Cosmoids Early Alpha is out! Funding Phase 3! PTD 2 updates!

Want to get the Shiny Starters? Shiny Zorua? Shiny legendary dogs? Shiny Mew? or any other shiny pokemon in the game? Adopt them today using SnD coins! Click here for more info.

Visit the PTD: Pokemon Center - a place to trade pokemon, get your Daily Code, adopt Pokemon, view your items and change your avatar!

Welcome to the Sam & Dan Games Developer Blog! Let's begin!

Blog updates
I want to apologize for not having blog updates the last few weeks. As my wedding get near things start to get hectic and I have less and less time to sit down and work and so by not doing blog post I saved those precious hours, however things seemed to have calmed down a bit and so I plan to continue with blog updates every week like before. There is much to talk about.

Fundraiser lives on!
The fundraiser is alive and kicking. The last few weeks I made it a point to add new ways for you to donate and the fundraiser has gained dramatically from this. If you haven't heard about the fundraiser basically we are asking you guys to help us keep making PTD2 and Cosmoids while giving out great prizes. Some of the prizes include access to the Cosmoids Early Alpha, Shiny Rayquaza and Cosmoids Starters for your PTD2 account. Instead of going over every detail here on the blog we have made a page exclusively for the funding. You can find it here. Check it out, if you feel like we deserve to stay alive making games then give us a little help.

Phase 3 of the Fundraiser
Today we start Phase 3 of the fundraiser. What does it mean? NEW PRIZES! For funding $10 or more you will receive in the near future your choice of one of the 3 starters from Cosmoids (you can check them out in the Early Alpha). You will get to pick your favorite and they will stats and move set similar to other starters in pokemon. They won't however evolve right away since we don't have the graphics done for the evolutions. You will also receive 2 of the one that you choose so that you can trade it with somebody. Lastly if you are wondering they will not be able to breed with each other or with any other pokemon.

Cosmoids Early Alpha Released
I'm super excited to announce that for those who funded us any amount now have access to the Cosmoids Early Alpha. If you don't have access and would like to check it out it is very simple. Go to the Pokemon Center's Funding Rewards page and watch a video ad to fund a few cents to us and get access.

Okay so now that you checked it out I wanted to talk about a couple of things that you might have noticed. First of a lot of the graphics are not final and some are close to final. Mostly everything is not final except for the creature units. Those are pretty close to the final graphic besides a few tweaks on size and some minor details. Another huge thing is that there is a lot missing. The UI which is always important is not set up yet.

So you might ask what is the point then? Well there are plenty of points. What I want you to check out is that you can put units in any spot on the map, units have different ranges depending on the attack they are doing. Also unit's attack speed will be based around the base speed of the creature. In PTD I always wanted to do that so that electric pokemon would attack very fast and slow pokemon like slowpoke etc would have a long time between attacks. The problem with pokemon is that attack stats are not balanced around speed since speed in pokemon only means who gets to go first. For cosmoids I do want the base speed to affect attack speed and so we will be balancing around that. In the alpha you can see that the chameleon has a high attack speed but doesn't inflict as much damage. While the koala has a lower attack speed but does more damage per hit. All the numbers still need to be tweaked so the balance is not there yet but it should show a little of what I want to accomplish for this game which is...

Cosmoid Creatures should feel different from one another
I think long and hard about the games that I'm making. On one hand I have PTD a game that I have already established so I don't want to add too much or remove things. Then on the other hand I have Cosmoids which is something new. I don't have anything that tells me how the stats should work or what levels and creatures I need to have. This is both a curse and a blessing. Mostly a blessing in my eyes. So I started to think about what Cosmoids is about and in the same thought what is PTD about. Is the whole point of the game to just capture all your favorite creatures? Do you just set a unit down and watch it all unfold? I thought a lot about it and came to some conclusions, but most importantly I came to the conclusions as to what I wanted the game to be about. I want the game to be about you discovering new creatures, trying them out in battle and picking the ones that suit your playstyle and taste and using them to beat the challenges that I lay in front of you. Using the combination of attack speed, attack ranges, defense, hp and attack stats to create very unique creatures that all play a little differently. I hope that the alpha can give you a little sense of how I want to make each creature feel a little different.

