AI War Beta 4.042, Light of the Spire Coming In January, Tidalis Update Coming, Alden Ridge News

This release includes a lot of highly anticipated fixes to the way waves have been working recently.  The core higher-difficulty-than-in-the-post-2.0-versions new style of waves are still there, but there were a number of glitches in recent versions that were causing occasional tiny waves, occasional monstrous waves, and in general counterattacks that were absolutely brutal.  My favorite was the wave of nearly 700 thousand beam frigates incoming.  That's like casually unleashing a fleet of Death Stars, good grief.  At any rate, this release brings the salve.

A cool new pair of features included are new Garrison-related control nodes that are part of the base game and which add some interesting new guard-style functionality for the human players.  The general idea is pretty powerful, and allows you to set up certain concentrations of ships on planets, with reinforcements being continuously re-added as the garrison numbers drop.  Automation, as usual, rocks -- you have Keith to thank for this one.

Another important thing is that the game now makes it clear when waves (or Cross Planet Attacks) are triggered by a ship -- guard post, raid engine, scrap wave, or otherwise.  This should substantially help reduce confusion about the deep raids into player territory when players accidentally set off a counterattack guard post, for example

And, of course, there are a myriad other bugfixes and tweaks in this one.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

Light of the Spire: Officially Launching In January
Now to the other news: the Light of the Spire expansion, which is currently in beta, is being pushed back until January.  As anyone who has toured the idea tracker can attest, this will be a good thing.  The expansion is (nearly) functionally done, minus a few last small features, but it's still in need of a lot more polish than we can do on short notice.  More to the point, it's in need of a lot more player-testing than can occur even if we did solve all the immediate balance/bug items right immediately.

With the recent (and ongoing) discount promotions, sales are up and we're not in a position anymore where we have to get this out this month, which is a good thing.  We're known for our commitment to quality, and honestly it's a relief not to have to rush this one out the door.  This is our best expansion yet by far, and it would be a shame to have the official release marred by some temporary issues that we can just as easily spend this month polishing out instead.

Of course, it's already available in beta format, and you can expect the frequency of bugfix/balance/small-content releases to keep coming hard and fast until it does officially release.

Other Upcoming Stuff
There's also a Tidalis update in the works that will bring it up to Unity 3.1 from Unity 2.6, along with various other improvements.  That will be out sometime in December.  And development on the new and improved Alden Ridge is also likely to start during December. 

We're expecting to hit public alpha on Alden Ridge sometime in March, if all goes well.  Man oh man am I excited about a lot of the stuff with that -- we'll be doing development diaries about it even before alpha so that players know what's coming.  The expectation is for that game to turn into as sprawling and as frequently-updated a game as AI War has been, but that all depends on player reception to it.

I've long said we wouldn't be able to maintain more than one game with the frequency of AI War updates, but by using a back-and-forth approach I think we actually will be able to do so.  If the period during which we were focused on Tidalis is any indication, that won't harm AI War at all, and it should work pretty smoothly from our end if we handle things sensibly.

Exciting times!

Arcen Store Cyber Monday 60% Off Sale!

Hot on the heels of the Steam Indie Puzzle Pack sale, which has now closed, we have another deal for you: anything you want from the Arcen Games Store for 60% off!  Now through December 1st, to give stragglers time to get in their orders.  Now's your chance to pick up some excellent deals!

Steam One Day sale - Indie Puzzle Pack

Tidalis is a part of Steam's Indie Puzzle Pack, a one day sale. At the time of writing this there is only 14 hours remaining to get this sale.

5 great games for 5$: Grab them while it's hot! http://store.steampowered.com/sub/6791/

AI War Beta 4.041, "The Reincarnate," Released!

Good lord.  This release is probably the longest list of release notes we've ever generated for a single day.  And it's not just a lot of little stuff -- though there are a ton of small balance tweaks and bugfixes here.  There's some really heavy-hitting changes for both the base game and Light of the Spire.  And for The Zenith Remnant, come to that (Whaaat? A nearly year-old expansion got major new features?).  To business:

Starting a new campaign?  First thing you might notice is that you  now get about twice as many possible starting positions as before.  This is useful for a number of reasons, but the most central is this: you don't have to click through as many maps to find one on it with a ship type you're looking for.  Given how many ship types are in the game if you have the base game and all expansions (53 in all, for those curious), this makes it vastly easier to find the type you're looking for.

Next up, also for the base game, are a number of changes to how human ships target enemies on AI planets.  In short: there will be less stray fire that enrages AI outposts you aren't yet ready to face, but at the same time making it so that things are still just as autofire for anything of the AI that's already been "enraged."

Another even more major change to the AI is how the AI breaches wormholes.  Actually, this is a whole host of interrelated changes, making the AI do a better job of using intel in a more human-like fashion, leading to more intelligent breaches that are more likely to crush you and not at all likely to have the "trickle effect" that players can take advantage of to destroy the forces of an otherwise-untenable AI world.  You can still blow the AI command stations early and sometimes you might be able to get some interesting results from doing so, but it shouldn't feel like an exploit anymore to do so.  And you're a lot more likely to regret it now: having a high threat hanging around out in the galaxy until you avert your attention or divert your fleet elsewhere (only then to have that threat come crashing down on you) is the new order of business.

