Mechadroids Round 2 & Update 1.0.1

Congratulations to the Mechadroids Hall of Famers from round 1! It was a tough round for some people and some vicious fighting took place for those highly coveted positions! The hall of famers will be remembered on the Mechadroids site long after the last Mechadroid has fallen into a crumpled cardboard pile.

That said, onto round 2 and update 1.0.1. The focus of this update is to fix bugs, tweak balance and introduce a few small changes into the game. The exciting new features will come in Round 3 (update 1.1.0).

So, stable that arm back on since it’s round 2… fight!

Here is the full changelog…
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DWS @ Welsh Games Development Show 2012

After a successful Mechadroids release we’re off to show the game off in our very first games show.

We’ll be attending the Gameslab Welsh Games Development Show on 22nd of June at Cardiff’s Millennium Centre.

If you’re free we would love to meet anyone who comes to see us! The show starts at 10am and ends at 3pm – you’ll need a ticket but the good news is that it’s free!

Grab your free ticket here!

Join the Fight! Mechadroids is Released!

Mechadroids is now available on Google Play! Download it free for Android and join the fight!

Start up your Large Hadron Colliders and brush the dust off your cardboardium armour! Fix that gammy left leg, slap on the paint and bring the Mech infused action to your friends and foes.

Download Mechadroids on Google Play

See our Mechadroids release trailer for a glimpse of the game!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWHEs8zRx78

Mechadroids Update 0.5.2

We are finally here. This is the last Mechadroids release (baring any game breaking bugs) before we push out to Google Play and rename to version 1.0.0! We have to say thank you to everyone who is helping us out by testing Mechadroids. This is the last push until we go live!

With this new version we bring you something else very special. We’ve completely rewritten our authentication / user system and we bring you the new Deadworld Studios ID system (DWID). You can log in with your existing Deadworld login details.

Keep an eye out for an announcement for Mechadroid’s upcoming release date!

Features:

– Added ‘Battle Points’ (BP). BP is gained from fighting other human players and can be used on some premium content
– Added ‘Rebuild’ premium item
– Added ‘Rebuild’ area. Allows you to change parts and colours of your Mechadroid if you have a rebuild item
– Player’s Mechadroid is displayed on the main screen once it is cached
– Added colour copy & paste functionality to Create and Rebuild areas
– Registration from Mechadroids now works
– Added one time help messages for some areas

Changes:
– [Server] Mechadroid images generated and cached on the server for much faster loading in Battle Overview
– [Server] Bots are now slightly harder than the last version
– [Server] Battle algorithm tweaked
– [Server] ‘Coolant’ premium item cost has changed from 100 frags to 300 frags
– [Server] ‘No Ads’ premium item cost has changed from 500 frags to 1000 frags
– [Client] BP replaces Credits in the Store
– [Client] Buy limit for coolant has been replaced with a daily coolant ‘use’ limit
– [Client] Key information in the detailed battle messages is now colour highlighted

Bugs Fixed:
– [Client] Various crashes from inactivity
– [Client] Customised opponent Mechadroid didn’t always load correctly

Mechadroids Update 0.5.1

Here is our first balance update for Mechadroids version 0.5.x. We’ve tweaked a few things and run a reset.

With each release we’re running a 20 question quiz. Congratulations to ‘Pringle’ won the prize of 300 fragments, ‘Dracuella’ won 200 fragments and ‘Inveracity’ won 100 fragments! We’ll be running another one today so feel free to drop by our IRC channel.

All participants will receive 50 frags and frags are premium content currency for Deadworld Studios!

Changes:
– [Server] Battle turn sequence algorithm has been improved to make it scale better
– [Server] Attack and defence attribute calculations have been improved for scaling
– [Server] Bot Mechadroids slowly gain credits each hour up to a maximum
– [Server] Credit stealing from lower levels has a much greater fall-off

Bugs Fixed:
– [Client] Players leaderboard is sometimes duplicated when returning from inactivity
– [Client] Crashes in players leaderboard when returning from inactivity
– [Client] Crashes in techlab/store/weapons lab/shields lab when returning from inactivity
– [Client] Adding a player from the ‘Recent Events’ could cause a crash

Mechadroids Update 0.5.0

We have a big update for you today! Mechadroids 0.5.0 has just been released!

We’re very proud to show off all the new artwork. The game has been brought to life with the style shining through. This is the last major release before we launch Mechadroids onto Google Play. Starting today we enter a month of rapid balance testing and so we need your support now more than ever.

For the next three to four weeks we’ll be running Mechadroids for week long rounds and then changing the balance to see how well the game plays out. During this time we’ll also fix any obvious bugs, show stoppers and quick wins.

