The Defence of Lushington Springs

After a fairly hectic few weeks with Uni and work, I finally managed to get a night off and sit down with Lushington. The aim was of course to correct the bugs that have been in the game for a few versions now.

The biggest one in my opinion (and a few of yours) is that of the ‘End Level’ achievements not being awarded at the end of each level. I did fix this in the past, but as it turns out there was more than one cause, and to be quite honest after looking at the code, I’m surprised anyone of you managed to get an end level award.

It turns out that a few months ago while writing code for a scoring system, I messed up and was incrementing a variable I use to store the current level index. So come the end of the level when I check for some of the achievements, it was checking something stupid like if(_iCurrentLevelIndex== 107622), which is obviously not right. #Fail

Now of course because I only partly implemented the scores (I never got around to getting a server), this bug only really ocurred when you triggered one of a few things that adds a score, so during testing when I use less waves it all seemed fine. (I typically test the levels with waves set to 15)

So the good news is, that’s fixed.

More Units

Kind of. It appears I had also been inadvertently capping the types of units that were appearing on each level. So while there are 13 units in the game, you will have until now only ever seen the first nine! I’ll probably label this as ’4 news units added to the game’ in the update, although it isn’t strictly true. The units are hover-tank, the blimp (really cool unit modelled by VeraShackle from the XNA-UK site), the ‘helos’ (which was replaced by the bomber in v1.4) and a walking star-wars like walking thingie.

Some other changes made:

‘Start Credits’ Perk grants more money at the start of a level:
Lvl 1: 15 + 5
Lvl 2: 15 + 10
Lvl 3: 15 + 20
Lvl 4: 15 + 40
Lvl 5: 15 + 80

This was probably needed as the last level is pretty hardcore (with the multiple map entry points).

The ‘Save Money’ award requirements have all been drastically lowered:

Mr. Money Bags – finish level with 500 credits (+200 AP)
High Flier – Finish level with 1000 credits (+250 AP)
Mile High – Finish level with more than 1500 credits (+300 AP)

The initial 5 waves of the canyon level have been made easier (less units).

Something to note:

A thing to note though, while many of the updates will make the game easier, all the ‘new’ units that have now been added and which were missing from previous versions all belonged to the higher unit tier; i.e. units with A LOT of health, so the ‘end game’ will be slighter harder (Yay! I hear you say); plus I feel I’ve been spoiling you so far with all the tower balancing. Many people have apparently completed the game already, so it is doable.

I’m still testing the XAP, and I’m going to send it off to the XNA UK Site for reviewing, so hopefullly this time any bugs will be found and fixed sooner!

-John