I'm really happy that people are enjoying the game, and what's out there now was my vision for the game and I was only concerned with making a great TD. I did not design the game with the expectation that people would play it dozens of times. I think of it kind of like a summer blockbuster. You go see The Avengers one or more times and it's cool, but you could easily spend more hours watching sports each year - yet no one would argue that watching sports is cooler than The Avengers. Also for the record, The Avengers is a much better 2 hours than playing my map, let's just be clear about that.
I've been on vacation for a few weeks, so I wanted to provide an update on this project.
First - I have decided not to push this game into EU. I plan to only focus on preparing it for the 1.5 patch (a lot of work), and it will be available to EU when the maps become global.
Second - I tried to get this game published to the 1.5 beta a few weeks ago, but there is a terrible new bug that completely breaks the game. I really don't know what I'm going to do if blizzard doesn't fix this bug. (http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/5836263601)
Third - In the very short term, I plan on releasing a fast paced version of this game with all of the story removed. From whenever I can get the game working in 1.5, this fast version will be out a few weeks later.
Fourth - This is the big one. I had always planned to release a new version of the game in HOTS that is exclusively competitive play. I've got about a dozen pages of notes and designs on this already. Players will be able to disrupt each other's parks, steal spectators, gang up on other players and eliminate them. The idea is supposed to be that you're running a business and competing against other tower defense businesses, and you need to run them out of town. There will be at least 30 levels that players can progress through, each one offering new unlockable bonuses. New towers, new upgrades, new facilities, new structures, special abilities, and bonus starting resources.
On top of all this, each game you play will be assigned one of 30 random "mutators" at the start, and the best players will be the ones who can most successfully adapt to the mutator. These mutators can change game rules, give bonuses to the weakest player, make it easier to disrupt the top ranked player, change the way you earn income, or just add a little dose of havoc into the game. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
My guess is that it would work if I set the cost on the unit itself, rather than the ability. But one thing is clear, which is either they've added a new configuration that needs to be set on either the unit or ability to make it work, or they've flat out broken something in the editor. I'm not particularly interested in spending hours of my time to work around a bug that Blizzard has introduced, I'd rather just see if they can fix it. The thing is, I have no clue how we're supposed to report serious bugs to them. It's a beta test, but I don't know of a mechanism to help them identify these problems.
I just uploaded my map to the v1.5 beta, and the first major break I found was that my unit upgrades are no longer deducting minerals. I made most of my units a long time ago before Blizzard added the "Cost" attribute to a unit, so the cost is set on each of my abilities. When I construct a new building the minerals are deducted properly, but then when I try to upgrade that building into a higher level version the minerals are not deducted so you can upgrade for free (but you still must have the number of minerals required to build).
Anyone else experience this bug?
Any known issues with it?
Maybe there's a new feature or configuration that's breaking it? (I tried it with the ability flag "Ignore Unit Cost" both on and off and it changes nothing)
I think you need an MPQ editor to find it, not sure. Did you upload any custom UI to your map? I can't imagine why it would fail if the .SC2Layout file is still the standard default.
The term "Slave" is prohibited in Spanish (esMX)... OK, fair enough.
The term "own " is prohibited in Spanish (esMX)... You've got to be kidding me...
The term "trans" is prohibited in Italian (itIT)... So basically "transport" is prohibited? Way to go, censorship!
Omfg.
Blizzard's excessive censorship is just an embarrassment. Their "marketplace" is never going to be considered as a legit platform with so much control over the content.
I'd like to post my tower defense map in EU soon (currently it's still only in NA). I'd have to use someone else's EU account to publish it, but I'm concerned about how this will work in patch 1.5 when the game goes global (or later if that isn't coming in v1.5).
If someone posts a map with my chosen game name, is that name reserved forever even if that user later removes the game? What happens with maps of the same game but different versions when the game goes global? Will we everything need to be reposted for the arcade?
I'd recommend "The Name of the Wind" and "The Wise Man's Fear" by Patrick Rothfuss, great books imo. Also read Ender's Game a while ago, that one was pretty good as well.
I have to second this. Ender's Game is one of my all time favorites and I recommend it to anyone with even a little interest in sci-fi or gaming. "The Name of the Wind" and "The Wise Man's Fear" are some of the best books I have read in years and they have been added to my list of regular book recommendations. They're beautifully written, exciting, fun, and the characters are fantastic.
