Ok, I changed some stuff:

Nerfed the railgunners a bit. They still do all the same stuff except they now drop $250 instead of $60, they come in smaller numbers (unlike the sand people) and they don’t try and dodge walls.

Nerfed the pipebomb guys a bit. They drop $100 now, up from $60.

Made the portal particles purple so they stand out against a white background.

Made the win text less vulgar.

Made the achievements a bit more logical. The spanner doesn’t count as a weapon anymore, and you can’t get the no structures achievement unless you NEVER build a structure in the area (selling them all before the end won’t work anymore).

You can preserve your progress by overriding the “config.ini” in the new version with the “config.ini” from the old version. Checkpoint saves won’t copy over though.

got a feaure at:

http://www.crudepixel.com/en/features/spotlight/74-drone-real-time-action-strategy

good review, good website.

Also, a dude named DarkWolf2 mentioned drone in a thread so that’s awesome.

http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=912410

I also made some alternate sprites the other day, here is a mockup of what it might look like in the game. I think this one is better than the other one, not as unique, but more functional and plesent on the eyes.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

I kind of think the texture on the background looks a bit cliché, but isn’t it supposed to? It’s like crates in first person shooters.

does this look better?

Drone got a mention on Jay is Games which is cool, didn’t find out until a fellow developer mentioned it to me though which is kind of funny.

http://jayisgames.com/

Speaking of which, he’s the creator of boxycraft, this physics platformer that’s kind of like phun (if you’ve ever heard of that) except with a goal.

Worth checking out if you’ve got a spare moment.

http://boxycraft.wordpress.com/

Got a feature on game jolt!

http://gamejolt.com/

Which is an awesome freeware portal that shares ad revenue with developers. (probably the only one actually)

Also I spent last week pestering Bytejacker to have my game on Free Indie Rapid Fire.  They didn’t put it up for some reason (probably the higher than normal system requirements) which is cool, but Joe Larson gave me some useful feedback which is all good and they put my video in the episode ><

It’s embarrasing but kinda cool at the same time. At least I know they watched it and Jon spent a few hours editing my ugly mug into the episode.

So I still love them

Honestly though, Bytejacker is a fantastic show, and it’s been quite inspirational watching their viewer base grow over the last year and a bit. I found it about 13 months ago when they had < 100 viewers. I remember thinking that these bastards work damn hard in a really competitive market (youtube) and hoping that one day it would pay off for them. Well they’re getting there, they got sponsored a few months ago by Revision 3 and their viewer base is in the 1000’s now. So cheers to them!

Speaking of freeware games; I found a couple last week that were pretty god damn awesome.

I can’t be fucked getting the links, but look up “Infectionator!” and “Battle Jump” if you’re bored.

I managed to get the cpu usage of the tutorial down by about 50%.

This + lowering the in game resolution should make it run even on a shit laptop with on board graphics. (except Jasmine’s because that thing isn’t even a computer).

So what I did was make all the bricks that make up the walls one massive brick, and that got it down from 30% CPU usage on my computer to about 22%. (this reduced the number of instances in the tutorial from 600 to 90)

Then I discovered through the process of elimination that the glow around the text in the tutorial was also causing it to hang. I didn’t think drawing text was such a big deal. I used this common method of drawing borders which is to draw the text you want 5 times. once in the middle and then 4 more times offset around the outside. (like the dots on the “5 side” of a die)

Anyway,  taking that glow off reduced the CPU usage on my computer from 22% down to 14%. Seems pretty absurd that “having a nice glow” around the text doubled the CPU usage. It’s like a hood ornament that doubles the weight of the car.

This needs work of course, it looks much better in the game with the parallax scrolling on it. But you get the idea. It also needs colour.

I’ve decided to re-do all the art for the next part which will hopefully be done within the next 12 months.

It will look something like this:

These are not finished.

The idea is that it isn’t robots in space, but some sort of flesh creatures in some kind of nightmare.

Ok, I’ve totally re-done the areas.

• Every wave will now only spawn one type of enemy instead of a mixture of all available enemies.
• The values for the enemies is now different per area.
• Wrote an introduction for each area to give you an idea of what strategies might be most useful.
• Added a new colour (blueish)
• Added easy mode
• Made the minigun 10k instead of 15k
• buffed the railgunners a fair bit
• buffed the exploding pistolbots slightly
• changed the player colour ever so slightly
• stopped the tank driver from dodging
• added a new ultra mega boss at the end of area 6
• made the hardness of the individual waves a bit more random
• added this harvester thing a acouple of the areas. the harvester generates money, and should be protected.
• the “next wave” button is now spammable.

So there’s axe area, gun area, explosives area, no bosses area, all bosses area, and everything area.

Anything goes in the axe area, so it’s the first place you start.

The gun area now favours bases with nodes around the outside and the player with a gun or a tank.

The explosives area is highly anti-base.

I added a new kind of unit that periodically drops money. You start with 2 of these, but you can’t rebuild them if they die.In the area with no bosses, these things move around the place so you want to follow them with either a tank or on foot. Alternatively, building a cluster of long range turrets in the middle might also work later on in the area.
In the all bosses area, there are two of these money generating units, but they don’t move. However, they are placed far apart, so you can try and keep both alive by building 2 small bases around them (hard mode), or just one of them (normal).

In the last area it’s all the enemies together with a mega boss at the end.

I’m going to have to tweak these changes a bit over the coming weeks, but I think they feel pretty good at the moment.

Ok, I made some more changes:

- FIXED THE MENU. (it should no longer screw up your firing)

- There are 2 difficulty settings now. (Normal and Hard)

- The red thing that appeared when you stood still now has a button that can be used to turn it on and off permanently.

- Made the red thing look better. (3 instead of 4 points that now move in and out as well as round in circles)

- I also changed the way weapons are equipped from your inventory.

drone also got a review at:

GMC review

Not the most positive review, but all feedback helps

Thankyou Mark13673!

drone got featured on Pixel Prospector – an awesome site about freeware games in development.

I’m also going to be doing something about the player drone being more obvious on the screen either by changing the colour of it or by adding some kind of button to make the cross permanent.

I also changed the website around a bit to make it look less shit.

It’s also on http://www.freewarehub.net/ and http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/shooter/drone-part-1/1686/