Pokemon Tower Defense 2 updates!
Many of you know that I've always wanted to make a Pokemon MMO but obviously I would need the copyright to make it happen. Cosmoids is a way to creature my own original creatures so that I can still make a creature MMO in my lifetime. Cosmoids is very important to the future of Sam & Dan Games cause it make it our first truly original game that we distribute to any place we want. Steam, Android, Appstore etc. So in many ways Cosmoids is going to get a lot of my attention from here on out. That doesn't mean that I'm not going to be working on PTD2. I will continue to do updates for PTD2 but with a slight change in focus.

My focus now is more on getting more attacks and more creatures into the game each week. You might have noticed I'm doing giveaways the last few weeks starting with Luvdisc and then Litwick. These particular giveaways are a sort of experiment. I'm curious to see if eventually these 2 will be common among users as more and more are breed. Luvdisc will take longer in my opinion because right now it can only breed with itself. Another way I'm adding more pokemon is by starting to allow PTD1 transfers over to PTD2. Each week I want to add at least 3 new families that will be able to transfer. Also I want to reach the mighty level 100 soft cap so that most of the attacks are added in the game and will make transferring from PTD1 and adding new creatures faster as more attacks are added. Also this week I'm adding the Dusk Stone and the Reaper's Cloth so that you can evolve your recently new Ghost Pokemon. The story mode is still very important to me and even 1v1 is important. But these take a lot of time to create, this week I won't be doing a story mode level but next week I will.

So let's look at what I will be working on this week.

Weekly Progess

PTD2 Alpha v1.36.1 Released!

• Mystery Gift (100%) 

 PTD2 Alpha v1.36.1 Released!

• Testing! (100%) - Super Important to test out things before I hand it over to you guys. 
• Bug Fixes (100%)
• Rough Skin Fix (100%)
• Flame Burst AOE Fix (100%)
• New Evolution Items (100%)
• Reaper's Cloth (100%)
• Dusk Stone (100%)
•  PTD1 to PTD2 Transfers (100%) - Pikachu, Sandshrew, Nidoran Female and Nidoran Male Families
• Soft Level Cap Increase to 25 (100%) - 37 New Moves!
• Mirror Move (100%)
• Roar (100%)
• Mega Punch (100%)
• Stockpile (100%)
• Swallow (100%)
• Spit Up (100%)
• Sweet Scent (100%)
• Horn Attack (100%)
• Thunder Fang (100%)
• Fire Fang (100%)
• Rock Blast (100%)
• Baton Pass (100%)
• Cross Poison (100%)
• Water Pulse (100%)
• Protect (100%)
• Crush Claw (100%)
• Amnesia (100%)
• Chip Away (100%)
• Assurance (100%)
• Psybeam (100%)
• Metal Sound (100%)
• Dual Chop (100%)
• Imprison (100%)
• Toxic Spikes (100%)
• Silver Wind (100%)
• FeatherDance (100%)
• Air Cutter (100%)
• Smack Down (100%)
• Bulldoze (100%)
• Steamroller (100%)
• Echoed Voice (100%)
• Refresh (100%)
• Torment (100%)
• Swagger (100%)
• Revenge (100%)
• False Swipe (100%)
• Slash (100%)
• New Pokemon (100%) - Pichu, Dusknoir, Chandelure, Aron, Beldum
• Graphics (100%)
• Stats (100%)
• New Attacks (100%)
• Electro Ball (100%)
• Nasty Plot (100%)
• ThunderBolt (100%)
• Magnet Rise (100%)
• New Abilities (100%)
• Heavy Metal (100%)
• Light Metal (100%)
• Clear Body (100%)
•  Evolutions (100%)
• Add to Breeding Center (100%)
• Add to Trading Center (100%)

That was a lot to read! Thanks for sticking with us and let's make Cosmoids the best that it can be! As always let me know what you think!

Fundraiser Begins! Cosmoid's Week! and Bug Hunts!

Want to get the Shiny Starters? Shiny Zorua? Shiny legendary dogs? Shiny Mew? or any other shiny pokemon in the game? Adopt them today using SnD coins! Click here for more info.

