Farm Fortress

Here's some progress

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 18:34:00 +0100

It’s been kind of quiet around the blog, twitter and everything so here’s an update for you.

We’re working on changing the design/build mode and the way walls are put up. A new set of rules will be put in to effect and wall pieces will be placed in sections, sort of like tetris..

The new rules will not permit structures to be totally closed, or be made up of too long interconnected sections. Corridors will also be two tiles wide and every part of a design will be reachable.

It might sound like it would be boring to build under these rules, but this change is to make the game more fun, both when defending and attacking others. As much fun as building 8 layers of walls seem to be for some, it doesn’t really contribute to the game in a good way. Another upside with this new system is that an indestructible wall type can be used to build stuff. Fortresses will become more like mazes of death if this works out the way we hope!

You can try our simple mockup and get a feel for it (press space to flip pieces).

Enemy waves will be totally remade as well, to accomodate the three new enemies we will put in the first release (more will follow). Right now the initial difficulty is too high and will be lowered. Weapons will be more powerful and get a better reach, maybe cheaper as well.

But all this will also mean a wipe out will occur, and all progress will be lost. Only purchased lives and level sizes etc will remain.

We’re right in the middle of all this and can’t quite tell when it will be released, sorry!

We’ve added a new Tobias to our collection of...

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 18:22:28 +0100

We’ve added a new Tobias to our collection of Tobias’s - Tobias Larson. He recently contributed with these cool things, still work in progress but we like it already. Also, rabbits? Oh yeah.

New enemies incoming

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 08:46:53 +0200

Anim test of the four new enemies in the next update of Farm Fortress!

Motherbug, Flybeetle, Drillbot and Archeroid.

Minor updates

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 22:20:00 +0200

While working on all the new enemies, I also have pushed a few updates.

The main thing about them is that prices are lowered for lives and the starter pack is more value for money - you get 20 lives when buying it now. Price is the same. Also there’s an option to buy a very affordable 50 pack of lives for 8 bucks.

Fixed a couple of bugs, one was pretty severe and would occur when exiting the game while in the shop.

If you buy anything ever, you wont get that nag screen suggesting you to buy a starter pack.

We changed server configuration a little and scaled it down a little to halve the costs, but there’s still lots of capacity left. The real problem is to get people in the game, not scale it as it stands now.. Our hosting costs are around 100 USD / month now, and what the game pulls in does not quite cover it yet. But we still have money to run these machines for well over a 6 months now, so there’s no worry. As soon as we figure out a few good ways of getting traffic here we know it converts to money.

Feels like just a day a week is too little for this project, but I’ll keep working on those enemies and keep you updated!

Public stats - oh yeah?

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 20:15:00 +0200

Today, farmfortress.com has been updated to show live purchase stats!

I don’t really know how and if this will affect anything, but I do know one thing: The only site/game/business I’ve ever seen doing this is Minecraft.

Markus has had units sold on display on the site for years, even before he was a millionaire. Initially, he presented the total number of purchases, but as the game grew in popularity he started having a 24h rolling window of sales instead. Now I just think it’s slightly disgusting that those figures still are going up, and that one day worth of sales would power this project with me and Dave full time for well over a year :D

But I can’t really see the harm in being open with these numbers. Let’s just see if anything happens.

Server trubble

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 12:34:20 +0200

Hit some server trubble a couple of hours ago. I’m working as hard as possible to restore the webserver and the rest of the game, but right now it’s up to my hosting to assist me in rebooting a hung server.

I’ll keep you updated on twitter, @knurf.

What happens if you're Notch'd?

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 14:44:00 +0200

Edit: A nice long thread about it produced on reddit! Check it out for a few answers.

Yesterday our Farm Fortress tweet was RT by mighty @notch, sending it past his some 800.000 followers. Today I thought I’d share what came of it and what it has meant to our project (well short term, since this was yesterday). Here are some numbers!