In the past few years I have also enjoyed "The Magicians" and "The Magician King" as very funny and addictive page turners. It's about a magic school like Hogwarts, except it's more like a college so there's lots of swearing, drugs, and sex.
And they're super mainstream now, but I really dug into The Hunger Games series.
I don't read very fast, so I tend to like books that are engaging page-turners. But since I read slow, I can afford to read only the best books and never run out.
Just published v1.12 with a few real quick updates. I'm going to take more of these suggestions and integrate them soon, I'm just out of time right now.
v1.12
Fixed errors with night 10, the inspection event, that can break the event when a player quits the game at a specific time
Burnout Towers were not receiving the damage bonus from Kinesis Crystals, Target Painter's weapon bonus, No Tower Left Behind upgrade, and Crowd Rally damage bonuses. This has been fixed, and players counting on Burnout Towers during crowd rallies should have a lot more success.
Player's name now properly turns grey when they leave or quit
Fixed spelling of "Satisfaction" on the daily earnings printout
Blood Towers once again have a damage of 35% > 140%
Mobile Tower kill bonus has changed
Used to be: +15% attack speed to all Mobile Towers for 15 seconds
New: 10% attack speed to all towers for 10 seconds
First Things First: Does anyone know how the double-click selection is configured? It is buggy in the game and I've been well aware of this, but I was never able to figure it out in the editor. Some towers work as expected and others don't work at all. This is one of those things where the editor's lack of documentation for many of the data fields makes my life extremely difficult.
-
Overall I think the towers are mostly balanced, but you have to figure out how to use each one. Glorn is really picking them apart here, which is what I expected would need to be done for a player to accomplish the highest difficulties. :D
Some towers are good on easier difficulties (powerful and easy to figure out, like Blood and Mobile), and other towers are better on harder difficulties (long term gains, harder to synergize).
Thanks for the feedback on Blood Towers, they're very tricky to balance. I want to have an elegant solution that makes them stronger earlier on and about as strong as they are currently in the late game. The only real advantage to a Blood Tower is that you can use them to get kill credit early in the game when you have not yet unlocked the kill bonus for any other tower. On higher difficulties, you probably don't want a Blood Tower stealing your kills once you get some good kill bonuses unlocked.
As for Mobile Towers, speed wouldn't help much because the 3 vepsene "Combat A.I." gives them the ability to teleport. The target lock feature is a designed draw-back for the tower that I put in very late during balance testing. When they weren't restricted to one-per-target, you could make lots of them and they just beat the game for you because the A.I is really smart. The effect looks good in the game now, but if you could have seen it when they didn't have a target lock feature you'd see that they work really well in groups, they just team up and win the game. In my opinion, Mobile Towers are a really fun tower to have in the game as they are now, but I completely agree that they're not a good choice on harder difficulties because they don't do anything for your income generation. Some changes would be good here, but I don't want to lose the flavor of them being the fun little support buddies that aggressively zip around the map killing things for you.
@SoulFilcher
The game does have a ton of text, and it can be very hard to follow any of it on your first play through. Once you get comfortable with the game mechanics it's not that hard. I was trying to make something new here, and it was unclear how much story a player could absorb (I think you'll find this problem on ANY multiplayer custom game). I'm happy with the story as is, and I certainly don't want to edit out elements of the story, but I've heard this feedback a lot and so I'm working on a story-free version of the game.
No changes made to the mineral drop rate, just the nerf to the Homing-Missile kill bonus.
I'll check the Terran boss. I only spot checked a few levels to make sure the secret difficulty worked. As far as balance testing goes on Secret Difficulty, I have never done a playthrough on this difficulty, I only added it and made sure it worked functionally. The slider goes up to 4x, but that doesn't mean it's mathematically possible. Or maybe it is? I have no idea. The people in the community like you are much better at this tower defense game than I am.
Future Lester has base HP of 150000. On Overkill, he has 150% more HP, so that's 225000. On Secret with 4x scaling, he has 150% + (50x4)% = 350%, which gives him 525000 hit points. What is the maximum? Something like 512000?
