief complaints we had was that the characters looked “flat” and were sometimes hard to separate from the backgrounds. Our solution was to apply some shading to the existing characters. I have a pipeline in photoshop now that lets me manually whip up some decent shading for each character pose pretty quickly, which we can then apply dynamically in different cutscenes. The light layer is separate from the color layer, so we can adjust the intensity of the shading based on the scene’s lighting, as well as change the blending mode, and in general save ourselves from having a bajillion image files with baked-in lighting. All of this functionality is also available in mod support, though be advised our cutscene scripting system is a bit hacked together.

Everything you’re seeing here is live in my local dev build - none of this is mockups. Karen’s completely done with backgrounds, and now I just need to finish applying lighting to all the cutscenes, which is going faster than I thought it would. It took me a little less than day to knock out everything in Act I, and hopefully things should speed up as I can reuse most of that content in subsequent ones.

We have two focuses for gold edition - improved art, and some extra bonus content chiefly in the form of NG+, bonus missions, and special loot. If you’re a gamer’s gamer like me, you might be wondering why we’re giving about equal weight to an art upgrade (which offers no new gameplay), and that basically comes straight down to business.

Launching Defender’s Quest has taught me two contradictory things - visuals don’t really matter, and visuals totally matter. They’re both true at the same time. For one, lots of people were willing to look past our rough initial look and see through to the game mechanics, even giving us glowing reviews. At the same time, almost every single review mentions in either the main text (or pretty quickly in the comments) that the art style needs a lot of work. On countless forum posts where the game is mentioned, I see this come up again and again.

So, I imagine we could probably reach a lot more people if we just get the art up to snuff, probably more than we could reach if we focused solely on gameplay and nothing else. This will hopefully improve our chances of getting onto Steam as our game will seem more ‘professional’ in their eyes. Our old art style was keeping a hard ceiling on our potential sales and distribution partners. I can’t tell you how many people have said, “Sounds great, but I can’t get past the art.”

This way, we have a real shot and giving this game a second wind - perhaps as big or bigger than our first burst of sales, and that means there’s better hope for a sequel and more interesting innovations in mechanics and gameplay. Defender’s Quest is currently supporting 4 main developers - 3 part time, and 1 full time (me). This means I’m personally bearing most of the risk (and also get a larger share of the reward, if any). If everything was said and done as of today, Defender’s Quest would be a success for sure, but not enough of a success to make a career of, especially if I want to support a family. Gold edition will really prove whether I can make this my main job, or whether I go back to doing Indie stuff only as a hobby.

I’ll finish this post right here for now. Tyvon’s got a new batch of sprites for me, and I just integrated the Ice Mage two days ago (Knight is done and Dragon is almost finished, but neither is integrated yet). I’ll try to post some animated gifs of those little guys, as well as some before-after of the new tile art for battles, which also look amazing.

And when that’s all said and done, I’ll talk a little bit about what remains about NG+, game design, balance, etc.

Finally - a word on the “soft target” date of July 1st. That’s when I want to be basically done by, as much as possible, because my wife and I are going to be visiting my family in Norway at the end of July, and I want to have a good shot at releasing the game and having at least a week’s worth of time to deal with customer support and other post-launch issues rather than just flying off to Scandinavia and dumping that completely in Anthony’s lap.

Do we have a shot at July 1st? Depends on how much I can get done this week We’ll keep you posted!

[shinigami]

@Anthony:
Sounds fair enough. Thank you for the update

@Lars:
Just wanted to give my two cents on the pictures. First of all let me say that the backgrounds are beautiful. They give the game as a whole an entire new atmosphere/vibe, for the better of course. But now it feels like the characters and backgrounds don’t match up. How you described the characters as “flat”, is on par with how I would have decribed them, “two dimensional”. If you feel you have the resources to improve n the characters I would sincerely suggest it. Yes, visuals matter, and more than people want to admit. Of course outdated graphics dont ruin a game, but better graphics undoubtedly make for a better game. When the game finally comes out, im actually leaning towards following the story this time around. last time around i only played for the gameplay of it, but now im feeling like i might actually be able to get into the story.

