Thursday, March 31, 2011

AI War LotS Review on Indie Game Reviewer

Over on Indie Game Reviewer Callabrantus has taken the time to check out and give his thoughts on AI War's recently released Light of the Spire expansion.

Some of the more tasty bits:

"This latest entry brings with it a healthy variety of new content and features, most notably the campaign modes, while staying true to the core experience...Even without the expansion sets, AI War is the type of game one never truly masters...Here, the concept of “casual” cowers in fear."

Read the full review on IGR.

A Valley Without Wind: First Public Release Now Beta, New Lighting Video and Perma-Death Journal

Arcen Games would like to pass along word of a new video, developer journal and new release info for its procedurally-generated action adventure title A Valley Without Wind.

We have made the significant decision to push back the first public release of AVWW to what we had originally planned for beta. For one, we feel it'd be a giant mistake to release any playable build of the game before there's more to do in it than fight Skelebots and destroy trees.

Not that killing Skelebots isn't fun, but that's not all this game is about; not by a long-shot. The choice to make the beta version the first publicly available build of the game allows us to add dynamic goals that players will actually care about, a fuller realization of our perma-death feature, and more ways the player can make an impact on their world -- along with much more overall content and variation. Those items, we feel, are now essential for the game before it can be considered playable and on sale to the public.

What this means for AVWW's release schedule is that the public alpha that was to arrive in April is now officially canned in lieu of a public beta. We'll determine a release date for it once we're closer to the completion of the aforementioned features. To sum it all up: A Valley Without Wind's first public pre-release will bring a much more content rich experience, we just need some time to put it together. The 1.0 launch remains unaffected by these changes and is still currently on target for October of this year, and of course we'll continue to update on the development of the game when new features and improvements are added.

Arcen head Chris Park explains and explores all facets of the matter in full detail on the Games by Design blog: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2011/03/first-public-version-of-valley-without.html

Making weighty decisions for AVWW doesn't mean we haven't been working on it! Check out our latest video showcasing the improved lighting in the game (along with a full explanation on where we were, and how we got to this point with the new method): http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2011/03/valley-without-wind-pre-alpha-8-new.html

Chris also dives into the game's interesting take on perma-death and what he hopes it'll mean for the player's overall experience: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2011/03/valley-without-wind-whats-deal-with.html

A Valley Without Wind is currently set for official release on PC and Mac in October, with a public pre-release build coming earlier in the year.

About Arcen Games

Arcen Games entered the PC indie scene in 2009 with their cult classic AI War: Fleet Command, which was named the 40th best-reviewed PC game of the year by MetaCritic. Their second year was a busy one, seeing the release of The Zenith Remnant, the first full expansion for AI War; Tidalis, an innovative block-based puzzle with casual appeal and hardcore depth; and Children of Neinzul, a micro-expansion for AI War with all profits benefiting the Child's Play charity, of which Arcen is a platinum sponsor.

AI War's third and largest expansion Light of the Spire marked Arcen's first release of 2011, and now the company has shifted its focus and excitement to the development of A Valley Without Wind. Originally a one-man shop, Arcen Games has grown to have half a dozen part-time or fulltime contributors to its various titles.

Monday, March 28, 2011

AI War Beta 5.009, "Desync II: The Resyncing," Released!

This one fixes yet another desync that Fleet and Tssbackus were the sole folks to be able to find.  Turns out you had to save your game under just the right circumstances in the middle of a big battle to get this one, which not many people presumably do, hence the rarity.

This release also includes some stronger desync detection methods based on a simple hash method on the clients and host, to make desyncs quicker to find and easier to reproduce.  Hopefully that was the last desync for a while, though!

And lastly, this sharply nerfs the health of a lot of the spire core shield generators that the AI has, which I'm sure many people will be quite happy about.  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.

A Valley Without Wind: Interiors, Lighting, Crafting, New Regions, Character Stats, And Perma-Death (And Much More!)

Arcen Games is downright ecstatic to share the latest updates, screens and video footage for its procedurally-generated action adventure title A Valley Without Wind. We haven't shared in a few weeks, so there's a ton of new stuff to show and tell including interiors, lighting, crafting, playable/NPC Skelebots, lava and desert regions, perma-death implementation and lots more.

Interiors -- the last remaining world building focus for the game -- have been added, though at the moment we'll be needing the proper time to populate them. These structures don't have any electrical power, making most indoor exploring pretty dark. This is where lighting comes into play, as several darker areas both interior and exterior can be lit by various spells and objects to grant better visibility and ease the search.

There's been plenty of character focus this past update as well: Perma-death and crafting in their basic forms are now in place, along with a working system for producing a unique set of stats for each individual character. A neutral Skelebot that works as both playable character and as a non-hostile NPC, a dynamic character name generator, and NPC dialog have also been thrown into the mix.