Anyways, the units late in the game have hidden damage reduction behaviors so that their health values don't skyrocket. Future Lester may be the only unit that can break the possible health max limit. But is it even possible to get there?
On the brood lord level; the randomly flying things take away lives; like... a lot of them. I lost 20 lives from them randomly flying backwards into my "exit".
This is not a bug, this is how you can leak on that level. Each flying guy make 4 passes across your park, and then proceeds to the exit. There's no way to tell which ones are about to go there, so it can look random. Some tower strats are better at this level than others (crossfire towers are REALLY good).
If you build your first upgrade center the second you get the minerals for it; the text will forever stay in the middle of your base; telling you to build an upgrade center.
Increased Burnout Tower kill bonus from 20% to 25% to increase crowd appeal while in normal mode
Lowered Homing-Missile Tower weapon upgrade from +30% to +25%
Homing-Missile Tower's mineral finder kill bonus now only increases mineral drop chance, no longer increases mineral value by +1
Chaosfire Tower lockout cooldown reduced from 3s to 2s
Solar-Powered Laser kill bonus now grants bonus energy at all levels of power, after 20 energy it adds 0.25 energy per kill
Petrol Sprayer support bonus increased from 25% to 40% chance to not be purged
Enhance Damage from Enhancement Crystals now properly boosts damage on Burnout Towers
Changed gift shop to reward a flat amount of money, this puts it in line with other facilities and makes it a good choice for the early game
Final nuke no longer kills towers
You should no longer get a negative score for tower assets at the end of the game when you have too many towers (it broke when you had more than $520,000 in assets)
Splitting tower life percentage changed from 75% to 90% normal, and 60% to 75% upgraded
The Day 11 upgrade "Satisfaction Guarantee" has had a new effect added to it. Now, in addition to the popularity boost, it will give you +1% spectators per day for each 25% popularity you have (rounded down, maximum of +5%)
Hotkey to build support towers has been changed
For Auxiliary Towers, the insta gib threshold has been reduced by -4% at all levels, but the Buff Forwarding upgrade now increases insta gib by +4%
Lowered Blood Towers from 35% > 140% (175% with upgrade) to 30% > 120% (150% with upgrade). A NOTE: I'm not sure about this change, but I have heard a lot from people believing the Blood Towers to be overpowered. Please let me know if you disagree with this nerf.
Maximum number of towers has changed from 60 to 40 + day
The leaderboard now shows each players difficulty next to their name, and displays the current day up top
Boring Fixes:
Crossfire/Chaosfire towers now have the Sell Tower ability properly appearing on the command card
Made improvements to Day 10 to help prevent the event breaking with duplicate spawns
Fixed tooltip for Cryonic Tower weapon upgrade to say 5%
Clarified range on Cherry Picker Cannon tooltip
Known Bugs:
Player's names do not currently turn grey when they lose or quit (fixing that soon)
NEW DIFFICULTY MODE ADDED!
The game now has a new difficulty mode, SECRET DIFFICULTY. This is for you punks who figured out how to dominate the game in just under a week. Secret Difficulty starts at Overkill level, and scales to make the game more difficult with each level. At the starting game settings, you get to pick how much you want the game to scale in difficulty. With each level of scaling, it will increase your final end game buyout by +$50,000. If you've got a killer strategy, you'll now be able to rake in an incredible high score.
But how do you get Secret Difficulty? Well here's the secret, you need to do one of these three things:
Complete the game on Overkill, regardless of whether you have a positive popularity
Complete the game with a high score of over $800,000
Find one of the alternate endings on any difficulty
Also, anyone who has a saved high score of over $800,000 will have Secret Difficulty retroactively unlocked.
Now that you can customize the difficulty and boost your score, please post here with your new high score!
0
@tdhsst: Go
I hope it's not any time soon. Their dumb 1.5 patch has still completely broken my game. They've got work to do!
0
I'm really happy that people are enjoying the game, and what's out there now was my vision for the game and I was only concerned with making a great TD. I did not design the game with the expectation that people would play it dozens of times. I think of it kind of like a summer blockbuster. You go see The Avengers one or more times and it's cool, but you could easily spend more hours watching sports each year - yet no one would argue that watching sports is cooler than The Avengers. Also for the record, The Avengers is a much better 2 hours than playing my map, let's just be clear about that.