Next up, for The Zenith Remnant: the golems have all been enormously rebalanced (beefed up), and are no longer a default-on feature of that expansion.  Rather, there are now three new Minor Factions called Broken Golems Easy/Moderate/Hard, which have various different styles of play for the golems, to hopefully meet the full range of player interest.  Fair warning: the hard minor faction for this isn't yet fully implemented, so it's actually identical to Easy right now. The golem waves for that minor faction are having to wait until a later release, we ran out of time!  The overall effect of all these golem changes is to make them more exciting and interesting, no matter what your preferences or skill level, and to make them wholly more relevant than they've ever been in the past for advanced play.

Similarly, for Light of the Spire, there are now three new Minor Factions called Spirecraft Easy/Moderate/Hard, which give a similar sort of tastes/difficulty spectrum to the Golems ones in TZR.  Same as with the golems ones, the hard minor faction is not yet fully implemented and currently works the same as easy.  As with the golems, the spirecraft/asteroids are now removed from the base game of LotS, and instead come in these three optional flavors that you can choose from (or ignore entirely, if that's your preference).  It's a much superior system to what we were doing before, and there's been a lot of anticipation for these changes to both golems and spirecraft on our forums already.  Oh, and spirecraft can now be repaired, which many people will love, I'm sure, as well. :)

And... well, there were a ton of other smaller changes, too.  Fallen Spire fixes and balance.  Frigate balance.  Enclave starship gun removal.  And so on.  Enjoy!

As a reminder, tomorrow and Friday are a holiday here in the US, so we won't be around much, if at all.  If there are any egregious bugs, we hope to fix those in the evenings, but otherwise we're going to be relaxing and visiting with family before plunging back in with a vengeance next week.  Happy Thanksgiving, all!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.040 Released!

This release doesn't quite make the Light of the Spire expansion "feature complete," but it does come close.  This version adds the last 3 classes of guardians, now bringing the total number of ships in the expansion up to 180, and so we're calling it at that as far as ships go.  We'd thought we might do two more classes of spirecraft, but there's just no time -- we need to get to polishing and balancing what we already have, and there's more than plenty here already (more than in any other expansion we've done, by far).

By the same token, the Constructor mode is also being cut from the expansion, as it was pretty similar to the Defender mode anyway, and we could use the extra time to get Defender mode better polished.  We are still planning a few more AI types (perhaps four, but no promises on that), and of course the usual accoutrement of achievements related to plots, minor factions, and AI types.  And there's still that spirecraft/golem rebalance, and the related minor factions, that need to be added as well.  Beyond that: it's polish time.  Bugs and balance issues, beware.

This version actually includes a wide range of bugfixes and balance tweaks already, come to that.  Also the actual unique far zoom graphics for the various spirecraft, which is a welcome change.  That's all the far zoom graphics in place except for the larger fallen spire ships, all of which are currently just using the fleet starship graphic as a placeholder so far.

And there are music tracks coming, by the way -- more than just the one listed on the wiki.  Pablo tells me he's aiming for 8 tracks of 5-6 minutes long, and so far he's already finished and mastered 5 of them.  He's got a really cool musical theme going for the spire that I think folks will really like.

Oh!  I almost forgot.  Also new in this version 4.040 is a new ship for the base game: redirection rally posts.  These work sort of like the preexisting rally post (now called mobile rally posts), except that they allow the setting of gather points, which can redirect incoming ships from one planet to another.  Using this new ship you can quickly set up chains of redirection for ships (rather than having to go back and repoint all your space docks), and you can even set up circular loops that make for cross-planet patrol paths, etc.  Pretty cool stuff.  This is the free DLC for November, but more stuff will be coming in December (so be sure to vote in the poll for what you'd like to see -- at the moment it's at the idea nomination stage).

Enjoy!  Lots more tweaks and such coming tomorrow.  Just a reminder that Thursday and Friday are a holiday here in the US, so we won't be doing much on those days.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.039 Released!

This release brings us very near to the end of the content-addition phase of the Light of the Spire beta, and into the polish/balance/bugfixes phase.  Since Keith is done with the Fallen Spire minor faction, he's already into the polish phase, but I've still got another three classes of guardians and another two classes of spirecraft to go, along with some smaller misc stuff like a few more AI types and the achievements.

So what's new this time?  Well, primarily it's about spirecraft:  a whopping seven new classes of spirecraft (5 marks each, so 35 ships in all) have been added to the expansion today.  That's in addition to the 3 existing spirecraft classes, so now we have 10 out of the 12 planned classes in place.  The remaining two will be added tomorrow.

But that's not all in this one!  Also of huge note is a new LotS AI Plot, called Beachheads.  We weren't sure we were going to add any AI Plots at all, but this player suggestion was just too cool to pass up.  It's an interesting occasional-siege-breaker type of maneuver that can optionally be added for the AI, and it should make for really interesting required defensive setups.