Also, I read a bit on what you wrote about hoping DQ would prove to be financially profitable. All I can say is im rooting for you guys. I know how hard it is to make money off of your own product. Regardless of whether you make a good amount of money or not, you should know that your game came out great! I didn’t think twice about paying the $5 for the demo version because i felt the game already was good as it was. now the complete game is nothing short of amazing. Seriously, good luck!!

[marak]

Also, I notice that Slak got some love (tweaked hair, new pants) - maybe consider similar little things like that for some of the other characters, as well? A little something-something here and there can make a big difference as to whether or not the character stands out. It would be a way to improve the look of the characters (and keep them from being out-shined by the purty new backgrounds) without having to completely redo them, which I’m sure isn’t feasible even if you weren’t trying to get this “out the door” in less than 4 weeks.

All in all, though, the new cutscenes are looking pretty damn good, especially compared to what you guys had before the art style change. Looking forward to seeing what the new characters and battle maps are looking like these days; if that sprite sheet is any indicator, battles are going to be a lot more impressive in the Gold version.

[larsiusprime]

Hey all!

So, first and foremost, I just finished a marathon bug-fixing session and got rid of all our highest priority bugs. Theoretically, at least. The newest test build is 0.9.14 and is hitting the test server NOW. This fixes broken maps, swimming enemies that shouldn’t swim, and a whole bunch of other problems large and small. I’ve whittled the bugzilla database down to 3 normal and 3 minor bugs, and the rest are trivial or enhancements.

Also, chugged through act II and got all the lighting in for those cutscenes, and started replacing the old in-battle dialogue portraits to reflect the new art stuff.

@Marak: James is in charge of new character art. He’s got a few characters he’d like to redesign, but how much we get through depends on what he has time for since he’s also trying to get all the writing done. He’s finished all the sidequest dialogue, and right now he’s working on some cutscene art for the sidequests. Whether we get to revise the other characters or not, time will tell. (Probably not though).

I’ll try to post some new battle art soon. Anyways, thanks for following us and bearing with us through this last stage. To all our testers, sorry for the downtime between test uploads - I’ll try to do at least one or two a week now that my internet’s back up. Ideally I’d like to post one every day, but you know how that goes.

EDIT: Forgot to update the link on the test page. It’s fixed now.

[protagon]

Norway, eh? If you’re near Trondheim, I’d like to buy you a beer. Which, curiously, is more expensive than the game itself

Also we could talk about your website, or just PM me. I work with Drupal and wouldn’t mind helping out if you have any plans in that area.

[larsiusprime]

@Protgaon: PM sent! Glad to see a fellow Norsklander on the boards.

So, today I got a lot of stuff done.

I FINALLY fixed that annoying bug where the options always default to 1/2 speed no matter what you do. Also fixed a bunch of crash bugs, and fixed an infinite loop bug that happens a save file is semi-corrupted. Fixed a lot of the graphics offsets, and a bunch of other sundry things.

Next, gave some attention to some neglected stuff.

Right now, you get a full preview of en enemy’s abilities only in one place - in the level confirmation box on the overworld. There’s two other places where you get enemy information - the wave bar preview, and the enemy information panel.

The wave bar is just there to give you a quick shorthand glance at what you’re facing, so it doesn’t have to be exhaustive, but it does need to communicate the most important information. The enemy panel can and SHOULD give you every single detail about an enemy, not only what it’s abilities are, but what’s going on with it right now (active status effect, etc). I don’t want to drown the player in info, but I also don’t want there to be some relevant information (such as, this enemy is immune to physical attacks) that you can’t see.

So, now you can see the following information in both places:

1. Enemy strengths/immunities
2. Spawn types/counts (it just lists the count on the wave preview, full info on tooltip for enemy info panel)
3. Phase patterns (usually just 1,1 for one tile on, 1 tile off, but can vary with levels)

It seems to make a pretty big difference - especially since every enemy in NG+ has some bizarre new super power specially designed to ruin your day.

