This one has more balance and bugfix changes, and more responses to the "worst unit" polls. This time, the Mobile Repair Station gets some overdue love. Most substantially with this release, however, are some bug/balance fixes relating to the AI and how it gets reinforcements.
Those were being held artificially low on certain difficulties, in certain circumstances, and when the AI had certain ships. So we fixed the glitch, and this will just work itself out naturally. Haha. In some recent versions, players were wondering why we were being so nice to the player team in terms of balance changes; well, now the other shoe drops, I guess!
It's not all that bad, really, but it's nice to sound ominous sometimes.
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.
Friday, March 30, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.922 "Come Out, Shy Little Monsters..." Released!
This one is a hotfix for some issues in the prior version. Sigh.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.921 "World Of Darkness" Released!
This one is a lot cheerier than our last release, in that it's not fixing critical bugs. Minor ones, sure, but that's a much better way to end the day as far as I'm concerned. It also changes around the balance on the supply depot meteor defense missions, and makes the world map way more oppressive-looking in a way that players have been asking for. Plus the world map just seems to look better now, too.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
AVWW Beta 0.920 "Thog No Like Jurassic Bugs" Released!
This one has got to be about the least fun sort of release to be working on, for everyone involved (players and developers). There was still a memory leak in the prior version, and it was harming performance as well because of all the garbage collections it was causing.
So all day today for Keith, myself, and Josh has been spent on this one issue. That's the bad news. The good news is that we found all the issues (knock on wood) and the game is running more memory-efficiently than it ever has before.
Some of the "recent" bugs withe memory leaks were actually just us having cleaned up some code that then revealed an older and longer-standing bug. There were multiple bugs that we fixed today that dated back to when this game was from the top-down perspective.
What essentially happened was some more recent bugs (as well as some more recent fixes) combined with the older bugs to create major problems. But we've been through this thing backwards and forwards today, Keith added memory profiling capabilities into the game engine itself, and it's now incredibly lean. If you hit F3 and look at the managed memory usage, it's absolutely through the floor.
Unfortunately this means we didn't get anything else done today, but this evening hopefully I'll have time to get a little more done. As well as fix any new bugs that might crop up if you guys find something.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
So all day today for Keith, myself, and Josh has been spent on this one issue. That's the bad news. The good news is that we found all the issues (knock on wood) and the game is running more memory-efficiently than it ever has before.
Some of the "recent" bugs withe memory leaks were actually just us having cleaned up some code that then revealed an older and longer-standing bug. There were multiple bugs that we fixed today that dated back to when this game was from the top-down perspective.
What essentially happened was some more recent bugs (as well as some more recent fixes) combined with the older bugs to create major problems. But we've been through this thing backwards and forwards today, Keith added memory profiling capabilities into the game engine itself, and it's now incredibly lean. If you hit F3 and look at the managed memory usage, it's absolutely through the floor.
Unfortunately this means we didn't get anything else done today, but this evening hopefully I'll have time to get a little more done. As well as fix any new bugs that might crop up if you guys find something.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
AVWW Beta 0.919 "But I LIKE Referencing Nulls" Released!
This one is our third release of the day, which is never a good sign.
Two releases can be good or bad: yay we had a batch of content and stuff leftover from prior days that we released mid-day, and then yay we did even more and released that at the end of the day; or yay we released a new version, and then oops we released a followup to fix something in the version we just released.
Three releases... there's no way there's not an oops in at least one of those three releases. Today has been a day with two oops-fixing releases out of three, although two out of the three releases also had new content of significance.
Sigh. It's been one of those days, I guess; hopefully tomorrow will go substantially more smoothly! But things seem to be in good enough shape for now, and so I'm heading for some sleep.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Two releases can be good or bad: yay we had a batch of content and stuff leftover from prior days that we released mid-day, and then yay we did even more and released that at the end of the day; or yay we released a new version, and then oops we released a followup to fix something in the version we just released.
Three releases... there's no way there's not an oops in at least one of those three releases. Today has been a day with two oops-fixing releases out of three, although two out of the three releases also had new content of significance.
Sigh. It's been one of those days, I guess; hopefully tomorrow will go substantially more smoothly! But things seem to be in good enough shape for now, and so I'm heading for some sleep.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.918 "The Music Of The Leaky Draconite" Released!