Visit the PTD: Pokemon Center - a place to trade pokemon, get your Daily Code, adopt Pokemon, view your items and change your avatar!

Welcome to the Sam & Dan Games Developer Blog! This week we are staring our Fundraiser, we need your help

Cosmoid's Week!

Okay so we are excited for the fundraiser but now let's talk about Cosmoids (previous called Creature Universe TD). Last week I had set my sites to do the PTD2 update and the first level for Cosmoids but I wasn't able to fit it in. This week I will focus my whole attention to Cosmoids to make sure we can start the Early Alpha for it.

Bug Hunts!

I'm focusing on Cosmoids this week but I'm not forgetting about PTD2, we will have a new Mystery Gift  and I will also look into several big bugs that PTD2 has. The main one is pokemon randomly changing into other pokemon, losing levels, and having their moves changed. Another big one that I've been hearing about is the pokedex not saving properly. The last one is the Onix Trade having people be suspected of hacking. I'm sure there are plently of more bugs out there but I won't have a lot of time so I'm focusing on the big ones.

Weekly Progress

PTD2 Alpha v1.32.2 Released!

• Mystery Gift
• Change link in game
• Change Graphic in game
• Change Server Code
• Get link and code from sponsor
• Change Blog Links
• New Pokemon - Cranidos
• Graphics
• New Abilities
• Mold Breaker
• New Attacks
• Headbutt
• Stats
• Move List
• Evolutions
• Add to Breeding Center
• Add to Trading Center
• Bug Fixes - push to next release

I want to thank you guys for your support, and I hope we can keep this going! As always let me know what you think!

SnD Weekly: Happy Thanksgiving! First Gym Level, PTD Fan Film 4!

Want to get the Shiny Starters? Shiny Zorua? Shiny legendary dogs? Shiny Mew? or any other shiny pokemon in the game? Adopt them today using SnD coins! Click here for more info.

Visit the PTD: Pokemon Center - a place to trade pokemon, get your Daily Code, adopt Pokemon, view your items and change your avatar!

Happy Thanksgiving week everyone! Last week we successfully got some work done that had been backed up for a bit. Got the Daily Activity out, Researcher, Pokedex, Saving your storage's position. There are still some left to add but I can safely say that we can move forward with the next story level.

Mystery Gift
Last week we all decided we wanted Electric type as the Mystery Gift, but this week in honor of the flightless Turkey we will have a flying bird Mystery Gift. I picked some from different generations, vote on the one you want! Like Shinx, this one will be shiny and restricted to one use.

PTD Fan Film 4!
Joel posted the 4th video in the ptd fan film, check it out here. This episode is about a Joey encountering Team Rocket for the first time before you meet him. If you like PTD 1 then I recommend you check it out!

Funding Postponed + Details
We were planning to start our funding this week but Dan and I haven't been able to figure out all the prizes yet. Dan has been super busy doing a lot of business work for SnD Games so I can focus on game development. While he is not doing that he is answering order emails for Snd Coins and making 3d models for the creatures in CUTD. Thanks Dan! Anyways, the funding will be to help us keep developing PTD2 and CUTD. Coin sales and Advertisement help immensely but the future is a little shaky. We want to raise $50k and that will cover about half a year of expenses for artist, programming, design, any server cost. The cool thing is that if you help to fund you will get really cool and exclusive prizes! We will even have cool goals for reaching a certain amount and if we make it to the goal of 50k we will also have what are called stretch goals. Extra prizes that you guys can win if we reach even higher amounts for things like being able to hire an artist to be full time, being able to bring Dan in full time, increasing the amount of levels in CUTD and bringing things like multiplayer to those games. The funding will be very much like a Kickstarter but the reason we aren't doing a kickstarter is because we aren't trying to fund a particular project we are trying to fund the company itself. Right now I'm full time but it might be that if we can't complete this funding I might have to get a job programming for a different company and that will cut my game development time drastically. So we really appreciate you guys helping us out and in turn getting rewarded for it! Note: The funding has not started yet so there is currently no way to help us yet.

