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[princec]

Help! Somehow all the droids in Omni-corp's droid factory warehouses have been activated and they have run amok! You must send in a virus drone to take over the droids and either capture or destroy all the activated droids before anyone can go back to work.

Click here to launch Droid Assault for Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.

Controls: WASD or cursor keys to move your droid. Use the mouse to aim. The left button shoots (either hold down or multi tap depending on your weaponry), and holding the right mouse button (Mac OS: hold space bar) enables transfer mode.

Before you can shoot you must first take over a droid by transferring to it. This takes a second or two - hold the mouse over your target with the right mouse button held down, and maintain a direct line of sight.

The cost of transferring to a droid is shown above it when transfer mode is activated and will range from 1 to 9 points. The number of transfer points you have is shown in the bottom right. Earn more points by scoring - you gain 1 transfer point for every 1000 points scored. You can have 10 transfer points maximum, so use them up!

The droid you leave when you transfer to another droid remains on your side. Don't shoot them! You can transfer back to them at any point for free. If you are yourself destroyed, you will immediately switch control to one of your captured droids, until your last droid is destroyed and the game is over. Your last droid has an automatic emergency shield which lasts 3 seconds when it reaches 0 hit points.

Gradually the strain of being under direct control wears out the droid you are currently using, and it will eventually end up fragile and will be destroyed easily by enemy droids.

This is ALPHA code!
- The music is, sadly, not ours to redistribute, and is sampled from Tectonic Plates. Buy it, it's great. But keep quiet about us borrowing it for now
- The graphics on the blurb screen and later droids are not finished yet and need fixing and tidying. Don't bother mentioning this to us, because we know!
- There are another 23 levels still to design, a bunch more tiles, and a whole load more sound effects to go in
- The bosses are temporary placeholders for real ones but largely will be the same kind of deal
- I periodically update the Webstart link above with fresh code and one day it'll vanish and that means we're in beta testing, which you can contact me about when it happens but not before please!

What we'd like to hear from you about
- If it doesn't run or crashes, your detailed system specs
- Whether you think it's fun and addictive, hard, frustrating, etc.
- Any oddities or bugs
- Whether the game starts too hard, or progresses too slowly, or gets too difficult too soon, or gets too boring
- Any cool suggestions

Enjoy yourselves and have a blast! See you on the hiscores table. (NO SWEARING PLEASE - you will be banned)

Cas

[Alex May]

Oh sweet. Can I get this running in a window? edit - found it

OK this seems great so far. I am not good with computer mouse though so it's hard to play - any plans for other control systems? Will play more later with my good mouse hand.

[jwaap]

Shitshitshit this is fun.

What I liked:
Fun fun fun robots!
Great powerup system, makes people care about their droids, but not too much.
Finding new droids is rewarding.
Graphics, of course.
Weapons! All sort of similar but they still kick ass.

What I didn't like that much:
It gets really dark when all enemies are dead. Sometimes annoying to find the exit.
Those turrets were annoying! My "shotgun" couldn't kill them as well. Perhaps make them a little more easy.
You sort of easily lost control.

Suggestions:
Instant transfer to your own droids, no matter where they are. Perhaps use q/e to swap between them. This might add more tactics.
More powerups?  It'd be more fun perhaps.

Great game anyway. <3

I didn't find it hard btw.

EDIT:

Completed the danger stage with like no health left, but couldn't find the exit because of darkness and died because I walked into a box or something?

Those things you cant walk over but can shoot over are really impossible to see. D:  Add some kind of flashlight or something?

My fav robot is the 4 eyed dual heavy blaster on btw.

EDIT2:

Forgot to tell, the first boss got stuck in the bottom center entrance thing, on the angled corner. he started flipping looking left and right real fast. He wasn't a lot of fun either though. Just shooting and seeking cover for a long time. I hope you guys work on that. Perhaps he should get sharp bullets also?   

[Ciardhubh]

Well, this looks like fun.

What I like:

• Graphics are very nice.
• The large variety of bots (at least as far as I got) makes it interesting and encourages to replay the game.
• Gameplay is smooth and fun.
• Minimode is a nice feature.
• Difficulty seems about right. You don't die too easily if you're careful and it requires some effort to stay alive.

