I'd like to announce the start of a public beta for the iPhone release of my popular Tower Defense game: Hordes of Orcs! To participate, you'll only need the Unity3D webplayer plugin -- I'm cross-compiling the game as a web game and an iPhone game. There's still a fair amount to wrap up with this game, but the gameplay features are all in place, the performance on-device is in the right ballpark and it's down to cleaning up the loose ends, making it look good, and balancing the heck out of the game. That's where you come in. I've been using a technology called the +7 Balance Engine to help with the game balance for the desktop version, and the iPhone version will be using it too. When you play, the game will send a summary of what game elements you chose, and how successful you were back to our servers for analysis. I'd also like to get feedback from everyone here about the game -- how it feels, how it plays, and thoughts on the level designs in particular. This beta will be ongoing as I wrap up the many loose ends of the game and the game balance comes together. The more you play, the more quickly we can get the game right. Since I haven't put in any how-to-play screens yet, here's how it works: Click-and-drag on the ground to pan around the map. Mouse wheel to zoom in/out. (This may be twitchy on Windows in particular; I'm working on it.) Click-and-drag on a tower or spell to place/cast it. (Except Fog, which is cast-on-click.) Don't let the orcs escape. There's a lot of rough edges with regards to visuals and user feedback, and some of the art is still placeholder (notably, the fixed-maze maps). Some more notable absences in the current build: Fog spell has no visual component. It works, you just don't see anything. Orcs are only slowed/sped up when they reach the next node on their path. No initial cost indication for towers/spells. No health indicators for orcs. Orcipedia button does nothing. But, without any further ado: http://scoreboardz.com/orcipedia/index Update: Build 100 was posted today, and we're getting very close! More feedback is always good though so please play play play (all the way to the end-game screen; win or lose) AND drop me an email with any comments!
i would like to participate. but when i installed that unity thing, nothing shows? like an app icon on my home screen. idk if it is suppose to do that but i would like to participate in this.
lol, i just noticed your name too, im philipino too xD. Oh and the game is actually enjoyable at this stage, ill let you guys know if i find any bugs.
cool testing it out, but quickly found an anoying bug, mouse wheel only zooms in... not out, both up and down wheel zooms in heh
D'oh. Sorry about that! Will get that fixed and have a new build up tomorrow (or rather, tonight...).
Ok, new build is UP! Textures don't get blurry (except projectiles which need to be replaced anyway), mousewheel works properly (and uniformly) on Mac and Windows, and so forth. I also have a big revamp to the beta page coming up real soon now that will include most of the content for the Orcipedia, which will deal with the issue of knowing how much things cost and so forth. That'll be up as soon as I get some SSH key issues sorted out.
So far the beta is pretty cool. The only issue I had was the pause button. It should show the play symbol when it is paused and the pause symbol when it is in play because it is the opposite right now and I found it a little confusing. I'm really looking forward to the final version. Hordes of Orcs on the iphone is a must buy for me.
Okay first I'd like to thank you for letting us try this beta, i love Td's and am gonna try to help you as much as i can Looks like a must buy in my book
Okay one problem im having is when the menu shows of which map, dificulty, etc. it starts on the first click. the problem is what if I want hard and the snow map but instead it only lets me click one thing and starts right away I have another problem because is that a clock/timer on the left side near the pause button because when I pause the game it seems to spaz back and forth numbers Is there going to be a zoom feature incorporated in the idevice and also endurance just wondering Another bug I have encountered is the lightning tower is not very respondsive as I was playing homage and they ground units and were in range but the tower did not attack
okay start a new game and make sure this symbol ">" is showing at the bottom left hand not "ll" this one and let it go for a few minutes and see what happens
The issue of what state to show for the pause/play and normal/ff buttons is something that we've been discussing internally for a while. I initially implemented it the way you describe but that was considered confusing too. Of course, at the time it was a single three-state button (pause, normal speed, ff). We'll discuss it some more and see if it makes sense to have the button indicate the next state now that we have normal 2-state toggles.
skyye06 beat me to it with a video clip, but installing the Unity3D plugin will give you access to a bunch of games (including Cartoon Networks' Fusion Fall MMORPG) besides this one so it's well worth doing. Unity Technologies keeps a list of some of the games built using their tech here. The main menu is unclear right now and needs to be re-evaluated, but the fixed-maze modes don't give you an option for difficulty. This is by design. The Open Warfare and Pachinko modes are a bit more open-ended but the Fixed Maze modes are meant to be more a set of discrete puzzles. That's a framerate indicator. What sort of numbers are you seeing while the game is paused? Should stay in the vicinity of 50 on even low-end machines. (For a standalone Mac/Windows build it hits 900 easily on my machine while paused -- 600 during intensive gameplay -- but due to a quirk of how browsers work, the Unity3D plugin generally gets capped at around 50fps...) Zooming is handled on-device using pinch/stretch gestures. What do you mean by "endurance"? There's some visual bugs I'm still working on with that tower. It behaves a little differently than the rest because it does damage continuously instead of in discrete shots. It may actually be doing damage even without a visual indication. Of course, if the orcs coming out are light blue, it won't touch them unless you've cast Weaken on them. Can you see if there's a file named "output_log.txt" on your hard drive and send it to me at [email protected]? -JF
