- 1.1 Anniversary Update - 22 May 2023
Hello all, It has been a year since Dofense was released. Thanks to everyone who purchased and played the game. It hasn't reached wider audience, but I'm glad it has reached at least a few. I have read your feedback over the past year about the difficulty. As I spent past year working on Gods of Defense, I've developed better understanding of game design. I wanted to address the frustration that players felt when they were stuck in the early stages of Dofense. In the 1.1 update, I've added a progressive hint mechanism for all the main campaign levels. Every time you fail, a new hint will be presented about the strategy to adopt. After 2-3 failures you will be presented with screenshots of partial solutions. If you still keep failing a screenshot of the full solution will be available eventually. These hints are now available for the 27 levels that introduce you to the core devices of th…
- New mission with 3 new levels - 22 June 2022
Enjoy!
- New mission with 5 levels - 2 June 2022
Hi all, Just added a new mission with 5 levels. They all look similar but have very different solutions. Enjoy!
- v1.0.13 - Bug fixes - 24 May 2022
Changed the achievement grant code to address some errors Fixed a failure when demon hand destroys a tower that's about to relocate Fixed possible causes for duplicate enemy deaths Fixed a fatal crash that was caused when an enemy carrying core was stranded and then killed
- Dev plays workshop levels - 22 May 2022
Hi all, I'll be playing the new levels that players have submitted to the workshop. You can watch me loose at my own game ːsteammockingː
- Out of Early access - 16 May 2022
Hi all, The wait is finally over. Dofense is now ready and released. Thank you everyone who bought the game in Early Access. With your feedback in the past 6 months, the game has improved a lot. Your purchase was a vote of confidence that was very encouraging for a first time Indie developer. I hope you will enjoy Dofense. Since the last release a month ago, the following key things have changed. Campaign The newly designed Campaign differs in structure from the past. Before, the levels were organized in separate sectors. It was mainly done to manage the crystal count. The new approach organizes the levels in a branched structure so that you get to play levels with a wide range of crystal counts - from 0 to 100. It has been designed in such a way that at any time you will have several levels to choose from, in case you get stuck at one particular level. There are total 69 levels. These…
- Devlog: Campaign design - 29 April 2022
Hi all, Just wanted to give a quick update. The game is in the last stretch of the development. Past two weeks I've been focused on the Campaign design. All the playtime for designing the levels has helped me catch some rare bugs and I'm feeling good about the Level Editor. Here are some details about the new Campaign It will have somewhere between 65 to 70 levels It won't be divided into three sectors like before, instead there will be a single path of level progression The progression is organized so that you will be able to play levels at different crystal balance, from 0 to 100. At high crystal levels you get to see real power of the towers. There will be a central track where each new level will introduce you to a new mechanic. This track will have branches that will lead to missions. This is where you will get to play some fun levels. Any levels that were available before, but dro…
- v0.14.0 - Lips, Nose and more levels - 15 April 2022
Hi all, I wanted to create new artwork to have a consistent theme for different bosses. In that spirit, here is the new artwork for the Healer and the Overseer bosses. The healing is done with a Kiss of Health! Nothing more to say. You will have to play to see it. ...and the overseer (eye in the sky), is now spawned from a congested nose. Can't wait to hear what you think! New Content Introducing Sector 3. This sector will be a bunch of levels that you can play in any order. Each one will have a preset crystal count. In addition, these levels may have additional restrictions. For e.g., only certain tower kinds will be permitted or certain executive actions will be locked out. So the levels in this sector will be challenge problems that can be played in any order. At this moment only one level is available. More are in the oven! A lot of new levels in Sector 2. Total level count across a…
- v0.13.1 - 7 April 2022
Small fixes and improvements Fixed the workflow of what happens after you finish playing a workshop level. (now you go back to the workshop browser) Improved the sound fx for tower interaction. Added pleasant "pop" audio fx for tower build actions changed music files to mp3 format, with huge reduction in size on disk Fixed a bug that was causing diggers not getting spawned in certain cases Tower selection ring visibility was fixed. It used to disappear in some cases when relocating Removed some artificial delay in UI, making it feel snappy Fixed tab button color changes Fixed spike damage FX. When enemy has shield intact, the splatter FX is not supposed to be visible 3 new levels in Sector 2
- v0.13.0 - Steam Workshop support, New levels - 6 April 2022
Hi all, The Steam Workshop support is now in! You can publish your custom maps to the Steam Workshop right from the map editor. You just have to hit the "Publish" button. You can also play the maps that others have created and published to the Workshop. You just have to subscribe to them and they will appear under the "Workshop" tab in the Sandbox. The Sandbox browser was upgraded during these changes. It now shows thumbnail previews of the maps, making it super convenient to browse through your custom levels. There might be some small issues, which I will fix in next few days. Among other changes: 10 new levels. With these additions, Sector 1 now has 50 levels. More are on the way. Implemented jump visual FX for enemies when they move quickly to side cells as a tower is built upon them. This gives some sense of continuation to their movement. Fixed a bug that had broken Ghost spawning…
- v0.12.0 - The Demon Hand - 1 April 2022
Hi all, How are you doing? Happy April Fool's day! Finally it's here. The ultimate Boss! The Demon hand In the past iterations of this game, I had implemented a certain kind of mechanism for the enemy to destroy tower. It was usually in the form of some big enemy that will go around killing the towers. Recently when I wanted to implement the same functionality I tried to think how it could be made fun and how it could serve multiple gameplay purposes. That's how the Demon hand was born. A restless hand roams around the map doing things on whim. One of them is trolling the towers. It takes fancy to a certain tower. It will approach it. Ponder for a few moments making up its mind. If it doesn't like the look of the tower, it will turn into a fist and crush the tower in an instant. This may destroy the carefully crafted maze of yours, thus leaking a flow of enemy to your precious cores at…
- Devlog: What's coming next? - 25 March 2022
Hi all, It has been a couple of weeks since the last release. I've been working on a new feature. I was hoping to finish it by now, but it'll take some more work. This will be the last game mechanic before the release of the game. This mechanic will allow for longer battles with some fun elements. It's a new boss which has the ability to destroy towers and do some other nasty things. But is quirky enough to be fun. After this mechanic is done, I'll be able to focus on adding more levels. I've also started working on the Steam workshop support. It'll be ready soon too. Until then, stay tuned and play Dofense. Cheers!
