As the dust settles...

...in a small village in Somerset, away from the ravages of the monster, life carries on as normal.

Well, almost normal. I've now migrated entirely to Linux Mint XFCE from Windows, which is a bit of a system shock to say the least, but let's not go in to that...

So what's going on now?

New Discord Server

We have a new Discord server for everyone. The old "vanity URL" Discord server is lost, and Discord simply ignored my support requests. They are absolutely useless. The URL for the new Discord is: https://discord.gg/e8MnM4Qdm3 (this link won't expire but only has 100 uses, accounting for the rather limited readership of this Patreon blog).

If you were affected by the Trojan attack there's a #plague-hospital channel to discuss woes and remedies in there.

Sacked!

I lost my job, and got booted out of the office on 24th January. This is vexing, as my job was the primary source of funding for Puppygames. This has caused some degree of panic for Chaz who has no other income other than the meagre scraps we make from selling games (40% or so) and the Patreon support (10%) unless I top him up with cash (the other 50% he needs).

Got a new job!

... but not to worry because I've already landed another contract. Unfortunately it's not paid that great and I've got a 3 hour round trip to get to work and back which is going to cost even more money, so my time is going to be massively limited soon and my ability to keep Chaz topped up is strained. Not least because the short amount of time between leaving one job and starting another is enough to build up an entire year's worth of debt that I have to pay off.

Basingstoke

Chaz is currently working on the Basingstoke update. This adds a bunch of redone and new levels, with a proper end game, and fixes a bunch of annoying bugs, and possibly makes the game a fraction easier. Maybe even a couple of new items too. We'll see how it goes.

Battledroid

The current version of Battledroid up on Steam is at a bit of a dead end, development-wise, as I've taken a long and critical reappraisal of the game design, and found it wanting. The deletion axe is swinging, and I'm ridding the game of large chunks of design that evolved over the last 18 months or so because they just didn't add anything fun to the game. All that resource mining stuff, research, territory depth, attack strength, etc. is all gone, and it feels good. The deletions will continue until morale improves.