We’re almost at the major milestone so wish us luck and we hope you enjoy the release!

Here is the full changelog…
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Heads Down Working Hard

This past month has been crazy in terms of development. Our contract artist has produced some excellent art that I’ve been concentrating on getting into Mechadroids. All the main features of the game are now in place so I’m wrapping up the loose ends. After that we’ll be ready for our next alpha release. Seeing how that goes we’ll then release it out onto Google Play (Android’s Market) as a beta!

We should have some exciting news to share in a few weeks time so I’m really looking forward to sharing more news soon! Ok… time for me to get back to work!

Mechadroids Update 0.4.0

After a few busy weeks of Ludum Dare, conferences, gaming nights and a successful world record attempt we still had time to continue working on Mechadroids so here is version 0.4.0!

One of the major new features is the much requested zero player activities. We’ve implemented this in the form of ‘The Hub’ where you visit the nearby city to complete one of four activities described in the changelog. We hope this introduces various ways for Mechadroids to help themselves out of ruts in the game and to successfully beat their foes!

We hope you guys enjoy this version. We’re getting close to the Android Market release!

Here is the full changelog…
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Mechadroids Update 0.3.0


What madness is this? Two Mechadroid releases within half a year of each other and four weeks none the less?! That’s right! Here is Mechadroids release 0.3.0!

A few exciting things have happened in the past three weeks. Our community member Inveracity has been very busy creating us a Mechadroid launch video for the previous version 0.2.0 and a full length Mechadroids theme tune! Our community is growing and we’re making good progress.

So, what have we thrown together for this release? A few exciting things. Firstly we have tweaked the balance of the game so try it out and see how it has changed. We have also added a contact system for friends and foes. You can now add players as a friend or foe using a long click anywhere you see a player name. This allows you to track how well you’re doing against your friends and allow you to attack people anywhere you see a name! In addition to this the detailed battle has new messages that are unique to each weapon and shield. It gives you important information regarding your foe’s armour weak points. Next time you fight it might be worth checking them out to get the upper hand in a fight!

Here is the full changelog…

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Mechadroids Update 0.2.0

We’re still here! *waves* Honest! After a lot of delays (Jargon moving to Australia and CWolf being worked to death, quitting, moving to Germany and going DWS fulltime!) we’re happy to give you our Christmas present early… a new Mechadroids update!

The new update brings in a few core changes/additions to the game play, general bug fixes and some much needed layout improvements for the smaller resolution phones. With the addition of the targeting system you can now target specific Mechadroid areas to attack. With your armour refit system you’ll be able to change where your strengths and weaknesses are. This brings a lot more strategy into Mechadroids that was absent in the last version. We’ll be eager to hear your feedback on this.

Two important points are that you can now opt-out of the daily Mechadroids report and more balancing is coming soon! The daily report is only sent if there is activity regarding your Mechadroid so for those of you who may have tagged it as spam you can now untag it as spam and deactivate instead. This would help us out a lot!

Alpha testers can now visit the Mechadroids download area to install or if you happen to have the old version of Mechadroids installed it will prompt you to update.

Here is the full changelog…

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Interfacing with UI #4 – Coherent UI

February 5th, 2016

This is part of a series of posts revolving around user interface design and development, the introduction and links to the other posts can be found here. Last I wrote about user interfaces I discussed the new Unity UI system and I wrote about our process of porting from Daikon Forge to it. That was a year and a half ago and a lot has changed since then. To keep things interesting we decided to move from Unity UI (yet another move?!) to Coherent UI and I’ll explain why we did it. Why Move… Again?!... (read more)

@SolitudeGame: Status update: Fuel reserves low. Asteroid mining facility detected on sensors. No response to our communications. On approach station appears to be abandoned and running on emergency power only. Away mission approved. Mission objective: Search and salvage - fuel is a priority.

23/03/2022 @ 11:00am UTC

@RogueVec: And so it begins! #RebootDevelop

19/04/2018 @ 8:05am UTC

@RogueVec: We'll be at @RebootDevelop this year. We can't wait! If you want to hang out just give us a shout! #RebootDevelop2018 #GameDev

16/04/2018 @ 12:06pm UTC

@SolitudeGame: Fullscreen terminals allow you to hook into your ship's guns for fine control! Moddable gun modules, terminals and UI! https://t.co/B5N01jrA70 #GameDev

8/12/2017 @ 4:58pm UTC

@CWolf: Woo! And, now we have a cross-compiled (nix --> win64) @SolitudeGame server in our build and deploy pipeline #RV #GameDev

28/11/2017 @ 3:39pm UTC