- v0.11.0 - Cloud Saves, New Pathfinding AI, 2 new levels - 11 March 2022
Hi all, The new build is here. v0.11.0. Two highlights: Cloud Saves and new Pathfinding AI Cloud Saves Your game progress and settings are now saved safely in the cumulonimbus. When you install the game on a new machine your progress and settings will instantly rain there. Automatically! Thank you Steam. New Pathfinding AI As you may have read in last week's post, I have replaced the Pathfinding AI of Dofense from a third-party library to my custom solution. Since this is a deep change I spent many days testing different aspects of the enemy movement. As a result I found and fixed a lot of issues. Here are some bullets: It's possible to corner enemies so that they have nowhere to go. (No, this is not the same as blocking the path from the gate to the energy center). Such enemies go into stranded state and then they just move around aimlessly within the isolated area of their confinement…
- Devlog: Pathfinding rewrite - 4 March 2022
Hi all, I spent the last week replacing the Pathfinding AI from a 3rd party library (Astar Pathfinding asset for Unity) to my own. The Astar library is great for all the pathfinding AI it provides. However the requirements for Dofense are a very small subset of them. The Astar API is too high level to do some optimizations. Moreover its Asynchronous nature made the code unnecessarily complicated. I've written many simple path finding solutions for Tower Defense in the past 3 years. I had chose Astar over them because I thought its visualization gizmos will be a good feature to have and I won't have to debug issues at low level. But over the time that benefit wore off. In certain maps I saw the library failing to give correct results and I couldn't find the root cause. I tried some workarounds, which were ugly due to the asynchronous nature of the code. So I finally decided to switch bac…
- v0.10.1 - Balancing the economy, 12 new levels, 4 new music tracks - 23 February 2022
Hi all, v0.10.1 is here and it's filled with lots of new content. New levels There are 12 new levels - 8 in the first sector, 4 in the second. Two of them are replacements of old levels. If you watched me streaming during the "Games of Quebec" sale event, you may have seen me design some of these levels. It was a lot of fun. Each of these new levels is a kind of a unique puzzle. Balancing I spent most of the past week pulling my hair out as I was trying to balance the numbers that determine damage levels of each tower. ːsteammockingː I started by creating a spreadsheet and tried to estimate the equivalent damage that each tower would deal to enemies within a given amount of time. This was a good direction, but it wasn't much help eventually. That is because, if the damage dealt by these towers was so easily comparable, then the game would have been very boring. I'll try to explain. Out…
- v0.9.1 - 15 February 2022
Fixed the lava luck criteria to make the probability of catching fire on lava tiles fair. Fixed the interaction logic during skydrill input phase
- v0.9.0 Revamped level editor, rebalancing exec Actions, new music - 14 February 2022
Hi all, Here's a new batch of feature updates Level Editor Rearranged the UI elements for the level editor to conform to standards. Various buttons are now arranged in toolbars. The parameter panels are now tucked away into the context aware menus Implemented the validation checks. The connectivity between Enemy gate and Energy center is now tested before saving the level. I used my custom path finding code for this job. I will soon use it to replace the 3rd party path finding solution I use in the main gameplay, which will fix some pending bugs and improve the performance. Fixed several bugs and removed some drawing inconsistencies in the level editor. Executive actions update Re-implemented the Skydrill action that is used to destroy the terrain tiles and create new pathways. This is a unique strategic tool in Dofense and it needs some thoughtful planning. So the game now automaticall…
- v0.8.4 - 7 February 2022
Fix tower range issues. A crash that was observed when a laser is built within range of creep. This change will fix it. It should also fix some other behaviour, where enemies were sometimes ignored even if they were within range. Enabled support for resizing the screen. The game can be played at any resolution as long as the aspect ratio is 16:9. On some non-standard screen resolutions this may cause a problem. Now you can exit fullscreen mode by hitting "Alt+Enter" and then resize the game window to match your screen size. Please try to match 16:9 aspect ratio to avoid seeing misaligned UI panels Added a max limit of 4 on shock tower crowd damage for better balance Update hit VFX of laser on Creep removed "Shift+tab" hotkey to change timescale in reverse direction. This hotkey is used by steam overlay, so it's not a good idea for the game to use it in any other way.
- v0.8.3 - 6 February 2022
A quick fix for the bug introduced in the last build that broke the multi-gate levels.
- Gate AI Complacency (v0.8.2) - 5 February 2022
Hi all, I have been thinking about some changes to the Gate AI algorithm in order to make the gameplay more fun and not unreasonably mean. I tried one simple change yesterday and it worked quite well. This morning I refined it further and made it more fluid. Here are more details on all the changes. Gate AI Complacency The spawn strength of the enemy Gate is now adjusted according to the status of the cores. If the enemy units have captured a number of cores and they are in the process of carrying it to the gate, then the gate becomes more complacent about victory and starts cooling down. This results in the reduction of spawn strength. This gives the player some chance to recover from a bad situation. If he succeeds in freeing the stolen cores, then the gate starts becoming more agitated and regains its spawning power. This mechanism allows for interesting tug-of-war mechanism between…