What I REALLY don't like:

• You have to start over at level 1 if you die. That's too frustrating in my opinion. A checkpoint every few levels would be great.

A few things that slightly bothered me:

• It's hard to distinguish your bots from the enemy in the heat of the battle. I ended up shooting my own ones occasionally.
• As mentioned above, when you finish a level it gets too dark. The only way to find a route to the exit was to constantly shoot and bump into walls. Maybe add rotating red warning lights to walls or use a differently coloured lighting instead of turning off all lights.
• Stationary turrets should be destroyable. I think it's somewhat frustrating if you cannot destroy them. Plus your own bots don't survive areas where turrets are around. Edit: appearantly they are destroyable later on. Couldn't tell whether a certain minimum weapon strength is required, though. I was firing for quite some time on them before but they didn't seem to care .
• I couldn't use transfers very often; partially due to the cost of transfers and partially due to the fact that your own bots die very fast while not under your control. To me the transfer seemed important and unique. However by the time I needed a new body, my other bots had already been destroyed. It's not like the game should be easier but as some sort of unique selling point (if it's intended to be one ) it's used too seldomly.

[Alex May]

I think you really need to make it clearer how many transfer points you have and how many it costs to transfer to a droid. This should be something inherent like on the screen all the time somehow, and preferably on the droids themselves - in particular, the number of transfer points I have left should be on my droid somewhere or somehwere I can easily see it without taking my eyes off the action.

There are some enemies that look very similar to friendly droids. I recommend having all enemy droids use a similar colour scheme (say, all have dark blue or red eyes, while all friendlies have light blue). It's hard to tell them apart.

Also the screen area feels too small. I feel like I can't see far enough, and the camera centred in between the cursor and controlled droid is quite annoying and makes my eyes go funny. This is exacerbated by the dark graphics - I really wish some of it was a bit lighter.

I'd really like it if friendly-fire was off too.

The turrets are SUPER ANNOYING MAN

OK yeah the camera is really annoying me now. I always feel like the enemies can see me before I can see them. So maybe I have got the cursor in the wrong part of the screen... sue me!

[Eclipse]

the camera is perfect for me, and i found the game very well done in all it's parts

if i can complain against something it's that in a level your and enemies drones can shoot over a dark grey area but you cannot walk over it, that's can be also a nice thing gameplay wise in some occasions but it's too similar to the walls colour.
Also maybe will be nice to have the level brighter once you've destroyed the enemies and not pit black

[Alex May]

I really like the inner-space-ship feel of this, with the clouds of smoke going up and blinking lights, and the screens powering down when you shoot them. It's really great. The sound is superb too. Really feel like you're in a blaster battle.

It took me a while to figure out I could press the mouse button repeatedly to fire faster.

[DIT]

This game is really cool!

Just a couple of things:

The screen becomes too dark after you kill all enemyes.
You still have to search for the exit. But i can barely see the level.

I also agree with haowan, all the transfer "interface" should be more easy to understand. After all the transfer ability is one of the game core mechanics.

[Alex May]

Turrets should be shut down when you pass a level IMO. Navigating to the exit in the dark with the turrets still firing at you feels unfair.

It would be cool to be able to move upgrades between robots somehow, maybe between levels. That way I could take generators I'd picked up with crummy robots and put them in my shiny new ones. It would also be pretty cool to be able to repair robots between levels, maybe deducting amounts from score? The score icon you pick up in-game is a dollar-sign but I never get to spend this money. I'd really enjoy upgrading and repairing robots between levels, but I realise you're going for the arcade feel so I will understand if you disagree with all this

edit: camera still really annoying me >_<

edit2: Oh one more thing - i hate starting a level being surrounded by enemies. Any chance of some doors or something?

[Terry]

Nice I can see this being a lot of fun when it's finished.