First Gym Level!
This next update will feature the first gym on PTD2. I really want to make these encounters stand out and for the enemy to have fun and new mechanics. So I hope you guys can look forward to that!

Creature Universe TD
Not going to talk a lot about CUTD this week. Just know that progress is being made and that I will talk more about it next week!

Wii U Friends
I also got a Wii U if you want to add me to your friend list my id is:  sam_sndgames

Weekly Progress
Alpha v1.26: Released!

• Gym Battle Story Level Added
• Intro Added
• Level Layout Added
• Level Waves Added
• Custom Attacks Added
• Pidgey's Gust
• Pidgeotto's Gust
• Pidgeot's Gust
• Ending Added
• Mystery Gift
• Graphic Added
• Stats Added
• New Abilities Added
• Evolution Information Added
• Attack Information Added
• Added to Trading Center
• Changed Graphics In-Game For Mystery Gift
• Changed Server Code
• Changed Blog Links 
• Made the Zapdos Level Easier 
• Fixed Shiny and Shadow Pokemon Walking in Story Mode
• Fixed bug with the attack Uproar not waking up pokemon in battle
• Added Ledian and Ariados to the Trading Center Search and Request Pages  

That's all I have for this week, keep checking back daily to see how I'm doing with the progress! As always let me know what you think, your feedback is valued!

SnD Games Weekly: Security Measures, Pokemon Researcher, and CUTD Map Abilities!

Want to get the Shiny Starters? Shiny Zorua? Shiny legendary dogs? Shiny Mew? or any other shiny pokemon in the game? Adopt them today using SnD coins! Click here for more info.

Visit the PTD: Pokemon Center - a place to trade pokemon, get your Daily Code, adopt Pokemon, view your items and change your avatar!


Hello world! Welcome to another week of Sam and Dan game goodness. Originally we had planned for a big event for this week but we couldn't get all the details sorted out, so it will have to wait until next time. So what is the big event about? Well, basically we will be needing you guys to help us keep developing Ptd2 and Cutd. You can think of it like a kickstarter except it's not really about one project but about the whole company. We are working out some cool prizes for those of you who wish to help us out. Like I said before we won't be starting it this week but I wanted to give you guys the heads up of what is coming.

Security Measures
Many of you have noticed that there are a lot of hacked pokemon flying around in the trading center. This week I will spend a good amount of time beefing up the security among other things. So that one person that keeps spamming my twitter can finally relax for a chance.

Update on Security Measures:
There is a lot of misinformation going around (especially on YouTube videos) about what happened and how it happened. So I'm here to tell you what happened, and how it happened straight from the source.

First I patched up the game so certain hacks would no longer work. Some hackers will complain about this but really they can only blame themselves for this. If they were to hack for their own personal collection and just stay quiet about it then I wouldn't even notice and would leave them alone. But... they decided to start putting up illegal trades and tried to scam other players. That is not acceptable so I had to step in and add more security.

After I did this it was time to remove any illegal pokemon (pokemon that you can't catch in the game yet like Ho-oh for example) from any account that had them. I had a list of all the illegal pokemon and I had the id of who the original owner was (the person who captured/created this pokemon) and who the current owner was (the person who had the pokemon in their account).  Usually for the person who currently had the pokemon I simply removed the pokemon from their account. If the person had multiple illegal pokemon even if he didn't create them I would remove more valuables. You really should know better than to hold multiple illegal pokemon, period.

People who created multiple illegal pokemon also had valuables taken. Creating illegal pokemon is not acceptable either. If you created so many illegals and you tried trading other people for them trying to scam them your account was completely reset.

The next step was removing any pokemon that had illegal shiny values. For example shadow totodile or shiny vanillite. I followed the same rules as illegal. The more you had the more you lost. Most people only owned 1 and all I did was remove it and move along.

The last check was for shiny starters or shiny zorua that the original owner had not paid for.

Okay so that was the process, I went and checked each account by hand. This wasn't an automatic thing where bam a bunch of random accounts were deleted. If you lost a lot of things the things you lost were hacked and I couldn't allow them to stay in the system. If you buy a stolen good and the police finds out about it, they won't put you in jail but they will take away the stolen merchandise. 