I used a little “flexed bicep” as the icon for “strengths” an egg for “spawn,” and a drama mask that’s half dark half light for “phasing.”

I’m kind of OCD about this - I’m always frustrated by how some other tower defense games don’t give you all the information you need to make the right decisions, which makes the ultimate strategy “memorize all the facts about the game” which is less fun than just easily looking up that info when you need it and making informed decisions on the spot.

[larsiusprime]

Sorry I haven’t posted a new build in a while. I’m going to put in a few hours this morning, then I’ll make a fresh build before lunch.

Since we’re slowly approaching the finish line now, I’m going to start compiling mac builds too so we can start testing those. Eventually I’ll try to start building a full deploy (Win/Mac/Linux, as well as demos and possibly browser versions) so that we can check for any errors in specific platforms. Generally, the gameplay content itself should be the same as flash is pretty good about that as far as internal consistency goes, but I’m sure we’ll find some interesting problems in the demo and browser builds specifically as those will have a slightly different content pipeline.

I’ll post again when everything’s up.

[larsiusprime]

Mac AND windows builds are up on the test server.

Also, Zhi and James both dumped a whole lot of new art in my lap. Will spend all day tomorrow integrating those. Also chomping away on bugs.

[larsiusprime]

Will put in some screenshots of all the new stuff Monday, but for now:

Build 0.9.23 is up on the test server.

The biggest change is that it has all-new overworld graphics. 90% complete, still waiting on one last thing (Eztli’s ruined city) and still need to do some tweaks/rearranging to make everything fit where it’s supposed to.

Some bugs and other stuff, but that’s the biggest new thing. Also, I’m uploading both Mac and Windows builds.

[coyot]

Wow, looks pretty impressive, a much more 3D look.

I see that you’ve merged all Hermits into one, and all skull types as well. Not sure if I’m happy with that, I was kind of looking forward to obtaining different skull types as a challenge

On the subject of hermits - please nerf the Captain’s Warbow. It’ll be strong enough to receive +1 level to critical skill, doubling criticals is a huge gamebreaker.

[coyot]

— Begin quote from "coyot"

On the subject of hermits - please nerf the Captain’s Warbow. It’ll be strong enough to receive +1 level to critical skill, doubling criticals is a huge gamebreaker.

— End quote

And so is the bleed-improving sword. +170% dmg is WAY too much - I was playing quite challenging one-squad play in NG+, just about coping with most maps, and then I escaped the city, ran into zelemir and slaughtered him with Slak, Ketta and Bakal before the game even started…

Oh, wait - that number is wrong anyway - off to bugzilla. Bug 400 - it looks like the bleed effect doubler accidentally adds extra 100% to bleed. (And also, bleed on critical hits is the same as on normal, although that might be intentional)

[larsiusprime]

Thanks for the feedback there - most of the values are just placeholders and I’m sure there’s even more that are totally off-balance. I want to finalize a lot of these designs so we can stop all the moving parts and have a clearer picture of where we’re at balance-wise.

[coyot]

The balance issue is quite tricky - when boosting skills, doubling effect of some is ok (various stuns and other mild debuffs), but madness, rage and especially sharpshooter act as big damage multipliers, featuring exponential growth of damage:

I’ve thrown together tables for these skills, showing total gain, gain versus first level of skill, gain versus previous level of skill - and gave projection of skills up to level 18, and as the last step, gave what the effect of doubling rate and effect produces.