There is also a new Spire Archive ship that provides a cache of knowledge if you capture and hold it from challenging planets (either the homeworlds or the adjacent planets).  This provides a new decision point for players regarding to the AI-homeworld-adjacent planets, which previously were almost always "don't touch them!"  However, this also has another, subtler effect: it makes the tiny maps a bit easier by providing a way of getting another 24k knowledge than could previously be found on those small maps.

In addition to the above major new features, this release also has a wide range of bugfixes and balance tweaks, including a bunch of balance shifts to the Fallen Spire minor faction story campaign.

One note: major balance changes are coming for golems and spirecraft.  In the meantime, however, some of the spirecraft are waaaay overpowered (most the new ones), while others are underpowered (most of the three preexisting ones).  Mostly this is to your benefit in the interim, so enjoy -- the upcoming changes, hopefully which will be in place by the end of Wednesday at the latest, should get the balance for those in the ballpark of right, while also making those massive ship classes as exciting as they always should have been.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.038 Released!

This release is a ridiculously massive one; two days' worth of stuff is a ton in Arcen land.  The big new stuff here is twofold: the last of the episodes for the Fallen Spire minor faction scripted story campaign (say that five times fast), and the first of the new Spirecraft ships.

For the Fallen Spire scripted story campaign thing, we can now comfortably reveal a particularly salient thing about it: it's an alternate way to win.  Normally games of AI War are won by destroying the AI home command stations, right?  Well, with the Fallen Spire campaign you have the option of pursuing all 10 episodes and winning via a... different mechanism.  That's all we'll say for now, to avoid spoilers. 

Of course, even if you want to try for a traditional kind of victory, you can still use the Fallen Spire minor faction.  You can pursue just a few episodes and get some benefit from that, or all the way up to episode 8 and get a much larger boost on your way to a traditional victory.  The in-game story makes all of this clear as you pass through each "firebreak," as we call them.

This is really cool and really different for the game, almost like building a whole new game into the larger game of AI War.  We hadn't wanted to say too much about the alternate-way-to-win thing unless we couldn't pull it off, but as of this release that's all in place.  And now, again to avoid any spoilers, that's all I'll say about that.

The other big thing, I already mentioned is the first of the Spirecraft.  All those asteroids that we seeded into the game last week were useless until now, but now you can build Spire Mining Ships (from the CONST tab), and in turn those can build mining enclosures that produce one or more spirecraft.  The first three classes of spirecraft are Shield Bearer, Ram, and Martyr -- but we hope to get 9 more classes in place by the end of Tuesday, if all goes well.  There are five marks of each kind of spirecraft, so that's 15 ships so far, and another 45 coming.

The spirecraft already in place are cool ones, but I will say this: don't use up all your high-level asteroids if you're in a long-term campaign that you'll still be playing on Monday and Tuesday and after.  Some of the coolest spirecraft are still coming, not that the ones already in aren't cool too (the shield bearer one is particularly exciting, I think -- well, so is the Martyr actually).

And, of course, this release also has various bugfixes and balance tweaks.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

It Rocks When Indies Cooperate

The article UK Dev Gets Off Arse - Makes Indie Portal on Spong talks about showmethegames.com, something that Arcen -- and 19 other indie developers, including Positech, 2D Boy, and many others -- have been quietly working on for the last month or two.  Time flies, I forget exactly how long it's been.

And I really shouldn't say we've all been working on it, as it's mostly been Cliff Harris, whose idea it was in the first place.  The rest of us made our contributions, fiscally and otherwise, but Cliff did all the heavy lifting and he blogs here about why he created the site and what he hopes to eventually accomplish with it.

Quoth Cliff:

Now I know what you are thinking, “why haven’t I heard about it then?” isn’t it usual form for me to go on a publicity blitz? When am I going to punch Keith Vaz on live TV? The whole point of SMTG was to prove 2 basic concepts:

• You can get almost 20 indie game developers to co-operate, and actually pay money into a mutual project
• You can make advertising work for indie developers, it we club together. (this is why we tested it as an ad-driven site at first)

I think the amount of success for the various indies in the first run of this probably varied, but it's early days yet.  I also think that the amount of success for most of us with this made it close enough to cost-neutral (if not generating a return for some of us) that it's worth future investment and investigation.  I don't share the anti-big-portals sentiments that some indies do, but that doesn't mean that an indie collective that is controlled by indies isn't attractive.

As an early experiment, Show Me The Games has been a success, I think.  We -- that is to say, Cliff -- has in my mind proved out that the basic concept can work.  And we had 20 indies buying into this without squabbling of any sort, which is another miracle.  It's a really good group of folks with games on that list, so that's certainly part of it.  Now all that remains to be seen is where we take it from here!

AI War Beta 4.037 Released!

This release is another biggie.  Where to even begin...  Well, for one thing the Fallen Spire minor faction has seen yet more updates, balance tweaks, and bugfixes, and now also has episode 8 in place.  Getting near to the end on that story-based campaign arc, now!