August 16-17 (24h)

7863 visits, by new visitors.
54% were from the US.
3.95% use Internet Explorer, 51% use Google Chrome.
3614 confirmed game starts (= 14Mb download & multiplayer connection up).
378 players registered their email.
264 players have also verified/activated their email.
228 hours collective playtime (registered users only).

Rather immediately, our web front end machine chocked out of low memory. This was discovered to be caused by two things.

Firstly, I had forgotten some (soon to be added) database request code on the front page. The generated queries were not even optimized yet, as the function wasn’t meant to be online.

Secondly, web server is hosted on a VPS which does not allow you to have swap space. This may have been the worst factor. Memory quickly ran out and I could not send a single command to it, or connect via ssh. This affected the game since it requires a http response when it loads a list of game servers of the web server. Obviously the page embedding the game could not load either. The game data was loaded from a CDN.

After a while, I found an option to temporarily boost memory for the machine on the fly, and that help getting the site responsive again. I could then also remove the unused but heavy database queries.

When notch retweets something, within seconds he sends a horde of 1000 or so users (and bots) to jump on your site and try to load it. This sudden wave should be manageable, but kills a lot of small sites.

Some really good news - it looks like I underestimated the load on the game servers, making the game a (potentially) better business. Technically the game can be compared to a very dynamic and persistent multiplayer 2d counter strike, for each player the server runs a full game simulation (even if player is alone in the fortress). This means grouping players together improves performance, but we can also handle a lot of “loners”. At most the game servers had 50-60 players on them, but causing very little load. A cheap AMD Operton will easily handle 150 instances by itself, maybe even over 200. Hopefully we’ll see that one day.

Having a small project and getting Notch’d is the equivalent of throwing a cup of gas on a little fire. It’ll burn real nice to start with, but pretty soon it will need some better fuel to keep burning.

Big update 0.85a

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 19:45:42 +0200

It’s been a while and we have been busy. Here are the biggest changes.

Strongholds & optional PvP mode. Playing against other real players is something that can be enabled or disabled now, this is to reduce frustration when someone demolishes your fortress without you knowing that the game is a PvP game. The blue entries in the attack list are strongholds. They are automatically rebuilt after destruction. Anyone can attack a stronghold, not just only the ones playing PvP, so real players can meet and battle there even when they are not putting their fortress at risk.

Ranking has changed again to now include saved money, but with a 30.000 grace. An attacker can now steal 10% of your saved money, by hacking into the tent.

You can also customize your own floor pieces, by drawing or importing something directly into your fortress and the game. This is immediately visible to others as well as you.

If you run out of lives, there is an option to invite someone to play the game to earn lives. The invited user also gets a great start with 25.000 in cash right from the start!

Other things to mention, your personal fortress page with stats and a snapshot is now visible at http://farmfortress.com/fort/<username> Here’s mine

Play the game is easier than ever now, since neither registration or activation is needed to start and try the main features out. See for yourself!

0.83a maintenance release (sort of)

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 12:09:00 +0200

Here we go with a small maintenance update. Biggest changes in this is probably nurfed biowaste sentry and machete has a usage limit. On the upside, targeting has been further improved for regular sentries and a crash bug has been fixed. It should also be a little easier to get scrap metal drops now.

The machete limitation is pretty kind, and the shop currently has an dull-machete-exchange program going, where a fully used up machete can be sold for the same price as a new one. Thus, getting a new knife with a trade in blade will cost you a measly $500. The limitation is mainly to reduce the amount of (unrealistic) destruction players can cause on walls, using a machete.

Robot adjustments to make it less prone to give up and the flame-thing a bit more powerful.
Biowaste grenades deal less damage, their main purpose is to slow down enemies
Targeting further improved for sentries, now works even better especially against robots.
Fixed a crash bug that occured if a (firing) homing sentry was placed on rails
Fixed a few issues with the online user status system (not in public use yet)
Scrap metal is dropped by laser robots and entry level robots, nuker and shotgun robots drop the cpu.
The register now sign on the login screen stopped working, it has been fixed.
The shotgun (Reverend) deals a bit more damage per shot.
The machete has a usage limitation, then a new one must be bought.

