Guess what?


We recently added the ability to aim and fire weapons from the Flying Saucer! Awesome, right? So, anyway, I'm still trying to put together a mission or two for the new release. This time I took the Flying Saucer out for a spin on the new map, SB_Shrooms!




Fireworks, hey? You gotta love 'em.

Hey hogs!

This weekend I was messing around a bit on 0.9.19. One of our resident users, claymore, suggested that we needed more graves. Community suggestions are very important to me, so I took this to mean that he wanted me to kill all the residents of Hogville immediately! Here's what happened:




I think this might make for a neat mission or cinematic. How about you?

Things are gonna chaaaannnge around here! Heya Hedgewars fanatics! Lately I've seen a ton of you playing the Highlander DLC. With a bit of luck, we'll be releasing 0.9.17 soon. Thus, due to the growing popularity of the mode, we've decided to include it officially as part of the new release. That said, I've also tried to balance a few things where they felt lacking. Below, I've listed some of the changes I've made to the mode, along with my motivation for doing so. Feel free to leave a comment below or suggest other alterations. If you make good points (and can validate them) I'll consider it!

All hogs start with kamikaze: This allows you the option to get rid of "weaker hogs" who are stuck in some hole and otherwise incapable of killing themselves. Even your weaker hogs are now dangerous in that they might knock a stronger hog into the drink.

Extra Time removed: As I see it, this utility wasn't doing anything for the fun of the mode. Generally, you either get stuck with a hog who doesn't find the Extra Time particularly helpful (You'd rather have something to help make you more mobile), or it allows for stronger hogs to keep rampaging much longer--further upsetting game balance.

Vampirism removed: Players have complained that Vampirism generally allows for stronger hogs to live forever. Once a strong hog gets going it becomes almost impossible to stop them and the game soon becomes boring.

Mudball, Hammer removed: These two weapons are very situation dependent. While it's true not all hogs are born equal, I felt players would rather have something slightly more useful than be stuck with a hog that only has a highly limited selection.

Landgun is now considered a utility: This was a bug, of sorts. Now it's fixed.

With the addition of any new feature comes the challenge of learning to use it effectively. And so, I thought I'd write a post detailing some nifty tips and tricks you may or may not know about our recent release's new features.

HATS

Oh no! You went into the game and half of your team was missing their awesome hats. But don't worry, we didn't delete them. The hats have just been reorganized so that they show up better in groups during team creation. To fix this problem, simply edit your existing team and re-assign their hats. Be sure to check out some of the new 0.9.16 hats, too!

HORRIBLE KEYS ON SOME MODES

Most of you have already figured this out, but those are just the default key-bindings. Space Invasion and Tumbler utilize the existing key hooks in Hedgewars (i.e Precise Aim, Long Jump and High Jump). Thus, to play these these two modes effectively I would recommend creating a new team changing the bindings so your keys are closer to one another. You can do this by clicking the "Advanced" tab in the team creation screen.

SPACE INVASION

The object of this mode is to win the game by accumulating as many points as you can by destroying space invaders. While you may think this is as simple as just trying to destroy as many invaders as you can in the time limit, you'd be wrong! In fact, most points come from achievements. You can read more about the achievement system and how to earn them on our (relatively accurate) wiki article, Space Invasion.

Tip: Change the Mine Timer in your scheme settings to alter how many rounds the game lasts. You don't need to play a 3-round game, this is just the default value. A game can actually last anywhere between 1-5 rounds.

TUMBLER

In this mode you play a very powerful flying hedgehog.

Me too! What are these devs doing?!


It's been a few months since our last release, and while 0.9.16 is still a ways off, I thought I'd write a short post to let you know we haven't forgotten about you. We're working on it, and it's looking good. :)





A while ago I asked whether the community was more interested in our standard mission maps or the new gameplay modes that came with 0.9.15's release. To my surprise, most of you said, "Gameplay modes". The video above showcases one of the modes for 0.9.16 that I've been working on. It's pretty game-breaking (I love you unC0Rr!), but I hope you'll like it.


It looks like our next release is going to be a really interesting one. It should go without saying that we've squashed a lot of bugs, updated translations, and in general, made the game more awesome! There are some exciting new weapons, as well as a couple of new themes and maps in the mix. Other weapons (mudball, hammer, drillstrike) have also seen some surprising changes and mines will be even more deadly for those who know how to use them. We've also added some 3D support, better snow graphics, reworked the server, and we're continuing to add "much much more^TM".


Perhaps most importantly, we have been receiving an enormous number of applications for Google Summer of Code and with that comes the potential promise of many new cool features. I'm looking forward to see our GSoC student's projects grow into something great.


Good luck out there!