There are also six new map types for the Light of the Spire expansion, based on three different overall algorithms.  These all create some really different sorts of situations compared to what we've seen in the past (the new maze maps are my favorites).  The new maps also continue the trend of having maps without any confusing, long-range overlapping lines.

The final three bonus ship classes have also now been added for Light of the Spire: Maw, Blade Spawner, and Armor Rotter.  I think the Maw is my new favorite bonus ship class, but actually a number of the new LotS bonus ship classes really vie for that.  Speaking of, we've toned down the Stealth Battleships and the Tractor Platforms, which were weapons of doom in the last version.  There are probably still a huge number of balance issues with the new bonus ship classes, but we'll be working on those -- with your help and feedback -- over the next few weeks.

Yet another new Light of the Spire feature is in place: a new minor faction called the Spire Civilian Leaders.  It's a fairly simple concept, nothing like the Fallen Spire, but I think it leads to some really interesting strategic choices.  There are only a few minor factions that I personally turn on in every game (Traders, Resistance Fighters, Marauders), but I think the Civilian Leaders might be another one that is always-on for me.  Of course, some of the more specialized minor factions are interesting for variety, but I also like having ones that I can always use if they match my personal preferences.

We also have some cool fan-created art by HitmanN for three of the guard posts, one of which is shown to the right.  They're updated versions of the originals I had done, and these add quite some cool effects.  This isn't the first time we've included fan-created art in the game; we're really fortunate to have such a talented, generous community!

In addition, of course, are some other random bugfixes and balance tweaks.
Coming up soon, we'll have the new Spirecraft in place, as well as some new Guard Posts and Guardians, and that's the biggest things remaining on our list aside from the Fallen Spire completion.  Well, and Constructor mode.  And possibly another couple of minor factions if Keith has time, but no promises there.  And a couple of other small random goodies from my end.  This is really a huge expansion!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.036 Released!

This release is a maintenance patch for a few issues with the last patch that we wanted to resolve before our next full release tonight.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.035 Released!

This release is pretty darn huge.  The main draws are episode 7 of the Fallen Spire story-driven minor faction campaign-within-a-campaign, and the 30 new ships (5 each in 6 new bonus ship classes) for players and the AI to enjoy.

There will be 9 new bonus ship classes in all in this expansion, the first 6 of which are now in place in a very rough-draft sort of fashion.  They need polish, balancing, and testing -- that's coming from our end, but of course the reason we're putting it out there now is because we'd love to know what you think. 

All of the spire bonus ship classes are larger-than-average and with half-sized ship caps or even far lower.  Some of them are, for most practical purposes, starships, despite not being called that.  When you see some of the biggest spire ships (at the end of the Fallen Spire arc), you'll know why these are the "small fleet ships" of the spire.  Their biggest ships make Golems look small.

With these new spire bonus ships and their caps, they follow the pattern of the Zenith Electric Bomber or Sentinel Frigates.  This means that in the hands of the AI, at present, they will sometimes be overpowered same as those other two ship types.  I have an idea for resolving that with all of the ships of that pattern, so over the next week or so as that gets put in place, hopefully that will reduce some of the woes of the electric bombers and such as well.

There were various other notable balance tweaks and bugfixes in this one, too.  Space planes are pretty much reinvented, for instance, and scouts got a major boost.  Also the wave sizes of the aggressive AI types have been heavily nerfed (they were excessive).  And one more whack at that sound issue on OSX.  See the release notes for the miscellany on this one, and descriptions of the new bonus ships.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

2010 Indie Of The Year Awards

Greetings Arcen fans!

We wanted to take a quick moment to let you know that three of our games are on the selection list for the 2010 Indie Of The Year Awards. The selection is very simple, as it's up to the fans to get the games to the next Top 50 round! All you have to do is go onto www.indiedb.com, and vote for your favorite Indie games of the year before November 30th. If you could take a moment of your time and go on to vote for our games, we'd really appreciate it! Here are the links to our games:

AI War: Fleet Command - http://www.indiedb.com/games/ai-war-fleet-command
AI War: The Zenith Remnant - http://www.indiedb.com/games/ai-war-the-zenith-remnant
Tidalis - http://www.indiedb.com/games/tidalis

If you're already a member of IndieDB, then sign in first before you vote. Otherwise, you can vote as a guest too (although sometimes it will make you wait 3 minutes between votes if you're a guest).

Be sure to click on the link, go half way down the page and click on the green button that says "Vote for this indie: In the 2010 IOTY Awards". You can only vote for each game once, but be sure to vote for all three games.

As always, thank you so much for your support! Check out the awards video as well, you might see a game you recognize on there!

~ The Arcen Team

AI War Beta 4.034 Released!

This release brings more bugfixes and balance goodies, as well as episode 6 of the Fallen Spire story-driven minor faction campaign-within-a-campaign.  It's late and it's been a very long day, so for now I'll just refer you to the release notes above.  There's a lot of changes in this version, but they're all over the place in terms of what they alter, not really clustered on anything specific.