Update 0.8a

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:54:00 +0200

Game world was reset! Here are the TOP 50 players with screenshots of their fortresses, just as they were before the reset! A few of them are abandoned and destroyed, but some like this one below, are great. Sorry I had to delete it!

This is the biggest update yet, containing several game play changing elements! Here’s a quick intro to the most important things

First of all, the number of sentries one can build is limited to 25. Don’t worry how ever, sentries are a lot tougher and each sentry can also be upgraded in 25 levels. Upgrading increases impact damage, armor, reach and improves the chance that the sentry fires a special effect shot.

Every sentry (except the homing missiles) now has a special effect. Chance and sentry upgrade level decides if a fired shot is carrying special damage and a particle trail follows that particular shot.

Bleeding - Causes damage over time for organic enemies (blobs, beetles)
Corrosion - About the same as bleeding but only affects mechs (sentries, robots)
Poison - Damages organic creatures over time, but effects are vastly limited if the poisoned one does not move.
Stun - Target gets hit by a massive energy bolt that stuns if briefly, this works for any enemy.
Paralyze - A more effective form of stun, but only effective against organic enemies.
Slow - Slowness halves the movement speed of moving enemies and doubles the reload time when firing. Effective against all.

We also finally got around to showing the real numbers of items in the design mode. This will give valuable information about the strength of walls, specifics about a sentry or even the growth information about a plant.

One new sentry was also added, the grenade lobbing biowaste sentry. It fires over walls and explodes in a puddle of dangerous goo. If someone steps in it, they receive damage and also run a risk of catching slowness.

Enemies and players under damage effects are marked with a similar effect to the one that the special damage shot has.

There are new weapons and items in the shop as well.

Sledgehammer - a powerful automatic shotgun that fires very fast and hard.
Wastemaker - a rapid firing bazooka, capable of some serious destruction.
Supercharge - a drug that makes the user fast and invulnerable at the same time.
Full-aid - more potent healing than first aid, and also cures slowness.

These new items also require rare items that are rarely dropped from different enemies. We’ve added 4 kinds of enemy drops to collect. They can also be sold for some cash if things are tight.

Glob - nucleus of a blob sometimes remain intact and can be useful.
Carapace - the shield of a beetle is very useful when in one piece.
Scrap metal - mechs can sometimes drop useful high tech components.
CPU - the robots can in addition to scrap metal leave their CPU behind which can be reprogrammed and used in various projects.

In addition to all this, we also have a lot of changes and tweaks added. Here is a list of the major stuff:

When harvesting plants, the color of the leave particles changes depending on plant.
Price increased for burst laser, minigun and kalashnikov. Minigun also requires crafting.
Blast damage is reduced to 1/3 for the causer of an regular explosion from own grenade/missile.
Walls are more expensive than before.
Added discounted ammo pack of 250 bullets to save a few right clicks.
Age old shadow updating bug has been fixed and some optimizations applied.
Added a register sign on login screen.
The amount of damages caused by and harvest stolen by an attacker is tracked and shown.
Killing an intruding player now gets you $2500 per life, was $250.
Robots will no longer step on regular sentries, it will try and burn/shoot them down instead.
Beetle shots can sometimes be poisonous.
The green blobs can now give you slowness, if you get too close.
Building walls has much less impact on the ranking score.
Sentry targeting in straight corridors work better, especially against larger targets.
Camp cool down increased to 45min after a player attack.
Amoebas in general are quicker to get agitated and chase a player.

Please help us out and balance/test it! Go play now!

Release monday

Sat, 19 May 2012 23:32:36 +0200

So right now we’re aiming to release version 0.8a and reset the game on monday.. The new version is a almost a different game, in a good way!

There will be more info here soon..

Progress report

Wed, 02 May 2012 09:17:00 +0200

Hi people, we’re busy adding and aiming for a bigger release now. Since activity is currently low on the game (we have not released it on other sites yet) it will be easier to tune it in if there are any bugs.

