CaveDefender, my first online game.

Hello everyone! I'm thrilled to share my very first online game with you all.

It's called CaveDefender, and it was inspired by the old offline Wallbreaker game made by Sam Tupy. I loved his version so much that I wanted to see whether I could build my own take on it, and with a bit of help from Claude along the way, I ended up with something I honestly never thought I'd get off the ground.

CaveDefender is an online game where you sign in to a server, share a world with other players, and chat, form rooms, and battle over four walls together. There are three modes: defend the walls from waves of enemies, attack them yourself while bots scramble to repair, or square off against real players on both sides. Because it's fully online, you'll need an internet connection to play, and you can find full instructions, including how to set up your own server, on my itch.io page.

I've packed a lot into this game over the past several weeks of development, far more than I could list here, so instead I've pulled together the ten changes from version 3.0 onward that I think you'll get the most out of.

1. A whole new player versus player mode, the wall fight with real people on both sides: one team smashes the four walls from outside while the other defends and repairs them from within.

2. A 45-second reconnect grace. If your connection drops mid-game the server holds your place, and you land right back where you were with your wood, score, and host role intact, instead of out in the lobby.

3. Full 3D cave audio. The cavern now carries a natural reverb, and in player versus player you hear the far team muffled through the walls, as if through stone, while your own side stays clear.

4. Server rules you read and agree to once before playing, so every server can set its own expectations for how people behave.

5. You can now manage your own account in game: change your password or email whenever you like, and permanently delete your account, all with simple commands.

6. Wood now comes in three sizes, and larger pieces reinforce a wall more than small ones, so hunting down the big wood is worth the trip.

7. A much richer player information card: from the F6 players menu you can see anyone's win and loss record, their best rounds, when they joined, and more.

8. Personal muting that actually protects you. A player you mute can no longer see where you are or send you a message, and your mutes stick across sessions.

9. New lookup commands, like /where to find where a player is, plus staff tools such as /warnings, /mutes, and /bans to review a player's record.

10. Lots of quality-of-life polish: a documentation menu on the main screen, toggleable typing sounds, no accidental duplicate saved accounts or servers, and clearer messages all around.

That's all for now. The full history lives in the changelog that ships with the game if you'd like to dig deeper into what was changed since then.

One thing to note. I wasn't able to set up a central server for everyone to play on just yet, as my budget for that isn't quite there right now, so for the time being, you'll have to most likely play locally. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, and I'll get a proper server sorted as soon as I can.

With all that said, I really hope you enjoy what I've built. It took a tremendous amount of dedication to get CaveDefender to where it is today, and I'm grateful to everyone who helped beta test it and smooth out the rough edges for the rest of those who haven't fully experienced it.

Here's the game's download link on itch.io.
https://tsatria03.itch.io/cavedefender

Enjoy, and happy defending!

That's cool, will give it a try.

Yeah, nice to see that you made an online game.
I will also try it out.

Thanks. Someone just set up a server for me. You can connect to it here.
host: cfs.kvothe.eu
port: 25562

Nevermind, I skipped over the download link by accident. Sorry.