A few minor issues for me:
 - The game is way too easy for my tastes. Personally I think a game should challenge you right from the start, but that's just me
 - There are some readability issues with friendly droids, especially later on when you meet enemy droids in different colours. I'm not quite sure why this was throwing me off, but occasionally I made a mistake and shot at a friendly droid by accident.
 - I never knew whether or not I had enough transfer points, and I didn't see anything on screen to indicate that

I'll come back to this, no doubt

[Alex May]

Just got to the level with the black spaces you can shoot over but not walk over. Did not enjoy, especially after shutdown, but at least you don't make me fall down through the gap :D

edit oh oh also, when I was playing this time some of the sounds were cutting out. At times my lasers were making no sound at all. Other sounds were still playing like the announcer voice, but even that sometimes cut short. Will try to reproduce.

edit2: yep still seems to be cutting sounds out now and again. Nothing special about my system, I have an Abit KN9s mobo with onboard sound and the Realtek drivers installed.

edit3: I don't understand why the robot under my control continually loses health and my other robots don't seem to?

[Alex May]

OK, 200k to beat mofos!

I guess a lot of my criticism goes away after about 50k points. The game gets a lot more fun when you have more armour and stuff, when the robots are a bit tougher and the turrets don't matter so much. In the early game the turrets are a huge pain, but later on they are just something else you gotta shoot.

The rocket robots are practically useless, especially the big bomb one. I'd recommend making hte splash damage a little more effective for those guys, something more like the exploder robot.

I guess I ran out of levels cos I was back to earlier levels but with tougher robots. One thing you've lost from the original Paradroid is the exploration of the ship. It's OK, cos this is an arcade game, and you need that level separation for things like resting and bosses I guess.

One thing I thought was that it would be nice to be able to save in the screen between levels - if I hit escape it takes me to the game and I expected it to take me to the menu. I then couldn't save until my shield had run out.

Also when you get to a boss, the EXIT LEVEL sign is stuck to the player, I guess that should only come up after the boss has been retired.

[Lazer]

edit3: I don't understand why the robot under my control continually loses health and my other robots don't seem to?

Robots under your control lose health, I guess to keep you constantly taking new ones.

I personally don't like having my favorite robot get crapped out because I like to use it. I really wouldn't mind this as much if there was a repair between levels option or something.

[Melly]

I like to idea of being able to exchange upgrades between bots in the in-between-levels screen. You could obviously create a cap for how much stuff a bot can have in him, and even with a very powerful bot it'd still be deteriorating slowly and you'd be forced to find new ones.

If you made that possible, you could also let your friendly bots pick up upgrades themselves that you could spread in the fashion you desire when the level is done.

Turrets should be disabled at the end of a level, yes.

Maybe friendly bots should be more noticeable than they already are so you can instantly tell when there's one on the screen even without placing your cursor over him (maybe some kind of light blue glow on them or something).

More interesting bosses would be nice. Ones that required different strategies to be taken down.

Very good effort so far.

[princec]

Uploaded a new one... tweaks are:
1. It's brighter when the level powers down
2. You can now capture turrets
3. The cost of capturing a droid is now proportional to the amount of damage it has taken
4. Fixed a couple of bugs
5. Turrets shutdown with the lights

Didn't have time for more today as the sun was out and I decided to drink Grolsch instead of programming. Hurrah!

Another upload with more changes soonish. Likely to add:
- Quick switch between droids using scroll wheel/Q+E/PgUp+PgDown
- A mechanism to stop you shooting directly at your own bots

Cas

[Alex May]

Doesn't seem to start at all now.

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

Slightly confused.. I downloaded, ran the java program and installed it but now I can't seem to play the game.. now when I run the install program again it says "Java initilizing", then nothing happens. Any tips?

[Ciardhubh]

Same here, the new version doesn't start. No error messages or anything after the web start splash screen. The previous version worked flawlessly.

On:
Windows XP, Java 1.6.0_05, Radeon X1250 (latest driver), 2gig ram and a 4ghz dual core AMD

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

I now get "download stalled" when I run the Java file. 
And as soon as I posted this, I kid you not, Droid Assault flashed and its running.
Um.. shit.. I thought I clicked play.. I had over 200k and the program just closed.. like level 40 ish? I was clicking back and forth to select a droid. Oh well I beat you Haowan! the game crashed, seriously. Dammit!!!! I had the sense to screenshot at 182k, in case my computer crashed


Oh well.. that's proof enough of a decent score 
Awesome game!

[princec]

Whoops, sorry, fixed now. You might have to uninstall the previous Droid Assault (Control Panel -> Java -> Temporary Internet Files -> View)

Cas