The next update will have several big changes to the game, possibly making a restart needed in order to keep a reasonable balance. Here are the most important changes:

- Droppables, enemies drop different kinds of rare things to be collected. These can sold or used to build weapons that can’t be bought with regular funds alone. We’re adding a few new weapons for this.

- Special damages/effects. Some weapons and sentries will get different kinds of damage effects, like poisoning, paralyzation, slowness or corrosion (like poisoning but for mechs). We also have a list of more effects to add to the game further on..

- Most weapons will be weaker and have their reach reduced. The laser will how ever be more dangerous but reload really slow, making it more useful for sniping.

- Repairable/upgradable sentries. The concept of sentries is being reworked, and most sentries will now have a special damage. We won’t be adding new sentries, but rather making the ones existing much more interesting. Upgrading a sentry now gradually improves range, damage and chance of special damage. After an attack, you must also take care to repair any damages.

We’re expecting all of this to be really out of balance, so hope to see you in the updated game, real soon! It will be released well within this month, for sure.

Update 0.72a

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:18:00 +0200

Yeah, more bug fixes! For the record, I am very keen on adding new stuff to the game, but I am also a responsible parent and we really needed to address a few more bugs.. Here’s the list:

Can no longer enter design mode or gear shop when there are less than 10 seconds before a wave.
Fixed an little known exploit that could be used to accumulate infinite cash (Thanks Mythrrinthael..)
Sentries blocked some paths AI-wise, that should be perfectly passable, crippling path finding for beetles and blobs.
Robots and nests now look different from other enemies on the radar.
Multiple tweaks to path finding logic for all enemies for improved behavior.
Improved activation of real cash purchases and some cannot be claimed when room is under attack.
Added a status box that will pop up when logging in after something was purchased for real money.
A problem occurring after firing the laser or bazooka a lot has been fixed.
Values over 10000 in the panel is now shown in thousands with a ‘K’ appended.

We also just did something of a road map for the coming 6 months or something, we’ll add it here soon. Lot’s of exciting things are being added!

Update 0.71a

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:37:00 +0200

This is a fix for the homing missiles (yes, they work now I promise), and an attack/rank rules related change.

- The bug was very tricky and did not happen all the time, at least not for me. It could have been caused by potentially several issues it had, but the real problem lie in that the missile failed at disabling the sentry that spawned it as a collidable. This was further hidden by the fact that it instead tagged itself as uncollidable (with itself) and that it did not always collide with the spawning sentry either. Aaaanyway, it’s fixed.

- The rank/attack rule has changed so that a player cannot purposely sell all of his structures and thus lower his rank to a much lower level, attacking the farms there. This is implemented so that you cannot carry more money in cash than the target is worth. So, attacking a farm at rank 400 requires you to have less than 400.000 in cash, or the game won’t allow it. This limit is enforced when a player has more than 100.000 in cash, otherwise things are as before.

Also a few minor glitches were fixed, but I forget what.. Probably not very common cases I guess.

Update 0.69a!

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 01:21:00 +0200

I’d like to update the game every week, but the tutorial just took too long time to get into place. And as an registered player you won’t even see it! That’s why I also fixed lots of bugs and fiddled with the rules quite a bit. Lets try this one out…

Fixed a bug that caused forest to grow back in certain cases when entering design mode
Sentries have much increased energy; rifle from 100 to 150, minigun from 140 to 400(!), laser from 120 to 300(!), homing from 100 to 300 and plasma from 180 to 250.
In-game tutorial for new users walking them through the essentials in 15 steps.
Fixed a bug with targeting in homing missiles to hopefully stop them being unnecessary suicidal.
Robots are now not as interested in walking over sentries as before.
Nukes have a decreased blast radius and are more expensive to buy.
Nests does not make metallic sounds when hit anymore.
Mobs and players will now clearly flash when sustaining damage.
Player now makes a grunting sound when damaged by blobs.
Speed drug now costs 5000.
The immortality drug now costs 20000 and last for 7.5 seconds.
Missiles cannot fire over infinitely long walls anymore, flyover limit is ~3 tiles.
Fixed a bug with shop and the backpack item that could break under some conditions.
Fixed a bug with nests spawning on the edge of the map causing delays.
Robots now have more energy (500,650,800,1200)
Fixed a bug that caused players to be denied to login due to system not logging them out correctly.
Updated graphics for death animation of beetle.
Nest has updated graphics and does not cause permanent debris on the level after being killed.
Homing missiles does not leave odd metallic debris after detonating.
The invisible remote player bug fixed.