Starting tomorrow, we're going to be pushing through the last of the new ships for the Light of the Spire expansion.  "Last of the ships!?" I hear some folks exclaim.  "We were promised 100+ ships, and so far there's only been about 50 added."  Indeed.  My goal is to add about 130 new ships this week, which are all laid out and which the art for about 70% of are now done.  There's been a ton of art, design, and underlying-engine work to get it to this stage where now we can quickly implement the majority of the ships in a playable fashion in the next four days.

Then the next few weeks after this will be spent on balance, fixes, and polish rather than new content, which I know some folks are really looking forward to as much as the new content itself.  Exciting times, there's a lot of cool stuff -- a huge portion of it player-suggested as usual -- heading your way soon

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.033 Released!

This release includes some bugfixes and balance fixes, as well as episode 5 of the Fallen Spire story campaign.  The Fallen Spire story is really coming together at this stage, and this also has a lot of refinements to the prior episodes.

Also of significance is that the model for how big waves are has been completely redone.  Fear the high AI Progress -- for real this time.  In general this is attempting to bring back some of that "high AI Progress is super bad" flavor from AI War 2.0 and prior, while removing the insane difficulty of the earliest waves in the last few betas.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.032 Released!

This release adds a bunch of stuff.  For the base game, that includes a number of balance tweaks to make the Heavy and UltraHeavy hull types not quite as hard-countered by bombers and the like, and some performance tweaks.  It also has some minor interface tweaks and extensions, as well as a few other balance changes to the higher-level starships (spire and core, mainly).  We also made major changes to the sound effects part of the engine in hopes (once again) of nailing that elusive OSX bug.  And we upgraded the game from Unity 3.0 to 3.1.

For the Light of the Spire expansion, there's a ton of stuff here: more balance changes and improvemetns have been made to the Fallen Spire story-driven minor faction, and episode 4 of the Fallen Spire is now also in place.

Additionally, 35 new AI Guardians (5 marks each of 7 new guardian types) have been added for LotS: Carrier, EMP, Self Destruction, Special Forces Rally, Vampire, Warp Gate, and Zombie.  Some of these are tough enough that they only appear on higher difficulties, and fairly rarely there.  In all, this nearly doubles the number of types of Guardians from the base game.

Also for LotS, six different kinds of asteroids are now seeded throughout the galaxy in the following order of rarity (from least to most rare): Reptite, Pysite, Xampite, Ebonite, Adamantite, Titanite. You can't do anything with these quite yet, but they'll be useful very soon for creating the Spirecraft ships (those "larger than a starship, smaller than a golem" ships).  Start staking out your Titanite now! ;)

Oh, and there are tons of new graphics for the Light of the Spire stuff.  All of the Fallen Spire ship graphics are now in (though some of the far zoom icons are still temporary), and various other ships as well.  In the base game, even the existing Spire Starship has been upgraded to use the new visual styling that will be common for all the Spire ships.   See to the right for what that looks like -- it's even cooler in-game, on a darker background.

Now that a lot of the art stuff has been worked out (since I'm doing all the art on this one -- using ZBrush, Photoshop, and a Wacom tablet, and in some cases Groboto, if you're curious), the actual new ships will be coming through quicker.  Coming up with a compelling art style, and figuring out the specifics of ZBrush, which I'm new to, took more of this week than I'd planned on, but the results are well worth it as you can see above.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.031 Released!

Today's release has yet more Fallen Spire minor faction stuff, basically adding a third "episode" to the story progression of that minor faction.  We won't say anything more about that, for risk of spoilers, but it's cool as always with the Fallen Spire work. :)

Also notable in this release is a new Ship Design screen on the Controls screen, for better modular ship designing, as well as smaller savegame files (and possibly a fix to that pthread_getschedparam OSX issue we've been chasing).

Beyond that, there are a few bugfixes and balance tweaks (Raid Starships should be useful again, Avengers are tougher, etc).  Other parts behind the scenes have still been inwork and aren't quite ready for release yet, but more is coming!  The first of the Spirecraft, including their unique (and as-yet unrevealed) new method of being built, are both coming soon.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.030 Released!

Today's release has a number of important bugfixes from the prior version, including a fix to the AIs only getting the basic triangle ships to start out in new campaigns.  It also fixes a longer-term issue with the AI Carriers, um, never appearing and always being barracks instead of carriers.

More exciting is a bunch of new stuff for the Fallen Spire minor faction, which is basically a scripted story-style campaign within the larger campaign.  This fixes a number of bugs in the first version of the Fallen Spire minor faction, and adds more content onto it (previously we were only about 10% done with the story events in this, now it's a bit further along).

Additionally, there have been numerous rebalancements including to some of the guardians, the superfortress, colony ships, armor ships, shield bearers, and hybrids. 

A bunch of other design/art/coding/music work has also been ongoing behind the scenes, with results that are not yet ready to be made public.  But soon!  The art for some of that new stuff is already in place, if you're looking for clues as to what they will be...

More to come tomorrow.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.029 Released!

