Our New Agenda For The Last Week Prior To AVWW 1.0.

The short version: we're going into bugfix, polish, and usability mode between now and about Thursday.  Then Friday I'll be getting stuff to the various distributors so that everything can be all hooked up for a release on Monday.

Then this weekend I'm going to take the weekend off (barring unforeseen catastrophic issues); it'll be my first days off, weekends or otherwise, since February 16th, aside from last Monday when my wife and I toured around Boston before coming home from PAX East.

And then next week, after our release on Monday, we'll see what happens.  Keith and I have a ton of new stuff I wanted to get in prior to 1.0, but that stuff will just have to wait until... dun dun dun... next week or the week after (gasps).

Rationale For The Shift In Focus
In some recent releases from last week, we added a few new spells and various other major new features.  Initially, my plan for this week was to keep doing the same.  However, other releases from the last week focused more on general polish, bugfixes, and improvements to usability and the new player experience.

The former is more exciting for existing players, sure.  But the latter is a lot more important to new players, and to broadening the playerbase in general.  And if we want to keep developing AVWW out over the long haul, like we have AI War, then we have to actually have a playerbase big enough to support the staff we have.

In that light, the only sensible thing to do is focus on making the experience as fun as possible for as many players as possible, and to lower the barriers to entry as much as we can without actually changing the game that the experienced players already love.  Sometimes it's something as simple as improving our support for the XBox 360 controller; other times it's something like allowing custom mappings for key items like wooden platforms or light spells.

This Happens Every Time
Whenever a big release is getting near, I always start getting worried that there isn't enough content.  Because, however much content there is, it's never as much as I've thought of.  Which is actually a good thing -- it's a sign that we didn't just wring every last shred of possible interesting ideas out of our central premise.

Well, I guess Portal 2 was actually criticized by some indies for not doing exactly that sort of wringing (which is a whole other matter).  But in our case, our style of post-release support is such that having lots of untapped potential is something we view as a good thing.  That way we can still be making lots of additions to this game three years from now, players willing, and everybody is still interested and having fun, including us.

That's how you get something like AI War 5.0, which is a game so massive at this point that I don't think any indie could have made it behind closed doors on a fixed budget before releasing it into the wild.  That's what I want to see with AVWW, years from now: I want us all to be looking back at the game in its current state and going "can you believe how small it was back then!?"

And of course, by "small" I mean that there's only about 30-50 hours of playtime required to see everything the game has on offer (after which you can still keep playing because, you know, procedural).  Compared with AI War, where it probably takes 300+ hours at this point to even see all the ships and AI personalities if you're playing full games.

So, yeah -- this happens every time.  Shortly before AI War 1.0 released, I still had another 30ish ships I'd been planning on adding before release.   Then I finally hit a point where I realized "you know what?  This came is more than large enough already for 1.0."  So I focused on this sort of polish and fixes, pushed the game out, and wound up adding most of those ships in the weeks following its release.

On That Note, We're Looking For Feedback
Both on general polish, as well as multiplayer in particular.  If there's anything that's not working quite right, now's the time to let us know!

What's Coming Up For AI War?

Version 5.0 is out most places (not yet Steam, but that's coming) along with the latest massive expansion, Light of the Spire.  This is a big milestone!  And you might notice that the next expansion isn't due until late this year at the earliest.  So what happens in the meantime?

Well, our take on the core community is that they are currently pretty worn out on reinvention.  We've had a nonstop flurry of changes to the game all the way from version 4.0 and the Children of Neinzul expansion in the September, up through 5.0 and the LotS expansion in late January.  At some point the game has to stop changing massively and kind of "settle."

That's the phase that we're entering now, and it's something that a number of players have hinted to us that they'd like.  "Letting the game settle" does not mean just forgetting about it.  Rather, it bespeaks a different way of continuing to work with it.  Those who were around for the eight-month span between 3.0 and 4.0 know what I'm referring to.

