Militia Defense (2009-07-17)

[qubodup]

I have two or three suggestions:

1. The mouse behaves in a strange way: If I build a unit, the mouse jumps to the center of the screen. But if I do not move the mouse and press 1 2 3 or 4, the symbol 'place unit here' will appear where the mouse built the last unit.

The mouse jump should not happen.

2. When I place a unit, I would prefer it if I could place another unit of the same type right after that without having to press the according button again. This might be a matter of style: I prefer to place lots of units, before upgrading them (in this td at least )

3. The level should be visually indicated. I first thought maybe stars/medals in the top left corner of a unit position, but I decided to try and manipulate the units, hoping this would allow for more diversity = fun

I release the changes I made into the public domain aka do what you want with it. :^)

They don't look realistic. It is more important to see the level difference than staying realistic IMHO. If both is possible, that would be grand of course

They might not be very good at distinguishing the level ingame..

Thanks for providing all the info, Budapest Defenders is much fun!

About the sounds, here's a thread containing info about the sources. Hopefully there will be freedomdefined-free sounds available to replace the current ones one day.

[Skofo]

I found a bug: if you pause in-game and toggle fullscreen in the options, it doesn't give you the option to resume the game anymore.

Also, I think the graphics are fine. You do get better at spriting the more you do it, but redoing the graphics for one game would probably just result in demotivation and headaches. I'd say something that is a lot more important than realistic graphics is different graphics, so people can easily differentiate between your different characters just by looking at their unique shapes, and this game does that pretty well.

But I agree with qubodup about the mouse jumping, it should be fixed. The classic TD medals might be fun too, but I think that a medal system works better when your units have a threat of death or deletion for more efficient units or something, otherwise your units just get indefinitely better and better as the waves get harder and harder, which works just as well as medals not existing in the first place.

EDIT: Tried the new version, froze at wave 24, but it's still pretty easy. I think that a good way to up the difficulty would be to perhaps make different units better at defeating certain enemies (i.e. engineers more proficient at destroying vehicles, maybe a future anti-air unit to destroy helicopters), and forcing you to remove some of your old units to put in new ones to defeat the enemies in the next waves. This would give the game a sense of strategy, and will likely trip up people who didn't think and make them go "huh, so I have to think" and then they'll go on to try to beat it again. If you're going to do this, it might be necessary that you clue in the players on what to expect next. Since it looks like you like to send out mixtures of multiple different enemy units, a bar that moves down and telling you what enemy types to expect in later waves ala GemCraft would probably not make much sense. Perhaps you can give your waves witty titles and tell players the titles of the next waves so they can have a better clue as to what to expect, and they'll be more memorable so players have an easier time to associate their wave strategies with wave names than wave numbers, plus I think they'd be just cute. A couple of examples of these titles are "Guns A'blazing" when there will be infantry units, perhaps you can give them guns and/or flamethrowers to fight back, "Of Tanks and Men" when there will be tanks and men. Anyway, these are all random ideas I'm throwing out there if you need some, I am by no means saying that your game would be better or worse with these implemented or telling you what to do. Just have fun.

[Tabasco]

I need to look into the mouse issue some more. I know what you're talking about as it has happened to me, but now I can't seem to reproduce it.
Once the weather clears up and I get some time I'll just go out with my rifles and make my own sounds for it, but that might be a couple of weeks. I was also lazy with my defender and enemy tracking so toward the end of the game I'm using a lot more memory than I should be.
Your suggestions are appreciated and noted.

[qubodup]

> Mouse spasm
I think this has to do with windows, on my Linux system there are no problems of that kind.

> Shoot some sounds
Cool! If you do that, please provide the recording (best in lossless format, if you can record it that way) and please do release them into the public domain (or at least use zlib). I would volunteer to do cleanup and cutting work, if that's a bother for you.

I recently created a public domain army sound pack using public domain US military videos.

There is a serious deficit of free sounds with clear copyright information. (And I get the impression that weapon sounds are the most popular ones.)

> Lazy programming
I noticed a bit of slowdown on my quadcore when playing and watching a flash movie at the same time.

[Tabasco]

I managed to get out yesterday with some friends and we blew some things up for the greater good. Enemy unit tracking should be substantially cleaner now as well.
Full details in parent post.

[appleide]

this is awesome!!

One problem with my copy, however. My macbook screen is only 1280x800 so the bottom of the screen is cut off for me :/

[Xcmd]

Oh, no support for 1280x800? Then I can't look at it. Suckage.

[osgeld]

what kind of ball suckage is 1280x800

normal res is 1280x720, 960 or 1024

sounds like some ati and or mac crap to me

[Tabasco]

I figured most people could at least play it in full screen, but if that's not the case I'll have to stop being lazy and at least provide 800x600.

[Xcmd]

what kind of ball suckage is 1280x800

normal res is 1280x720, 960 or 1024

sounds like some ati and or mac crap to me

You've insulted my X1400, sir! Pistols at dawn!