Aaand, it seems that Event.ScrollWheel doesn't get fired in a webplayer with Unity3D. I'll have a build up tonight that uses keypresses to zoom in/out. (The old way I was getting mousewheel data returns very different values on Mac/Windows -- hard to normalize it across platforms. The "preferred" way doesn't work at all from webplayers... Bah.) -JF
Right. So. I've worked around the mousewheel issue (which appears to have been limited to some Macs), AND I've got the new beta site up that will over the next day or two be fleshed out with all the nitty gritty numbers and fine-detail that you'll want for getting deep into the game. This will also form the basis for the Orcipedia. -JF
Ooh, nice. Hordes of Orcs is my favorite TD game on my Mac because it has got crazy amounts of variety. This one seems a little limited right now, but it ain't shabby thus far. The 2D view takes a bit getting used to, but it actually works fairly well. Some suggestions: - Switch the play/pause and tower/spell buttons: it's just odd to press pause to play and tower for spells and vice versa - list tower upgrades (increased damage and range, etc. when applicable); right now I just feel like I'm blindly clicking on upgrade not sure how much it's going to do for me - also knowing the initial cost of a tower would be good - walls still feel pointless to me. Why build one when you can put an arrow tower instead? - It would be nice to know what wave I'm on rather than the game abruptly ending. - Will there be an infinite mode (at least for Open Warfare)? Will Crossroads be available, too? I prefer twice the madness. - Are you planning on including the big bosses as well? - I kind of miss the bait spell. Still nice to be able to teleport them back to the entry gate. - Any possibility for (optional) health bars for the orcs since I can't click on them in this version? It would be quite helpful knowing whether they're close to death or still need a good beating. That's all I can think of right now. Off-topic: Is Revenge (of the Orcs) still coming for PC/Mac? I still would love to see any more detail on this.
Yeah, that's making more and more sense now that we've split pause/play/ff into a pair of two-state toggles. The orcipedia will have full details soon. Well, to be honest I want to encourage the use of walls because lots of small towers is computationally expensive. I'm looking at some tweaks that'll encourage fewer, more powerful towers. You'd then want walls to ensure that the orcs spend as much time as possible in range of a given tower. Might make walls a bit cheaper, or might make arrows a bit more expensive, or even some slightly more exotic schemes like having new towers get progressively more expensive (based on the # currently on the board) -- thus encouraging purchases of upgrades / walls. I agree. I miss Bait, and Grattantrons as well but each of those puts me over-the-line on some resource that I don't have enough of (CPU and fill-rate respectively). Infinite mode might be possible in a point release, but the code for the desktop version isn't suitable here; it would need to be reimplemented. A legacy of the desktop version's ability to launch waves early. Crossroads wound up being a bit of a weak-sauce game last I tried it due to the limited number of orcs I can have in play at once, but I'll take a look at bringing it back. I'm definitely looking into this. Not in the form that I showed off on Freeverse's forums, I'm afraid. Art costs wound up being prohibitive. I'm considering options for the game model though. -JF
It would be nice if this thread was updated more often. I figured I'd see whether the beta was updated and so it was again as of a week ago. It's nice being able to see health bars now. The towers/spells menu icons still ought to be switched. It also would be good to see the number of waves and current wave. I really hope there's going to be and endless mode for each map since as of right now the high score table seems a bit superfluous with the beta being so easy to breeze through. The game definitely doesn't feel nearly as challenging as the desktop version.
Sorry, I tend to bundle things up into weekly updates just to keep the release overhead minimal. There's a fair bit of behind-the-scenes stuff going on when I do an updated build (communicating with people involved in the project, manual QA run to make sure nothing is broken on the webplayer version due to the rube goldberg process I use to be able to make a dual-build, checking the bug DB for new showstoppers, etc). The build I'm tying up and readying for release Any Minute Now (well, more like a couple hours at this rate!) addresses this: I've ditched the tower/spell toggle and just have the spells lined up vertically on the right. For speed-players who don't like using pause, this will make spells have less of an opportunity cost due to the time needed to switch states back and forth -- not to mention the benefit of simplified usability. Endless mode ain't gonna be in the shipping version. It's possible it'll make it into a point release though. It sounds like I still have some work to do in terms of balance and difficulty! I want the easy mode to be quite easy of course, but harder skill levels should be presenting more of a challenge. Please be sure to play as many games as possible so I can see the win/loss data and get a good sense of how the game stacks up for people! The data is VERY helpful for balancing the game and I can always use MORE MORE MORE! -JF
Build 102 is up... Just so y'all know, build 102 is up featuring a bunch of bug fixes, UI improvements, and a few gameplay tweaks!
Hey there, just checking to see if further progress has been made? Would love to be able to play Hordes on my iPad!! Cheers, Rich
With it being a year later, in which there's been complete silence, I doubt the game is being worked on anymore.
Well, it's definitely been a rather long and winding road, but the game is slowly but surely progressing. The game reached a point where I was happy with it and ready to launch it in about November, but the publisher decided that it needed to have artwork that doesn't totally suck. So I've been waiting on an artist they hired who is absolutely amazingly talented and have been busily integrating his work since I got ahold of it. This has involved a number of code changes as he went with a pseudo-perspective-view, a la Fieldrunners, and a ton of work in terms of minimizing sprite sheet sizes, making tradeoffs about the resolution of sprites to keep memory usage sane, etc. I'm afraid I don't quite have a build with the new artwork ready to show yet, but it IS coming. -JF