Good evening peoples! I just released the next major version of CaveDefender!
I've been working tirelessly to fix lots of bugs that you all reported to me, along with some most requested features and enhancements while I was at it.
I'd also like to let you all know that I finally have a central server for you guys to play on. You can find this in the connection menu of the game, in the server chooser menu under the server storage pannel.
With that being said, the server application will remain included with future releases of the game. Do bear in mind, though, that it carries real game data and server-wide settings, from player accounts and their personal details to moderation records and the config that shapes how the whole server plays, so running your own comes with the responsibility of looking after all of that, and what you do with it is on you.
Just like last time, I packed a bunch of things into this game over the past week of development, so instead, I again pulled together the top ten changes from versions 3.6 to 4.0 that I think you'll get the most out of.
1. A whole new arsenal for the attacking side.
Attackers can now bring the walls down from a distance with a crossbow, cannon, firebomb, and grenade, plus a pistol and a fully automatic machine gun under a new Artillery tab, each fired with the space bar at the wall you're facing and passing harmlessly through anyone in the way. They run on ammo you gather off the ground the way defenders gather wood, arrows, powder, gas, grenades, and bullets, reloaded with shift plus R. A number of weapons even set a wall ablaze on top of their hit, every explosive along with the axe and hammer, the flames chewing at it for a few seconds and burning hotter the more you stoke it. And when you'd rather not spend your ammo, you can always fall back on your own fists and feet, the quickest but softest swings in the game.
2. Wood now comes in four kinds, categorized by tree.
The oak, maple, birch, and pine wood now replace the old small, medium, and large sizes. Each reinforces a wall by a different amount, oak the most and pine the least, so every kind is worth carrying. The Big, 75 by 75 map also grows its own amount of wood now, sitting between the medium and largest maps rather than sharing the largest map's supply, so what drops fits the map's size.
3. Choosing how far you can fortify a wall when you start a game.
PVE and PVP games now let you pick a wall reinforce limit right after the map size, 200, 400, or 800 percent of a wall's full strength, or no limit at all, setting how big a buffer you can stockpile. In PVE you also choose whether a fallen wall's bots pile onto the walls still standing for a tougher swarm, or simply leave the round.
4. Voice chat that fits the room.
You can now send your voice as a recorded message instead of only streaming it live, chosen in preferences, so others hear the whole thing once you finish rather than moment by moment. Voice also picks up a game's audio effects in every mode now, so a speaker down in the cave reverberates to match the space while the open-air modes stay dry.
5. A full keyboard layer over the menus.
Enter now opens an Actions menu that gathers your account settings and the lobby or room controls in one place, nearly every menu action has its own control key shortcut so you can create rooms, start games, and run a round without opening a menu at all, and you can even open your preferences mid-game with Alt plus P.
6. Truer sound through the walls in player versus player.
As a defender, the attackers' strikes on your walls, their swings, ranged hits, ricochets, and shells now reach you muffled through the wall to match how their footsteps and firing already sounded, and gathered items follow the same rule, each side hearing its own wood or ammo clearly while the far side's comes through the stone muffled, rather than ringing out as though nothing stood between you.
7. Reading your message buffers at your own pace.
You can now open any buffer message in a read-only box with alt plus shift plus C and move through it with the arrow keys, rather than only hearing it spoken, and a new Buffer menu on shift plus B gathers copying, exporting, reviewing, and muting a category into one list.
8. Report players, and reach the ones who've gone offline.
You can now report a player to the staff with /report and a reason, even after they've left, and private messages now reach players who are offline, waiting to be delivered the next time they sign in.
9. Server-wide tools for developers to keep order.
Mute, clear, or freeze the entire server at once with /muteall, /kickall, and /gamestop, review every ban in one place with /bansall, and the server now auto-mutes anyone who spams the global chat.
10. More data controls for server hosts.
You can now tune the cave's acoustics, the item economy, and the walls' strength through settings files in the server's data, and a new downtime monitor brings the server straight back up on its own whenever it goes down, so a restart is a brief blip instead of leaving everyone stuck.
That's all for now. The full history lives in the changelog, now shipped within the game itself. You can find this file in the documentation menu if you'd like to dig deeper into what was changed since then.
Here's the game's download link on itch.io.
https://tsatria03.itch.io/cavedefender
Enjoy, and happy defending!

So this is a fun little game and I've enjoyed it a lot lately. However, there a couple bugs I'd like to report.

1: In an EVP game, when the bots are repairing the walls after an attack, the repair timer seems to be stuck at 83 seconds.
2: When reloading weapons, if you walk away while the weapon reloads, the sound doesn't follow your avatar, but stays in teh position you held when reloading was done.
3: In text fields, such as chat, local chat etc, the selection of character echo is not saved between game sessions.

Hello everyone. I just released a followup update to this game to fix a hole bunch of bugs that you guys reported to me, plus plenty of enhancements along the way.

Here's what's new from versions 4.1 to 4.2.

You can now send feedback or a bug report to the developers with the new feedback command, or fb for short, followed by your message, for example feedback the crossbow makes no sound sometimes. It is not about another player like a report is, but about the game or the server itself; it is saved for the developers to read, stamped with your name and where you were, and announced to no one. Developers can review all of it in a read-only list with the feedbacks command, or fbs for short.

Reading a page in place no longer quietly drops your connection and forces a reconnect when you close it. The server help and rules, the staff review lists, and the client's own documents like the changelog and readme were not keeping the connection alive while you sat reading them, unlike the chat boxes, so a long read would time you out; they now hold the connection open the whole time.

Checking the round timer with Tab during a repair window, in both environment versus player and player versus player, now says the attacking clock is paused, instead of reading like a countdown stuck on the same number. The timer only spends time while attacks can land, so it holds still while the walls are being repaired, and the wording now makes that clear rather than looking frozen. In player versus player, the defenders' repair cue now also tells you to reinforce the walls, the word the game uses everywhere else, rather than to mend them.

Server hosts can now have players marked away automatically after a stretch with no keys pressed, tuned through a new setting in the server configuration file. When it triggers you go straight to away, with no countdown or reason, and any key brings you back just like a manual away; the shortest allowed time is thirty seconds, and setting it to zero turns the feature off so only the away command marks you away.