As far as how many accounts were affected by this less than 200 accounts were affected by this. This is out of millions of accounts that exist. So less 1% of all account lost something. Don't for a second think that thousands and thousands of account were affected. Trust me I did this by hand and thousands would have taken me weeks to do. Also like i mentioned before most people only lost 1-2 pokemon and less than 20 actually got their account reset.

Well I hope that cleared some things up for you guys. Thanks for understanding, it was actually pretty sad for me when I have to delete pokemon like that... it definitely took a lot of my motivation out from this week.   

Getting it done
So I've been piling up a bunch of new features and things that I've been wanting to add and it is finally time to get them done. This week I will focus on the things that were left behind from last week without adding too much to it.

Pokemon Researcher
While making the behaviors for the different wild pokemon I started to test them and I was having a lot of fun just watching what they did. So I thought that it would be pretty fun to have a mode that you could just spawn some pokemon and watch them interact with each other and with you. You can't capture them or battle. You just get to play around and see if anything fun happens. This mode is really easy to add since all the work for it is pretty much done. Just have to make some menus, which I hate >.<

Mystery Gift
The poll this week will start with asking for what type you want to see this week and then it will move to a list of possible candidates. Let's figure this out together!
 

Weekly Progress

My Status: Working on blog!
Alpha v1.25 Progress List:
Note: The list below is for v1.25 when it is released.

• Security Stuff (100%) 
• Can no longer log into story mode with an illegal pokemon (pokemon that you can't obtain yet) (100%)
• Can no longer save an illegal pokemon (100%)
• Removing current illegal pokemon (100%)
• Removing hacked shiny starters and shiny zorua and their evolutions (100%)
• Add New Pokemon to the Trading Center (100%)  
• Make all Golett's Genderless (100%) - Might have to cut out a few body parts, ouch!
• Properly align some pokemon when they are following behind you (100%) 
• Better Map UI (100%) - Similar to the Battle UI, it shows time of day and your current money amount.
• Pokedex (0%)
• Saving Pokemon's party and storage position (0%)
• Daily Challenges (0%)
• Day of the Week Spooky Event (0%)
• 1v1 Mode Changes (0%) - As described on the previous blog.
• Sponsor Version of the game (0%)
• Add a confirmation popup to the back button on story mode if you haven't saved (0%)
• Release Pokemon (0%) - Note: You can already release them in the Pokemon Center if you don't want to wait for this to be done.
• Pokemon Researcher  (0%)
• Add list in the FAQ page on where to find pokemon and at what time, similar to the PTD1 list (0%) 
• Fixed bug with the attack Uproar not waking up pokemon in battle (0%)
• Add a graphic for removing a pokemon from the field (0%) - To better tell what is going on when fighting and NPC trainer.
• Add new Level Item interface graphics for the ui (0%)  
• Added which pokemon you will be battling in the next battle in 1v1 mode (0%) 
• Make pressing Enter to trigger a lot of the menu buttons (0%) Pressing enter to log in instead of clicking on it.
• Check the Forgot Password pages for any errors (0%) 
• Top Searchers/Top Request/Latest Trades (0%)

Creature Universe: Map Abilities
Ptd2 introduced the concept of the map. Creature Universe TD will take it even farther with map abilities. An example of this is very early in Pillar Island, the grass start zone, you will be given some bug bombs to throw at some bugs to clear them out. I made an awesome concept sketch to illustrate this example.

Bug Bomb takes out bugs, one of the map abilities you will get

 So instead of only walking around you will be able to equip items to do different actions. Your creatures don't get left out on the action. Each family of creatures will have their own ability that they can use in the map for different effects. In this example the Grass Starter which is still unnamed has a tongue ability that lets him eat certain bugs. You will be able to switch place with your creature so that you can control it while your trainer avatar follows it. Here is another amazing concept sketch that I made to illustrate this example.

Grass starter using his map ability on a bug creature

  In CUTD your character will perform more functions than the characters have ever had in ptd and ptd2. That's all I have for you this week, keep checking back to see how we are progressing. As always let me know what you think! Sam out.