New music, regions, improvements to shadows and particle effects, a new lamp object, and two new spells: "shrink" and "flash of light," round out the sizable list of update highlights. Check out the latest gameplay video showing off everything mentioned and more here (in HD): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24qWu6TPdpE&hd=1

17 new screenshots can be found on the AVWW feature page: http://www.arcengames.com/w/index.php/games/avww-features

And to make up for the lengthy radio silence, we have three new developer journals available. A breakdown of the video as well as a detailed explanation of the aforementioned features, additions and improvements: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2011/03/valley-without-wind-pre-alpha-7.html

Arcen head Chris Park goes into his approach to the design process of AVWW as compared with past works: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2011/03/a-valley-without-wind-design-process.html

Lastly, Chris discusses horizontal versus vertical game development phases, and wonders why indies can't explore the latter as much as they do the former: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2011/03/horizontal-vs-vertical-game-development.html

That's all for this process improvement focused update. Come back next time for an update heavier on the art advancement. A Valley Without Wind is currently set for official release on PC and Mac later this year, with a playable Alpha build available to customers who pre-order coming in April.

About Arcen Games

Arcen Games entered the PC indie scene in 2009 with their cult classic AI War: Fleet Command, which was named the 40th best-reviewed PC game of the year by MetaCritic. Their second year was a busy one, seeing the release of The Zenith Remnant, the first full expansion for AI War; Tidalis, an innovative block-based puzzle with casual appeal and hardcore depth; and Children of Neinzul, a micro-expansion for AI War with all profits benefiting the Child's Play charity, of which Arcen is a platinum sponsor.

AI War's third and largest expansion Light of the Spire marked Arcen's first release of 2011, and now the company has shifted its focus and excitement to the development of A Valley Without Wind. Originally a one-man shop, Arcen Games has grown to have half a dozen part-time or fulltime contributors to its various titles.

Friday, March 25, 2011

AI War Beta 5.008, "Bad Robot, No Cookie," Released!

This one is pretty minor, just with a few balance tweaks and a bugfix related to minor factions and zombies going off their leashes too far.  Since that one in particular is really important to some folks, we're going ahead and releasing the patch for this today.  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.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

AI War Beta 5.007, "Zombies Are For Eating My Neighbors," Released!

Well!  I've been so focused on A Valley Without Wind for the last month and a half that I really wanted to make sure AI War was getting the love it needs.  Keith has been doing updates for the game the last while, but we haven't had any really big burn-throughs of the mantis idea tracker in a while. 

Yesterday was mostly all about one big desync, so today I wanted to spend one more day in AI War land and accomplish a variety of player-requested stuff, before I head back to AVWW tomorrow.  That's what this release is all about, and it's the hugest one we've had since 5.0 came out.

One of the most notable things about this release is how minor factions and zombies have been tweaked.  Friendly ones will still guard your planets somewhat, but they're also a lot more likely to strike out and help you deal with the AI on nearby planets.  They thus act partly as a force for keeping the AI stalkers down, and for helping you with nearby offensives, rather than just being purely defensive.  The hostile zombies and minor factions have also gotten some improvements, and thus the devourer golem is now better at actually devouring AI ships in most cases, for instance.

Spirecraft Penetrators have gotten quite a nerf, but before you panic remember that nothing is written in stone.  These were clearly game-breaking in the hands of some players, though, so we went with some rather severe changes to work back up from there if this seems like too much.  Some of the players who've seen the notes on this already are pretty optimistic this is a lot closer, though, so that's a good sign.

There have also been not one but two very notable performance improvements.  Once massively reduces the load caused in big battles by gravitational effects, and the other makes control group adding/removing no longer cause crazy lag.  For me, that's also seemingly really speeding up the loading of savegames.

Beyond that, there are a couple dozen other smaller bugfixes and balance tweaks.  Oh, and a message that is sent now whenever an EMP or tachyon detonation occurs, which can help you detect breaches in your defenses when EMP guardians are secretly after you.

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.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

AI War Beta 5.006, "Raiders Of The Lost Desync," Released!

This one fixes a desync that has been haunting my nightmares for months.  It's been incredibly, incredibly rare, to the point that only a few players have ever even seen it.  But those players could reproduce it reliably, while almost nobody else could reproduce it at all.  Knock on wood, today that saga ends.  One savegame provided by those same players most affected, Fleet and Tssbackus, has finally yielded a reproducible case for me.  The battle was hard, but in the end we nailed it to the wall.

But that's not all! This release also has some pretty notable balance shifts around translocation shots, specifically so that your military command stations are now more powerful and less unwieldy.  Also regeneration got a few tweaks to be less unwieldy when fortresses and force fields and such are around, too.

Lastly, and I'm sure most excitingly for the largest number of people, is some notable raid starship rebalancing.  The raids have been split into two lines: one for the humans and one for the AIs, and the human ones have been made about 20% more powerful, while the AI ones are now only 50% as strong as the human counterparts.  In other words, your raids will survive a bit longer against the AI missile guard posts, while the AI starships won't wreak quite so much havoc all through your systems when they come in any volume.