This one is the second release of today. There was a memory leak in chunk-gen in the prior version, and we wanted to get a fix out for that as soon as we could. Apologies that it took us a couple of hours to do so, actually -- we had the fix done about an hour and a half ago, but there were some other bits of code that were still in-progress and we couldn't push a new version until that stuff was checked in.
That said, there's some pretty cool new content in this version. A new kind of playable character (draconites), and a great new music track by Pablo that has now been added to the playlists for underground caverns in most areas.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
That said, there's some pretty cool new content in this version. A new kind of playable character (draconites), and a great new music track by Pablo that has now been added to the playlists for underground caverns in most areas.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
AVWW Beta 0.917 "Toss Some Ice At That CPU" Released!
This one took us substantially longer than we thought it would, but that's mainly because I wound up going down a rabbit hole of performance improvements.
Which is great news! There's a whole host of mainly-CPU-related performance improvements all through here, with everything from chunk-gen (particularly key in multiplayer) to actually when you're running around. Some of the most GPU-heavy enemy shot types (such as those from amoebas) have also had their load requirements toned down (in the process also making them more visually distinct from player spells, which is a double plus.
There's a new spell in here, called ice toss. I'd wanted to add another couple of spells at least with this one, and we've got another enemy that is just about complete, but on the other hand I didn't want to keep delaying this release indefinitely.
There are also a lot of fixes and balance tweaks in here. Large monsters drop more health now than small ones do, for instance. The ocean shallows are a lot more unique and a lot more interesting to explore, and they also no longer have dead ends through them constantly. So getting sea essence and coral is no longer the exercise in frustration that it once was.
Oh, and you can now place both wood platforms and crates in spaces that are normally too small for either (and when they grow into existence, they'll just expand to fill the space that they can. This is hugely useful for when you fall down a narrow 1-tile-wide hole, for instance. Previously that was a death sentence if you didn't have something special like a bat scroll, double-or-triple jump, lightning rocket, or an elusion scroll.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Which is great news! There's a whole host of mainly-CPU-related performance improvements all through here, with everything from chunk-gen (particularly key in multiplayer) to actually when you're running around. Some of the most GPU-heavy enemy shot types (such as those from amoebas) have also had their load requirements toned down (in the process also making them more visually distinct from player spells, which is a double plus.
There's a new spell in here, called ice toss. I'd wanted to add another couple of spells at least with this one, and we've got another enemy that is just about complete, but on the other hand I didn't want to keep delaying this release indefinitely.
There are also a lot of fixes and balance tweaks in here. Large monsters drop more health now than small ones do, for instance. The ocean shallows are a lot more unique and a lot more interesting to explore, and they also no longer have dead ends through them constantly. So getting sea essence and coral is no longer the exercise in frustration that it once was.
Oh, and you can now place both wood platforms and crates in spaces that are normally too small for either (and when they grow into existence, they'll just expand to fill the space that they can. This is hugely useful for when you fall down a narrow 1-tile-wide hole, for instance. Previously that was a death sentence if you didn't have something special like a bat scroll, double-or-triple jump, lightning rocket, or an elusion scroll.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Monday, March 26, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.916 "The Black Wind Shows" Released!
This one is the first of what we expect to be two releases for today. The main reason we're pushing this one early is that it has such major CPU usage enhancements in it that we really wanted to get that into the hands of folks as soon as possible.
But it also has a few other tweaks, the most notable of which is that the wind on the world map is now a visible thing that not only is shown blowing but also darkens the tiles it covers. This is something that players have wanted for a good while, so that they can have a better visual barometer of just how much they have pushed the winds back on their continent.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
But it also has a few other tweaks, the most notable of which is that the wind on the world map is now a visible thing that not only is shown blowing but also darkens the tiles it covers. This is something that players have wanted for a good while, so that they can have a better visual barometer of just how much they have pushed the winds back on their continent.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.915 "Dire Servant... From The Meadow?" Released!
This one has yet another batch of bugfixes, but also four new/revised features:
1. Actual glass in windows, with periodic cracks and everything.
2. Healing Touch now not only works in multiplayer, it's a lot more useful in how it works in multiplayer and solo.
3. Skelebot Guards are now Skelebot Grunts, and way less annoying. Elite versions of the grunts will be added later with new abilities/behavior to make them more challenging, but for now the grunts are pretty simple cannon fodder for the start of the game.