It boils down to refining what we already have in place, tweaking where tweaking needs to happen, and adding little extra features that enhance the overall process of the game rather than reinventing it wholesale.  During this period, we're going to be paying special attention to the Vote Tallies section of our mantis idea tracker.  New features that rank high in the vote tallies are a lot more likely to get implemented in our ongoing free DLC releases, alongside the various bugfixes and general tweaks that will be going into the game on an ongoing basis.

All in all: it's a great time to be playing AI War.  You can learn the current rules and functionality with the security that it isn't going to be changing on you every week.  And yet the game isn't going to get stagnant, it's going to be gradually changing into the best possible version of itself.  A lot of people remember the post-3.0 time period with special fondness, despite the fact that our attention was so hugely on making Tidalis, and I think that's why.  It's no secret that our focus coming up is going to be hugely on making A Valley Without Wind, but at the same time that leaves plenty of room for continuing AI War's evolution.

It's definitely a great time to be playing AI War!

AI War Beta 4.070 Released -- Release Candidate 1!

This one brings us very close to the next official release, which will be 5.0.  The last major issue is one multiplayer desync that we're chasing down.  As soon as that is resolved, we're pretty much ready to go.  There are a few last things we intend to tweak and fix, but it's expected that this is the last of the really large pre-5.0 betas.  And boy is this one large.

This one includes the last of the major pre-5.0 rebalancing that we're intending to do -- although feedback on ship balance is still welcome, as if there are further tweaks that seem needed from player reports, we will make them even prior to 5.0.  We're just done with the balancing work we're planning to do in the absence of further player reports.

The way that the AIs act around their own force fields is now a lot better in general, and so is their logic for how they act when there are a few player ships on their planets.  Cross Planet Attacks have seen a pretty large overhaul, with some helpful new text messages on arrival as well as some helpful-to-the-AI new rules adjustments for them that allow them to look in new places to find the ships needed to free for the CPA event.  Oh, and all CPAs are now twice as large, to make matters even worse.  With the larger wave sizes, it only makes sense, as in recent iterations the CPAs were not at all the terrifying events they once were.  Now they are again.

A large part of today was spent desync-hunting for that one main desync that people are experiencing.  We haven't found it yet, but we did find a number of other very obscure desyncs that hadn't been reported yet, and those are fixed.  Along with various other fixes resulting from the search, and also other little changes and fixes that were due to player reports, of course.

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.

The AI War Schedule For The Next Few Days

So what next?  At the moment we're not really looking for large numbers of refinement suggestions from players, as we're trying to keep the number of potentially bug-introducing changes to a minimum.  Our plan is to mostly leave the codebase as-is, aside from those few changes that we either feel are safe to make, or just absolutely critical to make.

That said, if you do have an idea, always feel free to share -- they just go into the Considering or Minor Fix For Later or Feature For Later categories when we're not in an immediate position to address them.  But that doesn't mean we aren't interested, so keep firing away!

Meanwhile, what we are interested in for the short term are any last balance thoughts people have, any bugs that are critical to fix for 5.0, and most importantly any clues as to desyncs if you're having them.  And if you're playing multiplayer on the latest betas without any desyncs, we want to know that too!  When it comes to desyncs, there is very specific information that we need, so please be sure to read the desync reporting guidelines to make sure that we can make use of your report.  We appreciate it!  These are a specific form of bug that are very challenging to find, and thus require special reporting.

A Valley Without Wind Kicking Off
While we give this version of AI War some time to rest in player hands and make sure there aren't any critical issues, when we're not working on those last tweaks or the desync search, we're going to be starting in on A Valley Without Wind work.  A number of the music tracks are already done, and they are awesome.  Keith got the basics of the engine stripped down and split out for us to build the new codebase on, and I'm really excited to get working on both the code for that along with Keith, and the art stuff in all my new 3D rendering tools.

I hope to have some very early screenshots in a week or less, and we'll share some of the music at that time, too.  We'll also start doing some development diaries to talk about our progress on the game and specific topics related to that, since there's been a lot of interest in that sort of thing.  We're still shooting for a first public alpha version sometime in March, but it could theoretically be earlier, or more likely later, than that.  We'll know more as we get closer to that stage.