Madness                    
Level Rate    Effect  Total   G-base  G-prev
 1    0.10    2.00    1.10    1.00    
 2    0.13    2.20    1.16    1.05    0.051
 3    0.16    2.40    1.22    1.11    0.062
 4    0.19    2.60    1.30    1.19    0.073
 5    0.22    2.80    1.40    1.27    0.084
 6    0.25    3.00    1.50    1.36    0.095
 7    0.28    3.20    1.62    1.47    0.105
 8    0.31    3.40    1.74    1.59    0.116
 9    0.34    3.60    1.88    1.71    0.127
10    0.37    3.80    2.04    1.85    0.138
11    0.40    4.00    2.20    2.00    0.149
12    0.43    4.20    2.38    2.16    0.160
13    0.46    4.40    2.56    2.33    0.171
14    0.49    4.60    2.76    2.51    0.182
15    0.52    4.80    2.98    2.71    0.193
16    0.55    5.00    3.20    2.91    0.204
17    0.58    5.20    3.44    3.12    0.215
18    0.61    5.40    3.68    3.35    0.225
2.9   0.68    7.20    5.22    4.74                        
Rage                    
Level Rate    Effect  Total   G-base  G-prev
 1    0.02    1.20    1.00    1.00    
 2    0.03    1.25    1.01    1.00    0.003
 3    0.04    1.30    1.01    1.01    0.004
 4    0.05    1.35    1.02    1.01    0.005
 5    0.06    1.40    1.02    1.02    0.006
 6    0.07    1.45    1.03    1.03    0.007
 7    0.08    1.50    1.04    1.04    0.008
 8    0.09    1.55    1.05    1.05    0.009
 9    0.10    1.60    1.06    1.06    0.010
10    0.11    1.65    1.07    1.07    0.011
11    0.12    1.70    1.08    1.08    0.012
12    0.13    1.75    1.10    1.09    0.013
13    0.14    1.80    1.11    1.11    0.014
14    0.15    1.85    1.13    1.12    0.015
15    0.16    1.90    1.14    1.14    0.016
16    0.17    1.95    1.16    1.16    0.017
17    0.18    2.00    1.18    1.18    0.018
18    0.19    2.05    1.20    1.19    0.019
2x9   0.20    3.20    1.44    1.43                           

Sharpshooter                    
Level Rate    Effect  Total   G-base  G-prev
 1    0.10    2.00    1.10    1.00    
 2    0.12    2.13    1.14    1.03    0.032
 3    0.14    2.25    1.18    1.07    0.036
 4    0.16    2.38    1.22    1.11    0.041
 5    0.18    2.50    1.27    1.15    0.045
 6    0.20    2.63    1.33    1.20    0.050
 7    0.22    2.75    1.39    1.26    0.055
 8    0.24    2.88    1.45    1.32    0.059
 9    0.26    3.00    1.52    1.38    0.064
10    0.28    3.13    1.60    1.45    0.068
11    0.30    3.25    1.68    1.52    0.073
12    0.32    3.38    1.76    1.60    0.077
13    0.34    3.50    1.85    1.68    0.082
14    0.36    3.63    1.95    1.77    0.086
15    0.38    3.75    2.05    1.86    0.091
16    0.40    3.88    2.15    1.95    0.095
17    0.42    4.00    2.26    2.05    0.100
18    0.44    4.13    2.38    2.16    0.105
2x9   0.52    6.00    3.60    3.27    1.114  

(G-base is gain over skill level 1, g-prev is increase of gain between levels)

These numbers show that every successive skill point gives a bigger effect - and actually doubling the current effect produces HUGE numbers.

The same table leaving level 9, hypothetical level 18 and doubled level 9 numbers:

Madness                    
Level Rate    Effect  Total   G-base  G-prev
 9    0.34    3.60    1.88    1.71    0.127
18    0.61    5.40    3.68    3.35    0.225
2.9   0.68    7.20    5.22    4.74                        
Rage                    
Level Rate    Effect  Total   G-base  G-prev
 9    0.10    1.60    1.06    1.06    0.010
18    0.19    2.05    1.20    1.19    0.019
2x9   0.20    3.20    1.44    1.43                           

Sharpshooter                    
Level Rate    Effect  Total   G-base  G-prev
 9    0.26    3.00    1.52    1.38    0.064
18    0.44    4.13    2.38    2.16    0.105
2x9   0.52    6.00    3.60    3.27    1.114  

Note that rage does NOT include the prolonged duration of the effect, too, based on the principle that most bleeding targets will not live long enough to make this matter, and not be targeted again by the bleed-invoker.

But the picture is clear - a ranger with sharpshooter is worth 1.52 rangers without it, a ranger with extra 9 skill points in sharpshooter would be worth 2.38 rangers - and a ranger with double-effect sharpshooter is worth 3.6 normal rangers.