4. A new summon spell has been added to the game; it's something you can get starting on the second continent. It's got a funny name and appearance, but it's actually pretty powerful -- depending on the circumstances, actually moreso than the rhino.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
1. Actual glass in windows, with periodic cracks and everything.
2. Healing Touch now not only works in multiplayer, it's a lot more useful in how it works in multiplayer and solo.
3. Skelebot Guards are now Skelebot Grunts, and way less annoying. Elite versions of the grunts will be added later with new abilities/behavior to make them more challenging, but for now the grunts are pretty simple cannon fodder for the start of the game.
4. A new summon spell has been added to the game; it's something you can get starting on the second continent. It's got a funny name and appearance, but it's actually pretty powerful -- depending on the circumstances, actually moreso than the rhino.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Steam Deal: Tidalis $2.50 Today Only
Steam has our 'easy to learn, hard to master' puzzler Tidalis at 50% off today only as part of their Daily Deal promotion. With the game's recent price drop that brings the PC/Mac title down to just $2.50.
If you know much about our games, you know that's quite a bit of content for around the cost of a cup of coffee. Plus no calories (directly).
The sale ends tomorrow (Monday, March 26th) at 10:00 AM PT. Reluctant? Demo. Tidalis Lite (browser version).
If you know much about our games, you know that's quite a bit of content for around the cost of a cup of coffee. Plus no calories (directly).
The sale ends tomorrow (Monday, March 26th) at 10:00 AM PT. Reluctant? Demo. Tidalis Lite (browser version).
AVWW Interview On First Drop Show
Chris and I had a solid chat last week with Eddie Milanes on the First Drop Show podcast.We cover a variety of topics regarding the design, development, and upcoming official release of A Valley Without Wind, including scrapped concepts, future possibilities for the game, why we try to only develop features in that we'd want to play, etc.
If you're looking for some in-depth discussion about the game, or just have an hour to kill, definitely give it a listen.
Saturday, March 24, 2012
AVWW Beta 0.914 "Insecticide" Released!
This one is our second release of the day, and it's just a bugfix release that is focused on fixing mainly things that we broke in the prior version. With that many changes to get multiplayer working better (which we're told that it is, happily), there were bound to be some other things broken.
The unhappy truth of doing surgery on a codebase to fix a nest of issues is that you get some collateral damage. Fortunately the damage was mostly pretty mild so far (knock on wood), but definitely still annoying and something we wanted to fix as soon as we could. All of the worst ones seem to be resolved with this release, but let us know what else you find that seems off, as always!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
The unhappy truth of doing surgery on a codebase to fix a nest of issues is that you get some collateral damage. Fortunately the damage was mostly pretty mild so far (knock on wood), but definitely still annoying and something we wanted to fix as soon as we could. All of the worst ones seem to be resolved with this release, but let us know what else you find that seems off, as always!
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
AVWW Beta 0.913 "Unraveling Mysteries" Released!
This one has been a few days in the works, but has two major components to it.
Mysteries!
First of all, there are finally mysteries in the game, as well as puzzle rooms to solve to unlock clues from each mystery. Right now there are two mysteries with a combined 28 clues between them, but there will be more mysteries added both before and after 1.0. The mysteries are really fun because they allow you to learn some more about the world of Environ without it just being lots of exposition, and they also add a puzzle element that is lightweight, and optional, but fun-if-you're-into-that-sort-of-thing.
Mysteries themselves took a little over a solid day for me, but they represent the last major "type of game mechanic" that we needed to add before 1.0, so that's pretty exciting to have done. We still have lots of content to add, but mysteries were the last new kind of broad mechanic that was missing.
Multiplayer Work
The rest of my time, and all of Keith's and Josh's time, has been spent working on multiplayer. We'd thought that multiplayer was in a much cleaner state than it turned out to be, honestly. We'd done a goodly amount of multiplayer testing on our own, but only in short-ish sessions over good connections in geographic areas that only spanned a few hundred miles. And we were getting and fixing the occasional bug report from people playing on public servers like Toll's, but there wasn't much of that and so we presumed all was well.