Enjoy!

Upcoming Development Schedule, Alden Ridge Renamed!

More AI War updates coming tomorrow, and then that's going to be the last batch of stuff for a while.  We're going to only be having spotty hours here and there between December 24th and January 2nd, so don't expect much in the way of releases there (though I imagine there will be a couple of smallish ones).  We'll mainly be recharging and spending time with family.  When we return, we'll have another week or two of AI War stuff, I suspect, for then having a LotS / AI War 4.4 release in mid-January.  The official Tidalis update will also be around that point, too.

Then we'll be off to work on Alden Ridge -- although, that's actually not the name of that game anymore.  We're really combining the projects of Alden Ridge and A Valley Without Wind (though mostly keeping to the gameplay of Alden Ridge and combining that with the themes and story -- and some gameplay -- of AVWW).  In any case, I felt the stronger of the two titles was A Valley Without Wind, so that's what the combined project will wind up being called.

It's going to use an art style that is all-new and not what is shown in the screenshots from either Alden Ridge 2008 or the old AVWW mockup images.  It's going to be prerendered 3D, with some pretty cool visuals in HD.  I look forward to sharing it with you in January, but if you're curious as to my general 3D art style, you can see a lot of examples of that here.  A lot of that is older, and of course it's largely side-views whereas AVWW will be all top-down, but that's the general idea of what the various components like grass, trees, etc, will generally look like.  Minus fancy effects like global ambient occlusion and anisotropic filtering and similar, which really don't work in a game like what we'll be doing.  In other words, look at the models, not the Vue-based atmospheric blending.

Anyhow, A Valley Without Wind is really an exciting project for us, and it's going to combine the best of the ideas from Alden Ridge 2008, the old AVWW design, and some new stuff we've come up with more recently.  I'd rather not get into specifics now because it's early days yet on that project and a lot is likely to change as we get down to the actual implementation (as should happen with our development style), but we're really feeling good about the direction is taking, and we think people will be really excited to see the alpha version when we make that public in March or April. 

In the meantime, once we're really getting full into development on that, we'll post periodic development diary updates for both what we're doing with the design of the game, as well as with screenshots and probably occasional videos so that you can see what the early versions look like.

Most of our changes are to play to our existing strengths: our knowledge of procedural content and dynamic systems; our past experience with creating wide-ranging player choice with sandbox-style environments with overarching goals; the sort of art, as pictured here, that I've been working on as a hobby since 1998, rather than the sort that requires staff that we can't presently afford; the sort of content that doesn't require a level designer, but instead which relies on programming to create emergent effects.  That sort of thing.  We think it's going to be our most exciting title to date.

Stay tuned!  And: happy holidays, as well!

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!

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 4.0 and Children of Neinzul Coming on the 27th.

We'd been thinking we were going to release on the 25th, this coming Monday, but we need a couple of extra days.  Aside from one OSX crash all is well -- very well -- with the betas, but we still have a lot of last-minute stuff to prepare, and our distribution partners need time to get the stuff online, too.  So, mark your calendars for Wednesday instead of Monday!

Release Schedule Updated, Alden Ridge Arcade

The new schedule (also visible on the left sidebar of our main site):

Oct '10: AI War Unity/OSX
Oct '10: AIW: Children of Neinzul
Dec '10: Alden Ridge Arcade
Q3 '11: Alden Ridge
Q2 '11: AI War Expansion 3
Q3 '12: A Valley Without Wind
2013: AI War Expansion 4
2013: Cayenne

What is this new "Alden Ridge Arcade" game?  Well, it's something really different that we have planned for the fall.  It's a smaller project and will be even less expensive than most Arcen titles.  This will be the first arcade-style game that Arcen has ever done, and we have a great design for a really focused, fun, high-replay, procedurally-generated arcade style game using the core concepts of pursuit by zombies, traps, and environmental interactivity that are from the main Alden Ridge game.

We're really looking forward to sharing more about that with you in the coming months, but for now that's all!