This update has a goodly bit of stuff in it.  First off are a mix of bugfixes and balance tweaks for both Light of the Spire and the base game, most notably relating to bomber starships and turrets.

Secondly, the first version of the Fallen Spire minor faction for LotS is now in there.  As we've noted in the past, this is one of the major anchor features of this expansion, and it's sort of a scripted sequence of events that you can go through to achieve... well, that's secret.  At the moment, only about 10% of the events are in place, and only a few of the new specialized ships relating to this story-based minor faction are in place, but a lot of groundwork is done for how to create the rest of the events and ships related to this.  This one is really exciting, but we're being careful to avoid spoilers on what the actual events entail.  Stay tuned on this one!

Lastly, four new core AI guard posts have been added for LotS:  Booster, Cross Planet Attack, Heavy Beam, and Raid Engine.  All four of these basically add variety to the end-of-game scenarios (most specifically the CPA guard post is wildly different), which has been a long-term goal for the game for a while now. Because of the comparative rarity of AI Core Guard Posts (they only show up on the AI homeworlds), we won't be adding too many of these in this expansion, though -- more focus will be going into the regular Guard Posts (mark I-V) that show up on all the AI planets randomly, as variety is even more critical there (in one sense).

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.028 -- The First Light of the Spire Beta -- Released!

This update fixes a few small things for the main game, and then includes the first of the new content for Light of the Spire!  Also, preorders are now open for Light of of the Spire (it's a full expansion, so $9.99).  Right now it's just available through the Arcen store, as is generally the case during our preorder/beta periods, but in December it should be available through all the usual suspects that carry AI War products.

The Spire are coming...
Ravaged by their recent encounters with the same AIs that pushed humanity to the brink of extinction, the Spire are an alien race that have also been all but destroyed. However, while the AIs were successful in their surprise attack against the Spire, the Spire are far more powerful than even the AIs seem to have realized. The Zenith were broken-down and ancient when humanity encountered them, but the Spire were at the height of their deadly power until quite recently.


Now the splintered remains of their race are regrouping, and entering the galaxy with a vengeance. Their attitude toward humanity, who after all spawned the AIs that harmed the Spire so, is unclear. Proceed with caution.
If you'd like to read about what features have been implemented or announced so far, please see this page on the wiki.

This Expansion Is Still In Beta!
Beta means it's not finished, and that you should expect bugs and balance issues until it gets out of beta. But we're making it available to folks early, because there's already some seriously cool stuff in here that we think you'll enjoy, and we'd also love feedback on it all. Light of the Spire will be released in the first week of December or thereabouts, so the development time schedule is very short on this one -- we're leveraging a lot of groundwork that we put in place in 4.0, as well as picking the features that go into this very carefully, in order to make this possible.

But, even so, we're obviously concerned about scope creep and want to avoid having to go back on a feature we promise. So with that in mind, we're being rather uncharacteristically secretive about the features in this expansion until they come out. Basically, the only stuff we'll talk about in concrete terms in advance are things we know we can without a doubt accomplish in this timeframe. Stay tuned over the next three weeks or so, and all will be revealed as that time passes. If you want to wait until after that period to order or preorder this one, we quite understand. We think you'll agree that this is the best expansion yet to AI War when you see it, though. Again: stay tuned!

Key Features That Will Be Coming
* 100+ new ships, including new "spirecraft" ships (larger than starships, smaller than golems).
* 2 new campaign types: Defender and Construction.
* Exciting new Fallen Spire "minor" faction.
* New in-game music tracks.
* Other new stuff not yet revealed. :) 

What's In This Beta Version For LotS So Far?
The exciting new Defender mode, as well as the Vanilla and Everything AI types make their debut. As a warning, Defender mode is extremely preliminary, so will probably need a lot of tweaking to be in balance. But it's pretty fun already, if you like getting beat up. ;)

Also bear in mind that we do still need to teach the AI a few new tricks for this mode. It's not used to working on a timer, it's used to thoroughly crushing you. When it's on the clock, it needs to do a better job of prioritizing your quick defeat, rather than obliterating every last trace of you.

In short, if you play with too few planets the AI will crush you; too many, on too short a time schedule, and it won't have time to crush you so you'll likely win despite the thousands of high-level ships slowly scouring you from the galaxy. We'll be working on that in future releases, but for now we suggest you use maybe 4-5 planets as perhaps a sweet spot. Or, feedback on what seems to work best (and what doesn't) is also welcome. Part of the point of the beta, after all

More to come soon!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.025 Released!

This update fixes a few small things, among them perhaps the most hilarious bug we've yet had.  In the prior beta version, the Mark I scouts basically "went postal" and suddenly had guns.  About half the time they'd attack, giving themselves away and getting themselves quickly killed (while stirring up potentially massive numbers of AI ships that would then counterattack the player), while the other half of the time they'd, you know, actually do their real job and scout.