Turns out that was not the case! For some folks who were more geographically distant, or who were otherwise having lag issues, there were a number of severe MP issues that only cropped up in those circumstances. We've now got a way of testing under situations of moderate or heavy lag internally for ourselves, so we were able to duplicate the issues (and then had to figure out how to fix them). We fixed an absolute horde of these sorts of MP-specific bugs, and the MP experience is thus incredibly smoother under most conditions.
What Remains For Multiplayer -- And A Communication Breakdown
There are a few mostly-cosmetic bugs that we're still aware of, as well as a handful of not-cosmetic-at-all bugs, but in the main MP is now feeling a lot closer to a product we'd actually want to release as 1.0 next month.
The most concerning thing through this process, however, was that we just didn't get the feedback and didn't even know there was a problem -- normally people tell us when they run into issues right away, and since there were a number of people we knew were playing MP, we assumed that an absence of reports meant an absence of issues.
But in this case, it apparently meant that MP was so badly broken for a few people that they just assumed that it was some sort of working test version and that we knew about it; and thus said nothing. And meanwhile other people were playing under situations that weren't high-lag, having almost no issues, and telling us things seemed great, which matched our own testing.
Far be it from me to chide anyone, because I know that everyone who takes the time to submit any bug report is doing us a huge favor, and it's not something they were required to do. Testing our games isn't your job, etc, etc.
But for those folks who do find a bug that they want to see fixed, definitely I'd advise erring on the side of assuming we don't know about it. We'd rather have to clean up duplicates than to have something important slip through the cracks -- in the last three years, this is the first time I can really remember where that almost happened, and frankly it was kind of scary. If we had gone ahead with our original go-live date of next week, there would have been some major fecal matter hitting the proverbial fan, and we would have had no idea that was coming.
Serves us right for not doing our own better testing under conditions of lag, of course. We just assumed that having two people in two different cities in North Carolina, plus a third person in Georgia, would give us real-world-enough results. Ah, well; in the end it looks like it is all working out well, knock on wood, but that's definitely had us in a bit of a tizzy for the last couple of days and delayed some content updates.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Mysteries!
First of all, there are finally mysteries in the game, as well as puzzle rooms to solve to unlock clues from each mystery. Right now there are two mysteries with a combined 28 clues between them, but there will be more mysteries added both before and after 1.0. The mysteries are really fun because they allow you to learn some more about the world of Environ without it just being lots of exposition, and they also add a puzzle element that is lightweight, and optional, but fun-if-you're-into-that-sort-of-thing.
Mysteries themselves took a little over a solid day for me, but they represent the last major "type of game mechanic" that we needed to add before 1.0, so that's pretty exciting to have done. We still have lots of content to add, but mysteries were the last new kind of broad mechanic that was missing.
Multiplayer Work
The rest of my time, and all of Keith's and Josh's time, has been spent working on multiplayer. We'd thought that multiplayer was in a much cleaner state than it turned out to be, honestly. We'd done a goodly amount of multiplayer testing on our own, but only in short-ish sessions over good connections in geographic areas that only spanned a few hundred miles. And we were getting and fixing the occasional bug report from people playing on public servers like Toll's, but there wasn't much of that and so we presumed all was well.
Turns out that was not the case! For some folks who were more geographically distant, or who were otherwise having lag issues, there were a number of severe MP issues that only cropped up in those circumstances. We've now got a way of testing under situations of moderate or heavy lag internally for ourselves, so we were able to duplicate the issues (and then had to figure out how to fix them). We fixed an absolute horde of these sorts of MP-specific bugs, and the MP experience is thus incredibly smoother under most conditions.
What Remains For Multiplayer -- And A Communication Breakdown
There are a few mostly-cosmetic bugs that we're still aware of, as well as a handful of not-cosmetic-at-all bugs, but in the main MP is now feeling a lot closer to a product we'd actually want to release as 1.0 next month.
The most concerning thing through this process, however, was that we just didn't get the feedback and didn't even know there was a problem -- normally people tell us when they run into issues right away, and since there were a number of people we knew were playing MP, we assumed that an absence of reports meant an absence of issues.