Madness normally gives you 88% percent gain, doubleskill 3.68 and and doubled 5.22 - that’s 4 and 6 times stronger effect, in both cases FAR bigger than 2x.

And rage increases the whole party effectiveness similarly, instead of 6% boost, giving 20% or 44% net boost.

If the effect is to be really “2x”, then for madness you can go for approx +7 skill points, for Rage for about +4 skill points and for sharpshooter, +6 skill points.

[larsiusprime]

Wow, thanks, we’ll be looking over all that! Also see there’s some fresh new bugs in the database. I’ll get to fixing all that

In other news, all the character art is now finished. I’ve moved Tyvon over to updating the enemy art, as I work on fixing bugs and integrating the knight/dragon. There’s still some rough spots on some of the earlier art integration I might fix, but for now I’m just trying to get new content into the game and fix bugs so our playtesters can properly evaluate game balance.

Finally, I’m looking at some revisions to the game’s interface style. The actual UI design itself will stay the same, but I’m looking into some ways to make the interface less “cheesy” - I’m working with Tyvon and some others on that, and when I have some mockups I’ll post them here so we can evaluate which looks best. I want something that is compatible with both the cutscene and sprite art, provides good visual contrast, and isn’t distracting. Finally, I want something that is lightweight and doesn’t take long for me to implement because I don’t want to take too much time away from all the other stuff we’re doing - as Steve Krug says, the smallest change you can make that solves the problem.

To start with, I’m looking into a new color scheme where the buttons seem less like they belong in a carnival or bubble gum machine. I’m also considering replacing a lot of the chrome* with simple black rectangles, such as at the bottom of the overworld map, as well as the chrome at the bottom of town screen and cutscenes.

Some kind of chrome will be necessary for the store/recruit menus, as well as the battle menu and options pop-ups, but I think I can find something that works a little better than what I’ve currently got. Even just having Tyvon do a “better” version of what’s already there would almost certainly be an improvement.

*(For those who aren’t familiar with interface design and wondering what the heck I’m talking about: “Chrome” is design jargon for the non-functional parts of a window or interface element, such as the grey border around a windows explorer window, or the toolbar where the buttons sit.)

[larsiusprime]

Okey dokey, new windows build 0.9.24 is up. This has some bugfixes and whatever else I’ve been working on lately.

Notably, I’ve added support for “stat tracking” to spells and stat upgrades like “bulk up” and “sword training.”

These aren’t IMPLEMENTED YET, because I need to talk to Anthony to see if/what he wants to do with them, but the engine supports it now, so if you make some tweaks in a mod the game should respond to it.

Notably:

To add a 10% of current base HP bonus to “fatten up” change the stat tags to something like this:

This makes Azra’s lightning dmg have the base damage + 10% of her “attack” stat (which is otherwise not used):

Adding this flavor to lightning will make it burn off PSI from enemies in proportion to damage dealt as % of total health:

More details later

[coyot]

Just for those who don’t follow Bugzilla closely:
Bugs fixed between .23 and .24:
400 Handling of Bleed, criticals and armor. Apart from fixing Blood feud Kopal+, the game was changed to apply bleed to net damage (after armor).

Lars, speaking on this subject, I think a clarification/rethink is needed on the damage handling.

IMO this is how it should work:

1. Base damage calculation (skill + attack bonus)
2. Bonus from Inspire (characters hit harder)
3. Bonus from criticals (lucky hits)
4. Armor reduction
5. Bleed application (hitting already wounded enemy)

From your description of the bugfix, I think that the Inspire bonus is applied after armor and I’m not at all sure how criticals behave.

And I am also not very sure as to where should various sideeffects be calculated from - but we deserve to know
I’d vouch for poison to be based on 1), armor pierce on 2 or possibly 3 (this would make ranger more powerful against armored targets)

397 Hermit interface bugs - all reported problems with hermit shop
394 Area attacks hitting targets twice. This can have a significant impact on effectiveness of ice mages mainly - because due to this bug they’ve been causing double damage. (Lars, could you find out whether this was introduced recently or has been in the code for a long time?). Note that there’s a similar pending bug with Swipe, it hits all targets, not just 90 degree angle, and it sometimes goes crazy and scores a truckload of hits on a single foe.