Fixed the ranged weapons doing nothing in player versus player games, where firing the crossbow, pistol, machine gun, cannon, firebomb, or grenade at a wall had no effect while the melee weapons worked; their shots now reach and damage the walls the way they already do everywhere else.

The instant server restart command now says the server is restarting when you use it, and the shutdown command says it is shutting down once you confirm, so neither acts silently anymore; the countdown restart already announced itself.

Developers can now take the server fully offline from in game with the new /shutdown command, or /sdn for short, which asks you to confirm first. Unlike a restart, which brings the server back on its own, this stops it for good and keeps the auto-restart monitor from reviving it, so the server stays down until someone starts it again by hand.

The server no longer rewrites its configuration file every few seconds. It used to overwrite the file on a timer, wiping any edits a host made while the server was running; now it only saves the file at startup and when a setting actually changes, so a host's edits can now stay put.

Server hosts can now tune the environment versus player round timer through the game settings file. The base time limit for each map size and the extra seconds every cleared round adds are both adjustable, and an untouched file plays exactly as before.

Updated the todo list file with the latest bug fix and feature improvements made to the game.

In environment versus player, the bots' walls now get tougher every round you clear instead of stalling at the same strength. Each cleared round raises how far the bots fortify the walls, so the deeper you go the harder they are to tear down, climbing well past two hundred percent in the later rounds.

Environment versus player bots no longer waste a trip trying to reinforce a wall that was destroyed while they were carrying wood to it; they now redirect that wood to the weakest wall still standing.

The pistol and machine gun now ring one of twelve ricochet sounds at random when a shot bounces off a wall, instead of the same one every time.

Several sounds that had gone silent in the release build now play again: the in-flight whoosh of a ranged shot as the bullet, arrow, or projectile crosses to the wall, the ambient loop of wood and ammo lying on the ground so dropped items are easier to home in on, and the pistol and machine gun's spent shell casing ringing at the wall on every landing bullet.

The X ammo readout now adds that firing won't spend a round yet when you check it during the build phase or a rest window, so its counts no longer read as ready to fire when a shot would only ricochet for free.

Firing a ranged weapon during an attack window now spends a round no matter where you aim, so a shot into open space or one that reaches no wall costs ammo just like a hit did before. Shots during the build phase and rest windows still ricochet free, and a shot only does damage when it actually reaches a wall.

You can now only reload a ranged weapon once it is fully empty, rather than topping up a partly loaded one. Spend the magazine first, then reload, so refilling early can no longer drain your reserve a few rounds at a time.

Pressing enter in the lobby or a room now opens the panel for where you are straight away, the lobby panel or the room panel, and shift plus enter opens the account panel, instead of first stopping at a two item chooser. These replace the control plus H and control plus A shortcuts, which are no longer needed and have been removed. In a game, enter still opens the round menu.

A fresh setup of the game, or resetting your settings, now points you at the Central server by default rather than a local one, so a new install is ready to connect to the official server straight away. It is the Central preset either way, so you can still switch to another server whenever you like.

The game over screen after an environment versus player game now names exactly how much bonus ammo you earned for beating your best round, listing the amount of each kind, rather than only telling you that a bonus was earned.

That's all for now. Stay tuned for more updates to come!

Here's the game's download link on itch.io.

https://tsatria03.itch.io/cavedefender

Enjoy, and happy defending!

Is an updater planned for this game?

Good evening fokes. I just released a followup update to this game, but this time, it mostly involves the new free play mode I added back in the last version or 2. This update also fixes some critical security bugs as well.

Before I move forward with the changes, I'd like to let you all know that the PVP mode will be removed starting in the next update, do to lack of stibility and quirky mechanics I wasn't too fond of. I don't know wen I'll bring the mode back, but it will no longer be accessible to play untill I find a better way to refactor it.

With that being said, here's what's new in version 4.6.

When you clear bots or items as a guest in a free play cavern, the how many box now starts filled in with the most you can clear at once, your cap or everything present if there is less, so you can simply accept it.

Guests in an open free play arena can now use the cavern controls too, not just the host. Everyone can add attacker bots, builder bots, and items, and clear them: the host clears all at once, while a guest clears up to twenty bots or five items at a time. Only the host can reset the whole cavern or switch on wall damage.

When you add items to a free play cavern, the how many box now starts prefilled with the most that map's floor can hold, so you can accept it to stock the floor to the brim or type a smaller number; the amount depends on map size, which is why only the item box is filled in and the bot boxes are not.