I've been on vacation for a few weeks, so I wanted to provide an update on this project.
First - I have decided not to push this game into EU. I plan to only focus on preparing it for the 1.5 patch (a lot of work), and it will be available to EU when the maps become global.
Second - I tried to get this game published to the 1.5 beta a few weeks ago, but there is a terrible new bug that completely breaks the game. I really don't know what I'm going to do if blizzard doesn't fix this bug. (http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/5836263601)
Third - In the very short term, I plan on releasing a fast paced version of this game with all of the story removed. From whenever I can get the game working in 1.5, this fast version will be out a few weeks later.
Fourth - This is the big one. I had always planned to release a new version of the game in HOTS that is exclusively competitive play. I've got about a dozen pages of notes and designs on this already. Players will be able to disrupt each other's parks, steal spectators, gang up on other players and eliminate them. The idea is supposed to be that you're running a business and competing against other tower defense businesses, and you need to run them out of town. There will be at least 30 levels that players can progress through, each one offering new unlockable bonuses. New towers, new upgrades, new facilities, new structures, special abilities, and bonus starting resources.
On top of all this, each game you play will be assigned one of 30 random "mutators" at the start, and the best players will be the ones who can most successfully adapt to the mutator. These mutators can change game rules, give bonuses to the weakest player, make it easier to disrupt the top ranked player, change the way you earn income, or just add a little dose of havoc into the game. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.
0
@Taintedwisp: Go
My guess is that it would work if I set the cost on the unit itself, rather than the ability. But one thing is clear, which is either they've added a new configuration that needs to be set on either the unit or ability to make it work, or they've flat out broken something in the editor. I'm not particularly interested in spending hours of my time to work around a bug that Blizzard has introduced, I'd rather just see if they can fix it. The thing is, I have no clue how we're supposed to report serious bugs to them. It's a beta test, but I don't know of a mechanism to help them identify these problems.
0
I just uploaded my map to the v1.5 beta, and the first major break I found was that my unit upgrades are no longer deducting minerals. I made most of my units a long time ago before Blizzard added the "Cost" attribute to a unit, so the cost is set on each of my abilities. When I construct a new building the minerals are deducted properly, but then when I try to upgrade that building into a higher level version the minerals are not deducted so you can upgrade for free (but you still must have the number of minerals required to build).
Anyone else experience this bug? Any known issues with it? Maybe there's a new feature or configuration that's breaking it? (I tried it with the ability flag "Ignore Unit Cost" both on and off and it changes nothing)
0
@AnOddRadish: Go
I think you need an MPQ editor to find it, not sure. Did you upload any custom UI to your map? I can't imagine why it would fail if the .SC2Layout file is still the standard default.
0
Omfg.
Blizzard's excessive censorship is just an embarrassment. Their "marketplace" is never going to be considered as a legit platform with so much control over the content.
0
I'd like to post my tower defense map in EU soon (currently it's still only in NA). I'd have to use someone else's EU account to publish it, but I'm concerned about how this will work in patch 1.5 when the game goes global (or later if that isn't coming in v1.5).
If someone posts a map with my chosen game name, is that name reserved forever even if that user later removes the game? What happens with maps of the same game but different versions when the game goes global? Will we everything need to be reposted for the arcade?
0
I have to second this. Ender's Game is one of my all time favorites and I recommend it to anyone with even a little interest in sci-fi or gaming. "The Name of the Wind" and "The Wise Man's Fear" are some of the best books I have read in years and they have been added to my list of regular book recommendations. They're beautifully written, exciting, fun, and the characters are fantastic.
In the past few years I have also enjoyed "The Magicians" and "The Magician King" as very funny and addictive page turners. It's about a magic school like Hogwarts, except it's more like a college so there's lots of swearing, drugs, and sex.
And they're super mainstream now, but I really dug into The Hunger Games series.
I don't read very fast, so I tend to like books that are engaging page-turners. But since I read slow, I can afford to read only the best books and never run out.
0
Just wanted to confirm that Secret Difficulty at x4.0 scaling is possible. Someone sent me a replay of a successful attempt. :)
0
Just published v1.12 with a few real quick updates. I'm going to take more of these suggestions and integrate them soon, I'm just out of time right now.
v1.12
0
First Things First: Does anyone know how the double-click selection is configured? It is buggy in the game and I've been well aware of this, but I was never able to figure it out in the editor. Some towers work as expected and others don't work at all. This is one of those things where the editor's lack of documentation for many of the data fields makes my life extremely difficult.