Unintended hilarity aside, this release also makes the Neinzul Clusters a lot less nasty (no more translocation shots), and makes the Raid Starships have a much more unique niche (armor piercing galore against regular fleet ships, which finally gives a mobile counter to armor ships in the default always-available ships -- previously only the fixed-position laser turrets were a good armor ship counter).  Oh, and we fixed a small possibly-it's-a-tiny-memory-leak bug that might have been related to the issues that some folks were having on OSX.  Fingers crossed there.

Seem like a small update?  Indeed, it is.  Most of our work has been going into some not-yet-revealed updates that will be coming out tomorrow for the first public beta release of the new Light of the Spire expansion.  We're not normally very secretive, but in this case we kind of have to be because we don't want to promise something that it turns out we can't deliver in our ultra-aggressive timeframe for that expansion (that sucker goes official in a month and needs to be packed to the gills with awesome stuff you want by then, on a scale equal to or greater than The Zenith Remnant, as well as stable).  Needless to say, we expect LotS to be a pretty epic expansion, but we have to play it carefully and not promise anything that turns out to be infeasible in the timeframe we have.  So stay tuned. :)

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

Update On Donations For Child's Play, Arcen Financials, Light of the Spire, Alden Ridge News

It's that time again!  As of October 31st, 2010, we have so far raised and donated $1,640.80 for the Child's Play charity via sales of our Children of Neinzul micro-expansion for AI War -- and that's just with preorders! Bear in mind that the money that was generated in October via distributors like Steam and Impulse won't reach us until the end of November, and we can already tell that our total donated is going to massively increase at that time.

We look to be well on our way to hitting our goal of $14,000.00 for the year at this rate (just with what's already been generated, but not yet made it to us, we look to be around 2/3 of the way there!). We'll post monthly updates on how we're doing towards our goal, so check back!

More About AI War: Children of Neinzul and Child's Play
When you purchase AI War: Children Of Neinzul, you're not only getting an exciting new expansion, you're also supporting an important cause. Arcen Games has partnered with the Child's Play charity, pledging 100% of the profits from sale of Children of Neinzul (excepting any taxes and distributor fees) to helping sick kids in need.

The staff at Arcen has long admired the work done by Child's Play, and we're very excited to finally be able to contribute in a substantial manner. Our goal is to raise $14,000.00 USD for Child's Play in 2010, but even after 2010 all of the proceeds from this micro-expansion will continue to be donated to the charity.

At the moment, this micro-expansion is available directly through the Arcen Online Store ($3.99 USD), as well as through Steam, Impulse, and GamersGate.

A Quick Note On Our Finances
It's true that there was recently a lot of press about our financial difficulties, and it's also true that while the release of 4.0 has been a solid step in the right direction for us, that doesn't solve everything.  We've had loads of people telling us we should "put an end to that charity thing" and look after our own finances first.  If we go out of business we won't be able to help the charity any longer, whereas if we get stronger and bigger we later can do more for charity.  Our answer is, simply: no.

On the surface that seems like solid advice, but we're not keen to start going back on our word just when things get rough.  The charity micro-expansion has been a boost to us in terms of visibility and press, so it's not like it's completely selfless at this stage, if that makes those worried about this feel any better.  But even if that wasn't true, we wouldn't want to cut this off, as we deliver on what we promise and we're not about to start taking money promised to sick kids just to help ourselves.  I'd rather go out of business.

And To Address A Couple of Misconceptions About Our Finances
First of all, some folks seem to think that our financial troubles were because of the Child's Play expansion.  Others think that it's because AI War was a failure.  Neither of these are true.

The whole point of the Child's Play expansion was that it took maybe a man-month to create, and then the result of that generates a lot of money for charity.  So far so good, and a man-month of time, while nontrivial, also isn't the cause of our problems.  And having that month back, or having the revenue from Child's Play for ourselves, while it certainly wouldn't be unhelpful, also wouldn't solve our problems.  The gap between prosperity and financial ruin is not nearly so narrow as this.

Regarding AI War itself, some folks feel like it was a failure and thus recommend ways for us to change it or whatever based on that belief.  I assume those same folks haven't seen the financial numbers that were at PC Gamer: fact is, AI War is one of the most successful indie games of the last year.  It's not Minecraft, but it's still in the top 1% financially for the indie scene.  I wish AI War was better-known, of course, and the version 4.0 has gone a long way to make it more accessible, but at the same time AI War is not really related to our troubles, either.

So What Were The Problems?
Only a few people have really understood what the problems were that led to our financial issues.  I think my posts were a bit over-long on the subject.  They boil down to four things: 1) trying to do too much; 2) jumping into an unfamiliar, overcrowded genre; 3) the worst slump in indie game sales in a decade, apparently; 4) my own poor marketing for Tidalis.

In other words, we spent a lot of money to make Tidalis, and had a much larger staff than in the past (a whole five people).  Assuming that Tidalis did remotely close to AI War, this would have been fine.  The problem was, we released it right during a huge slump for the industry in general, and the PC indie scene in particular.  Bad timing for us.  I keep up with a number of indies, and a lot of them that have been in the business for a long time talk about it being the worst few months for sales that they've seen in literally a decade.  It's not just us that's hurting.