372 non-swimming enemies can swim on some levels, in fact it included other map errors. I’d like to ask fellow testers to do a quick play-through of all maps and verify that both swimmers and non-swimmers take the appropriate paths everywhere. These map errors were mostly in the invisible map layers, not all of them were easy to spot, especially when you had strong killzones near spawns, and all these errors were introduced fairly recently

[larsiusprime]

Here’s how damage is currently calculated, sorry if I was unclear in bugzilla:

1. Base Damage (X)
2. Apply damage flavors & status effects, resulting in new Damage (X -> X1)
3. Subtract Armor from X1 (X2 = X1-A)
4. Apply Bleed multiplier to X2 (X3 = X2 * B)

Step 2 is where critical and inspire are applied. I believe inspiration will always apply before critical.

The way bleed works, is an enemy with bleed has an additional damage multiplier, so that’s separate from whether an incoming attack has the bleed flavor. Ie, if you are not bleeding and I hit you with an attack that makes you bleed, there’s no bleed bonus damage until the NEXT hit from any source.

I believe most things that are driven by some % or multiplier of damage (poison, etc), will do that off of base damage (pre armor tax), as that all gets applied in step 2. I’ll check on that tomorrow and post full details.

[coyot]

Thanks - this seems to match my understanding quite well. It’s not necessary to apply pierce/armor break from inspired attacks.

[larsiusprime]

Okay, just dropped version 0.9.27 onto the test server (just windows for now, will try to get a mac build up later this week).

Aside from a couple of bug fixes, new stuff includes the new art for the knight, some other tweaks, and a big change to how assets are loaded into the game.

Previously, all assets were embedded into the main swf. This was convenient and is kind of the standard way most flixel-based games are done, however the full version is just so cram-packed with assets (for a flixel-based game, that is) that the flex compiler has been choking. The solution was to move all the embedded assets out of the main swf and just load them at run-time.

So, now the majority of the game’s assets are kept in a separate swf file stored in the bin/assets/ directory of your game’s installation folder. This works on my computer but I’d like testers to verify whether it works on theirs. All you need to do is install the new test build, and see if it works. As a bonus, try installing it on top of an old version of the game, as well as a clean install (uninstall the old version and make sure to purge any record of its existence). Both seem to work on my computer.

There shouldn’t be any visible changes, except perhaps a slightly longer initial load time for the game. If it’s any longer than a few seconds for you guys, I’ll update the main loading screen to display progress rather than just say “Loading…” with no animation.

If this works, the only other thing I need to do is check with my German security expert dude to make sure that if someone were to modify assets.swf (say, with some malware surreptitiously on your computer), it wouldn’t let them inject arbitrary code that would then get run by the main game. (Given the game has AIR priviliges such as read/write access)

Since assets.swf is in the game’s installation directory, this normally “shouldn’t” happen because OS permissions would require the theoretical malware to have elevated privileges, but you know how that goes. If there’s a risk (which I suspect there is), what I’ll probably do is add a script that computes a checksum of assets.swf before the game compiles, then embed that in the main game code. Then, whenever the game loads up assets.swf it checks it against the checksum to make sure it hasn’t been tampered with since installation. (Come to think of it, this would be a smart thing to do with the little helper-apps that change the screen’s resolution, since they could be tampered with just as easily, or even more so).

My security dude has identified a few other things I should do before final release, so I’ll probably be adding this to the list. The game is probably about as secure as most other games you can buy, but I want to make sure to go the extra mile to make sure I patch any vulnerabilities that I can think of.

I don’t think there’s not too much risk of any of these (potential) vulnerabilities being exploited right now, but I want to do it sometime before final release.

[coyot]

Could we get a linux test build as well? (I’m off for a week-long vacation with my notebook and I don’t fancy playing through wine at all)

Tarball would be enough, no need for a package.