But in this case, it apparently meant that MP was so badly broken for a few people that they just assumed that it was some sort of working test version and that we knew about it; and thus said nothing. And meanwhile other people were playing under situations that weren't high-lag, having almost no issues, and telling us things seemed great, which matched our own testing.
Far be it from me to chide anyone, because I know that everyone who takes the time to submit any bug report is doing us a huge favor, and it's not something they were required to do. Testing our games isn't your job, etc, etc.
But for those folks who do find a bug that they want to see fixed, definitely I'd advise erring on the side of assuming we don't know about it. We'd rather have to clean up duplicates than to have something important slip through the cracks -- in the last three years, this is the first time I can really remember where that almost happened, and frankly it was kind of scary. If we had gone ahead with our original go-live date of next week, there would have been some major fecal matter hitting the proverbial fan, and we would have had no idea that was coming.
Serves us right for not doing our own better testing under conditions of lag, of course. We just assumed that having two people in two different cities in North Carolina, plus a third person in Georgia, would give us real-world-enough results. Ah, well; in the end it looks like it is all working out well, knock on wood, but that's definitely had us in a bit of a tizzy for the last couple of days and delayed some content updates.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
AVWW 1.0 On April 16th, Confirmed On Steam -- Also Price Drop For Final Game
It was just two days ago that we gave you some general updates about A Valley Without Wind's launch coming the "week of April 16th," but there were a lot of specifics we couldn't give you at the time. Welp... now have the rest of the details for you!
Release Date -- And Steam!
The actual release date will be, specifically, Monday April 16th itself. The game will be going live on Steam on that day as 1.0, along with having its version updated to 1.0 with Impulse, GamersGate, MacGameStore, and our own site. All of the latter already carry the game at a preorder discount.
Steam Keys For Existing Preorders?
Any keys you buy from other sources should be able to have their CD keys imported into Steam for Steam keys. The final call on that is always up to Valve rather than us, so we can't make promises on their behalf. But all five of our existing games/expansions that are on Steam allow for CD key imports, so we don't have any reason to believe that this sixth title will suddenly be any different.
Final Pricing For 1.0
The preorder price has been $9.99, and will remain thus until April 16th. At launch, we'll be moving to a final price of $14.99 for the game instead of the previously-planned $19.99, however.
Insight Into The Pricing Thought Process, If You're Curious
This pricing change is something that we decided upon in consultation with our distributors, who strongly recommended it. Looking at the market for games vaguely similar to AVWW, we had to conclude that they were correct, and honestly we'd been getting antsy about the $20 price point for a game of this genre, anyhow.
Crazy, right? There's dozens of hours of content in here, hundreds if you really get into the game heavily, and that beats out a lot of AAA titles in terms of how much bang for your buck you get -- at $15, $20, or even $60. But that's not how the market works, and the market is always changing.
If you think about this as your game, and you're trying to figure out a fair price, that makes $20 seem like the right choice -- after all, AI War was $20 up until this past month, and it's done very well for us. So that's what we originally went with as our goal for the launch price. The thing is, if I step back and think about this as a consumer (which I am -- I still buy plenty of games myself), then $20 for most small-studio indie games seems a bit steep.
The exception are those that are in niche genres: strategy titles, visual novels, wargames, hardcore simulations, and so forth. I think that my friend Cliff has it right with his pricing for Gratuitous Tank Battles, for instance. And I think that $20 was the right price point for AI War for most of its life (though I always had people telling me it should be $30 like some other wargames, and others telling me it should be $10 like some other indie games).
For A Valley Without Wind, looking at anything that could be lumped into its general sort of genre, the pricing is more typically between $10-$15. Given the massive amount of playtime this game has, and the ongoing work we do post-release with titles like this, being at the higher end of that range -- but no higher -- seemed like the pragmatic move.
What's Left To Do?
Today we should have the first two mysteries released for you, which will mark the last of the overall "broad game mechanics" for the game. Then it's a focus on:
- Polish
- Bugfixes
- Player-requested tweaks and additions
- More enemies, including enemy elites and boss modifiers
- More spells
- More guardian power scrolls
- More mission activities
- Possibly a few more enchants, although there are already hundreds of thousands of permutations of these.