When you add items to a free play cavern, you are now asked whether they should spawn continuously. Answer yes and the game keeps that many of them on the floor, replacing what you gather until you clear the cavern items; answer no and they drop just once, as before.

When you add attacker bots to a wall in a free play arena, you are now asked whether they should spawn again each time that wall recovers. Answer yes and the bots return every time the wall rebuilds, idling while it is down; answer no and they leave for good the moment the wall falls, so you can wear a wall down and have it stay quiet.

You can now stock a free play arena with builder bots from the cavern controls, the same wall-defending bots as in environment versus player. They gather the wood you leave on the ground and carry it to the walls to reinforce them, so a free play cave can now have attackers and defenders both at work. The B key now locates the builder bots in 3D, and the old per-wall count of attacker bots has moved onto the Clear cavern attacker bots menu option.

You can now pause a free play arena, solo or open, the same way as the other game modes: press escape to freeze the whole arena, including the attacker bots and the walls' self-healing, and open the pause menu to resume, leave, or stop.

You can no longer begin an open free play arena by yourself; like the other game modes, an open arena now needs at least two players before it can start, while a solo arena still begins on its own.

Banning or kicking a player now cuts their connection right away instead of trusting their game to leave on its own. Someone who had tampered with their game to ignore a ban or kick could previously stay on and keep playing; the server now drops them and refuses to let that account back in while the ban stands. The same applies when your account is deleted, renamed, or has its password reset from another device.

Fixed signing in with different capitalization than your account's name showing you on the server twice. Typing your name as bob when it was registered as Bob used to leave a second copy of you in the player lists; the server now recognizes it as the same account and takes over your existing session instead.

That's all for today. Stay tuned for more updates to come!

Here's the game's download link on itch.io.

https://tsatria03.itch.io/cavedefender

Enjoy, and happy defending!

Hi everyone. I just released a small update to fix some bugs, while also refining a bunch of things in the process. Please check it out!

This will be the last update I'll be releasing for a while. For now, here's what's new in version 4.7.

The leaderboard now has more to compete on: alongside best round, the player versus environment side ranks total wood gathered and the environment versus player side ranks total ammo gathered, both counting real games only and never free play. After typing /lb and choosing a mode you now pick which of that mode's boards to view, or you can jump straight to one, for example /lb PVE wood or /lb EVP ammo, and climbing either of the new boards is announced just like the best round ones.

When a player climbs to a new spot on a game leaderboard, everyone is now told, for example alice has reached rank 4 on the PVE best round leaderboard, with its own cue that plays one way for the player who climbed and another for everyone else. These rank ups collect in a new leaderboards message category you can review or silence like any other.

The game now has a server-wide leaderboard: type /lb to rank every account by its best round in a game mode, from highest to lowest, whether or not that player is online. Pick PVE or EVP from a menu, or name the mode directly with /lb PVE or /lb EVP, and choose any row to open that player's information card. Each row shows when that best round was reached, and players tied on the same round are ordered by who got there first.

You now answer room and game invitations with keys instead of commands: press Alt plus A to accept or Alt plus D to deny, from the lobby or a room, and the /accept and /reject commands have been removed. A new /invtime command tells you how many seconds are left to answer a pending invitation, and refusing an invite is now called deny to match the D key.

The typed /rules agree and /rules disagree commands have been removed, since the menu that already appears when you close the rules answers the gate for you. You still agree or disagree there, and re-reading the rules with /rules brings that menu back any time.

You now hear a cue whenever you join or leave any room, however you do it, and anyone already in the room hears you come and go too, much like players hear you connect to and disconnect from the server.

The game over screen in environment versus player now tells you how much ammo you gathered that game, the attacker's version of the collected wood the player versus environment results already show.

The player versus player mode has been taken out of the start game menu for now while it is being refactored, so you can no longer start a new one; its section has been removed from this guide and player information cards no longer show a player versus player record until it returns. Environment versus player, player versus environment, and free play are all still here, and player versus player may return once it has been rebuilt.

When a wall fire burns out, its burning sound now fades down smoothly over about a second as the fire-out sound comes in over it, instead of staying at full volume and cutting off sharply, so a dying fire melts into its end rather than snapping silent.

In environment versus player, the cavern walls now fortify gradually across the build phase, climbing in real time toward this round's target strength as the bots reinforce them. Previously the walls appeared to sit at a low level through the whole build phase and only jumped to the round's true strength the instant the wave began, which made it look like the bots were stuck and not building at all.

That's all for today. Stay tuned for more exciting updates!

Here's the game's download link on itch.io.

https://tsatria03.itch.io/cavedefender

Enjoy, and happy defending!