Well, you’ve read about it, now go play it!

Update 0.68a!

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:52:52 +0100

Time for a small update people. Again, to fix a few bugs/security issues, but also to add something cool (and at the same time make stuff slightly easier to comprehend for new players).

Added a powerful plant tool to inspect your crops. It will countdown until they reach full maturity and then countdown until they rot and restart their cycle.

It was possible to attack players repeatedly by using either allies screen or the event screen, regardless of the 30 min cool down. This is now checked serverside and should not be possible anymore.
Railed sentries move twice the speed to make them harder to hit.
3 tiles from the rail had significantly lower energy than others and were easily broken (end pieces).

Other than this, today we completed the first round of planning for a in-game tutorial. It’s pretty boring basic stuff, but quite essential to maximize the players we get. It will take some time to complete, but hopefully we can add small things along the way to keep the game feel fresh.

Update 0.67a!

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:56:00 +0100

Very minor one tonight. There has been a lot of timezone issues since launch which hopefully have been corrected by this update.

The most notable bug this caused was that it disabled the attack cool down timer that was supposed to stop people from attacking the same fortress over and over.

We also gonna try dropping the minimum rank range required to 5 from 75. We’re crazy like that. Have something to say about it we’d love to hear it, in our new forum!

If you haven’t hit that Like button or G+ button in the site, please do. We need all the attention we can get right now!

Possible update tonight

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:03:49 +0100

Aiming to do an update this evening, it will be another round of fixes. Mainly the attack countdown that should protect a fort from many successive attacks is broken and does not behave well.

We will also change the limit of ranking required to attack others. Might have been a bit on the steep side of things with rank 75, so now we’ll drop it to 5-10’ish. This is to promote more activity in that fairly large group of player that are hovering under 75 right now. There was big, immediate drop in activity after we added that limit.

We’ll also be reminding the people who signed up but have yet to activate their accounts (Hm, I guess chances are pretty slim they read this blog). There are hundreds of users to activate in this group.

Minor Update 0.66a

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 08:02:00 +0100

I had to rush a small update this morning. Turns out the 75 rank limit was not properly implemented in all paths, and you could by-pass it and wreck fortresses that should not be attackable at all.. The exploit has now been patched.

Sorry about this, but this is an early game in alpha and part of this is to learn and fix issues like this. Hope you are not too discouraged!

Update 0.65a!

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 20:48:00 +0100

This evening I pushed yet an update.

You can no longer attack others unless you reach a rank of 75. This means you need to build up a pretty fort first! You cannot attack anyone under the rank of 75 either. The number 75 may be too high or too low, so let’s feel it… We want to give new players a chance to build up an interesting fortress and not be decimated every day. A higher ranked fort will be better at holding its own without the owner online.
Ranking computation is now based entirely on the investments that are standing on your level, not your weapons (or half the price of your weapons, as it was before).
A major stack corruption bug has been fixed. This has caused various crashes during attacks and prolonged playing (or both).
Nests cannot spawn under rails or floor any longer. They will spawn under plants still, that is by design.
Problems with the robots flame gun and path finding have been addressed, making him more dangerous.
Enemy spawning could overflow a level with enemies in certain camps (this could in some cases even crash the game) and enemies often spawned on top of each other. This has been resolved now and the enemy flow has been improved.
You can only carry two nukes at a time now and their price is up to 5000.
The world wide fortress top list now lists the top 20 fortresses instead of 10.

As always with this flexible, young alpha project - nothing is set in stone, let’s discuss the changes if you feel something is horribly wrong (or right)!