-Overall I think the towers are mostly balanced, but you have to figure out how to use each one. Glorn is really picking them apart here, which is what I expected would need to be done for a player to accomplish the highest difficulties. :D
Some towers are good on easier difficulties (powerful and easy to figure out, like Blood and Mobile), and other towers are better on harder difficulties (long term gains, harder to synergize).
Thanks for the feedback on Blood Towers, they're very tricky to balance. I want to have an elegant solution that makes them stronger earlier on and about as strong as they are currently in the late game. The only real advantage to a Blood Tower is that you can use them to get kill credit early in the game when you have not yet unlocked the kill bonus for any other tower. On higher difficulties, you probably don't want a Blood Tower stealing your kills once you get some good kill bonuses unlocked.
As for Mobile Towers, speed wouldn't help much because the 3 vepsene "Combat A.I." gives them the ability to teleport. The target lock feature is a designed draw-back for the tower that I put in very late during balance testing. When they weren't restricted to one-per-target, you could make lots of them and they just beat the game for you because the A.I is really smart. The effect looks good in the game now, but if you could have seen it when they didn't have a target lock feature you'd see that they work really well in groups, they just team up and win the game. In my opinion, Mobile Towers are a really fun tower to have in the game as they are now, but I completely agree that they're not a good choice on harder difficulties because they don't do anything for your income generation. Some changes would be good here, but I don't want to lose the flavor of them being the fun little support buddies that aggressively zip around the map killing things for you.
@SoulFilcher
The game does have a ton of text, and it can be very hard to follow any of it on your first play through. Once you get comfortable with the game mechanics it's not that hard. I was trying to make something new here, and it was unclear how much story a player could absorb (I think you'll find this problem on ANY multiplayer custom game). I'm happy with the story as is, and I certainly don't want to edit out elements of the story, but I've heard this feedback a lot and so I'm working on a story-free version of the game.
0
@GlornII: Go
No changes made to the mineral drop rate, just the nerf to the Homing-Missile kill bonus.
I'll check the Terran boss. I only spot checked a few levels to make sure the secret difficulty worked. As far as balance testing goes on Secret Difficulty, I have never done a playthrough on this difficulty, I only added it and made sure it worked functionally. The slider goes up to 4x, but that doesn't mean it's mathematically possible. Or maybe it is? I have no idea. The people in the community like you are much better at this tower defense game than I am.
Future Lester has base HP of 150000. On Overkill, he has 150% more HP, so that's 225000. On Secret with 4x scaling, he has 150% + (50x4)% = 350%, which gives him 525000 hit points. What is the maximum? Something like 512000?
Anyways, the units late in the game have hidden damage reduction behaviors so that their health values don't skyrocket. Future Lester may be the only unit that can break the possible health max limit. But is it even possible to get there?
0
You're lucky, man
This is not a bug, this is how you can leak on that level. Each flying guy make 4 passes across your park, and then proceeds to the exit. There's no way to tell which ones are about to go there, so it can look random. Some tower strats are better at this level than others (crossfire towers are REALLY good).
I'll take a look!
0
@GlornII: Go
v1.11 is UP!!
Who likes patch notes? I do!
Balance Changes:
Boring Fixes:
Known Bugs:
NEW DIFFICULTY MODE ADDED! The game now has a new difficulty mode, SECRET DIFFICULTY. This is for you punks who figured out how to dominate the game in just under a week. Secret Difficulty starts at Overkill level, and scales to make the game more difficult with each level. At the starting game settings, you get to pick how much you want the game to scale in difficulty. With each level of scaling, it will increase your final end game buyout by +$50,000. If you've got a killer strategy, you'll now be able to rake in an incredible high score.
But how do you get Secret Difficulty? Well here's the secret, you need to do one of these three things:
Also, anyone who has a saved high score of over $800,000 will have Secret Difficulty retroactively unlocked.
Now that you can customize the difficulty and boost your score, please post here with your new high score!
0
Thanks, I have a fix for that that should be ready within the hour.