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.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

AI War Review on i-luv-games.com

AI War 5.0 has received a glowing review from John over on i-luv-games.com. Here's some of our favorite words:

"I love that AI War is so different from every other Real-Time strategy out these days...No other strategy game that I’ve played treats the player to battles of such epic proportions...AI War: Fleet Command is a game that combines equal portions of quality and quantity. Not only is it a great game, but it’s a great big game. The battles, micromanagement, exploration, and discovery, will keep strategy gamers coming back."

Read the full review here.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

AI War Beta 5.005, "The Balancer," Released!

This one fixes a bug with savegames in 5.004, and also includes a large selection of balance tweaks requested by players since 5.0.  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 5.004, "The RAMinator," Released!

This one is very exciting for me personally, because it addresses one of the hugest bugbears for me with the post-Unity-porting version of the game, which is RAM use.  As long-time players will know, we've already gone through a huge number of gyrations to get the per-frame RAM usage down, with great success, but the problem was that we were still having too much baseline RAM -- in other words, too much RAM in use right when the program was launched and when a savegame was loaded.

This version literally halves -- or actually in some cases quarters -- the baseline RAM usage.  Here's how  we did it, if you're curious.  Be aware that this was some pretty major surgery to the innards of the game, so things may be wonky.  I haven't seen any issues whatsoever, but I can't stress enough how many files this change touched, so there's bound to be something.  If you do find something, just let us know, and we'll fix it as soon as we can.

If you want to revert to the 5.003 version of the game if you run into problems with 5.004, then you can download that directly from here.  Just unzip that file directly over your existing AI War folder (unless you're on a Mac -- you'll have to move the files individually there, because of how OSX handles file transfers.  Bear in mind that saves made in 5.004 won't be able to be opened in 5.003 or before, so overwrite with care.

Honestly I don't think there's really much cause for alarm here, but better safe than sorry when this sort of change comes down the pike.  All things considered, anyway, this is a really exciting change that will really improve the experience for folks pushing the game to its limits.  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.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

AI War Beta 5.003 Released!

This one has a couple of small fixes and tweaks, but mostly focuses on the top-requested ideas from players.  Since it's been a couple of weeks since the last release, we have a triple-dose of free DLC for you today: the ability to save and load the "controls screen" settings to your disk; a new "Mobile Tractors With Full Load Rally" toggle; and a new "Auto-Scout-Picket" command on the context menu.

This version also updates the game engine to Unity 3.3 (from 3.1), which includes a host of improvements.  A lot of these are engine-level performance and correctness improvements, especially centered around sound playback and graphics load.  It hasn't made a whole lot of difference on our beefy rigs, but I imagine that on the lower end of the system requirements spectrum this could add a lot to the experience.  For ourselves, we're also really happy about the improved profiler, and the ability to debug standalone builds, which is hugely useful to us.

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.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

AVWW: Energy Lance Spell, Multiplayer Benchmark, Minimap, New Regions, Buildings and Objects

Arcen Games is pleased to share the latest info and footage for its procedurally-generated action-adventure title A Valley Without Wind. This week we reach a multiplayer benchmark, introduce the Energy Lance spell, implement the minimap feature into the HUD, add new regions, buildings, objects and more.

Early multiplayer testing has gone well. In our first foray, two players were able to connect and play together on a server across the Internet with all the basics working. The functionality is certainly a great success, and now the focus shifts to putting in smoothing/prediction and more testing with a varying number of players.

As for what's new in AVWW this week? Plenty! The HUD has seen several new improvements and additions including better organization, official in-game font, and a minimap to show where you've explored in each area. The Energy Lance spell has been introduced, which provides a handy way of slicing through lines of foliage, refuse and enemies; and several new regions, buildings, and objects, along with more densely populated existing areas have been added as well.

All of the above mentioned and more can be found in greater detail in our latest developer diary: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/2011/03/multiplayer-more-regions-and-buildings.html

The latest gameplay video can be viewed here (in HD): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW69QNq_X-E&hd=1

We'll be checking in again next week with our latest report containing more info and media from the game. A Valley Without Wind is currently set for official release on PC and Mac later this year, with a playable Alpha build available to customers who pre-order coming this spring.

About Arcen Games

Arcen Games entered the PC indie scene in 2009 with their cult classic AI War: Fleet Command, which was named the 40th best-reviewed PC game of the year by MetaCritic. Their second year was a busy one, seeing the release of The Zenith Remnant, the first full expansion for AI War; Tidalis, an innovative block-based puzzle with casual appeal and hardcore depth; and Children of Neinzul, a micro-expansion for AI War with all profits benefiting the Child's Play charity, of which Arcen is a platinum sponsor.

AI War's third and largest expansion Light of the Spire marked Arcen's first release of 2011, and now the company has shifted its focus and excitement to the development of A Valley Without Wind. Originally a one-man shop, Arcen Games has grown to have half a dozen part-time or fulltime contributors to its various titles.