But, our big mistake was having quite so much riding on Tidalis.  We tried to do too much, we packed so much awesome into it that it took us a lot more time and manpower than we'd initially expected (and the porting between engines in the middle, while necessary, also didn't help).  Given the largely glowing reviews that touch on only a fraction of the content in Tidalis, it's clear we could have put in 1/4 of the content or even less, and it still would have been very well received.  For the casual genre, it's clear we went overboard to the point that it's actually overwhelming some of the casual audience with how much is in there.

Not that I wish we had done less on Tidalis, but perhaps for launch we should have done less, and then built upwards from there if the game caught on.  If it didn't catch on, the loss would have been smaller.  That's what we've done with AI War (and, heck, that's what's going on with Minecraft), and it's worked very well for us.  This build-a-big-thing-and-then-pray strategy was a really bad idea (and my messing up the marketing didn't help).

Lessons Learned / Plan of Action
1. We're still working to promote Tidalis, and we think that it can be successful over time.  That hasn't changed.

2. We're working on a new for-pay full expansion to AI War, called Light of the Spire, to be released in the first week of December.  It's using a lot of the groundwork that we put in for 4.0, which is why we're able to do a full expansion in such a short period of time; we've been thinking on this for a while, and getting things ready.  Clearly there's still a big appetite for AI War stuff, and we've got some seriously cool ideas for this one, too.

3. Alden Ridge Arcade is dead, and we're going to reinvent Alden Ridge itself from what it was going to be.  No more hand-crafted story or levels -- instead, we'll be going procedural, which is something that we're very good at from AI War.  We're also going to be releasing an public alpha of Alden Ridge in the first quarter of next year, which we're pretty sure the finances will let us do, and then if that takes off we'll build that game upwards from there.  If it really takes off, which we suspect it might (that's a seriously cool game, and a lot of people are waiting for it), then we'll probably develop it over a span of years, with lots of free updates as well as paid expansions, essentially like we've been doing for AI War.

4. Cayenne and A Valley Without Wind are also off the table for now, as both of them are huge projects with a lot of hand-crafted content.  It's just not a good idea for us at this time, and we just don't know how to go about that sort of thing in a successful manner yet, it seems.  We'd need an enormous cash buffer before I'd be comfortable taking on a project like either of those.  All that said, we're instead planning to wrap a lot of the gameplay ideas from both of those into Alden Ridge, possibly as expansions to that core game, possibly as just part of other core experience over time.  There's a ton we'll be able to do with the Alden Ridge engine, if people are interested, like what we've done with AI War.  And if people aren't... we'll do something else.

5. We're also going to be working with a smaller team for a while.  Right now, it's just Pablo (music), Keith (programming/design), and myself (programming and design, as well as everything else, including art).  Phil is currently working on other projects, and Lars has a demanding day job anyway, so fortunately that works out, but we do hope to be able to work with them (and get me off of art) in the future.  Though, if AI War 4.0 is any indication, people have been really happy with the art I've been doing, as the 4.0 changes were all me.

In short, we aren't out of the woods yet, but this past week has been hugely positive for us and things are definitely moving in the right direction at long last.  And we've managed to do that while still supporting charity in a major way, which is the best part of all.

AI War Beta 4.024 Released!

This update is focused on balance changes.  The big thing that has changed is the cost structure of higher-mark ships.  They are now significantly and predictably higher-cost than their lower-level counterparts, which means two things: the lower tier ships are once again more useful (due to a better cost-to-benefit ratio), and the late game requires a more substantial economy than in recent versions. 

That last is important, because in the process of making the early game economy more robust and manageable for players, we also inadvertently made the late-game economy kind of a non-issue.  Well, now the player economy will have to keep growing throughout the entire game if they wish to sustain massive high-level fleets.  This also heavily nerfs the mercenaries, since they're correspondingly more expensive.  Some of the mark I starships, fleet ships, and turrets are actually a bit cheaper than before, though, along with all this.

Additionally, player home command stations got a buff to not be so fragile, and the AI now gets their own fortresses that are a lot more powerful in light of the increased firepower that the players are carting around.  Oh, and cutlasses are no longer death on wheels (or, I guess, death wheels).

And lastly... Mark V Fighters.  At long last, after countless requests.  And we threw in Mark V Bulletproof Fighters and MicroFighters, as well.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.023 Released!

This update has a wide variety of fixes and updates into it.  It also has the first beginnings of the upcoming Light of the Spire expansion in it, although you won't be able to see or enabled (even in trial mode) those new additions just yet.  Later this week it will open for trial and preorders with the extremely early version of it!

Other notable new stuff in this version includes making the game much more playable with a 600px high resolution (which is technically below the minimum we supposedly support, but it's nice to have it playable on more widescreen formats than before).  There are also a number of new threat-related options for defining when you want to be alerted about danger at specific planets.  Guardians, fortresses, and beam cannons also got a heavy dose of rebalancing.

Along with this were a lot of bugfixes, and also a change to hopefully prevent the OSX version from crashing if it encounters the pthread_getschedparam that some users have run into (more details on that in the release notes).

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.