If you're curious how things are likely to go over the next month between now and 1.0, just take a look at what we've been up to lately. That's pretty representative.
And Now, Some Shameless Plugging Of Social Media
Be sure to like the game on facebook if you're into that sort of thing, follow the game on twitter if that's your bag, etc. This game is really important to us both personally and as a company, and word of mouth has been absolutely instrumental in the past success of AI War for us. If you like what we do and want to see more of it, be sure to tell your friends!
Thanks, as always, for your support! We really wouldn't be here without you all. Nor would AVWW be the same without all the extensive beta involvement it's seen. I mean, seriously.
Release Date -- And Steam!
The actual release date will be, specifically, Monday April 16th itself. The game will be going live on Steam on that day as 1.0, along with having its version updated to 1.0 with Impulse, GamersGate, MacGameStore, and our own site. All of the latter already carry the game at a preorder discount.
Steam Keys For Existing Preorders?
Any keys you buy from other sources should be able to have their CD keys imported into Steam for Steam keys. The final call on that is always up to Valve rather than us, so we can't make promises on their behalf. But all five of our existing games/expansions that are on Steam allow for CD key imports, so we don't have any reason to believe that this sixth title will suddenly be any different.
Final Pricing For 1.0
The preorder price has been $9.99, and will remain thus until April 16th. At launch, we'll be moving to a final price of $14.99 for the game instead of the previously-planned $19.99, however.
Insight Into The Pricing Thought Process, If You're Curious
This pricing change is something that we decided upon in consultation with our distributors, who strongly recommended it. Looking at the market for games vaguely similar to AVWW, we had to conclude that they were correct, and honestly we'd been getting antsy about the $20 price point for a game of this genre, anyhow.
Crazy, right? There's dozens of hours of content in here, hundreds if you really get into the game heavily, and that beats out a lot of AAA titles in terms of how much bang for your buck you get -- at $15, $20, or even $60. But that's not how the market works, and the market is always changing.
If you think about this as your game, and you're trying to figure out a fair price, that makes $20 seem like the right choice -- after all, AI War was $20 up until this past month, and it's done very well for us. So that's what we originally went with as our goal for the launch price. The thing is, if I step back and think about this as a consumer (which I am -- I still buy plenty of games myself), then $20 for most small-studio indie games seems a bit steep.
The exception are those that are in niche genres: strategy titles, visual novels, wargames, hardcore simulations, and so forth. I think that my friend Cliff has it right with his pricing for Gratuitous Tank Battles, for instance. And I think that $20 was the right price point for AI War for most of its life (though I always had people telling me it should be $30 like some other wargames, and others telling me it should be $10 like some other indie games).
For A Valley Without Wind, looking at anything that could be lumped into its general sort of genre, the pricing is more typically between $10-$15. Given the massive amount of playtime this game has, and the ongoing work we do post-release with titles like this, being at the higher end of that range -- but no higher -- seemed like the pragmatic move.
What's Left To Do?
Today we should have the first two mysteries released for you, which will mark the last of the overall "broad game mechanics" for the game. Then it's a focus on:
- Polish
- Bugfixes
- Player-requested tweaks and additions
- More enemies, including enemy elites and boss modifiers
- More spells
- More guardian power scrolls
- More mission activities
- Possibly a few more enchants, although there are already hundreds of thousands of permutations of these.
If you're curious how things are likely to go over the next month between now and 1.0, just take a look at what we've been up to lately. That's pretty representative.
And Now, Some Shameless Plugging Of Social Media
Be sure to like the game on facebook if you're into that sort of thing, follow the game on twitter if that's your bag, etc. This game is really important to us both personally and as a company, and word of mouth has been absolutely instrumental in the past success of AI War for us. If you like what we do and want to see more of it, be sure to tell your friends!
Thanks, as always, for your support! We really wouldn't be here without you all. Nor would AVWW be the same without all the extensive beta involvement it's seen. I mean, seriously.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
AI War Beta 5.031, "Harvest Of The Unloved," Released!
This one is just rebalancing, but some of it's pretty significant. The main thrust
is to bring some of the consistently-least-loved units back into the
"interesting choice" range. It also has a few bugfixes and some changes to both harvesters and harvester exo-shields, hence the macabre-sounding nickname for the release.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)