For those of you who don't want to read any developer blah-blah-blah, go here and get the free Demo, which features hours of fun gameplay!
...and now for our regularly-scheduled blah-blah-blah ;-)
It's been a very hectic six weeks, since we posted the Demo for 1.0 and got rolling with the process of selling the game online.
We released an early update for paying customers to fix some bugs that cropped up the first week after release, then we were faced with... the Rest Of It.
The stuff that normal companies have "people" to do- stuff like building an e-commerce front-end on our website, so that we could finally offer a Linux version of the game, revamping the entire website's structure, jumping through all of the hoops so that we could be officially a "business" under the Law, and not just "some crazy guys who decided to sell video games". Oh, little stuff like at least writing out our marketing plan, not just, "hey, we'll post press releases and hope for the best".
Yes, we are terrible business people- please give us money, so that we can hire professionals!
Rational people would have done all of this months in advance. To the crime of being irrationally exuberant, we plead "guilty as charged". The game always came first. We launched with a website I built out of Duct Tape and some spare pixels I had lying around. We didn't even have a Forum up.
Yup, we're nuts like that.
Well, it's all fixed and spiffy and Awesome, and now we're ready to pitch... version 1.2!
So, what's in it, besides some pretty pictures?
1. Complete campaigns for Resistance and Overmind. At least 60 hours of gameplay, with missions ranging from "mommy loves me" to "OMG, that's gotta hurt". We promise they're all beatable. I've beat them myself. Without cheat codes.
2. The brand-new ultra-cool Skirmish System, which lets you play survival games vs. a random enemy faction, and uses all three factions in the game (currently!)- the Resistance, the Overmind, and the evil Space Chickens.
3. Cooler graphics and sound.
4. Weather! Snow and rain, even a dust storm, courtesy of some slick GPL-friendly GLSL shader code.
5. New private server, just for the game. No more Spring Server any more, you can play with like-minded folks if multiplayer is all you're into.
6. Lots of new GPL-friendly World Builder content to sink your teeth into.
It's cool, folks. Come get the Demo, play the three missions and Skirmish, and buy it, you'll be happy that you did!
Congrats on getting all the fine backend stuff worked out!
I'll be checking out the demo and hope the best for your project :)
Thanks :-)
Oh, and btw, the Linux version will be offered for $14.95. We're going to have the e-commerce stuff finalized over the next few days.
Hmm, I could swear there were two other commments here, when I looked yesterday. Commercial games on Spring - IDK, why make a commercial game on a free engine? That feels like cheating, when other people create better engines from scratch.
However, the game does look original and judging from what I can see you put a lot of work into creating content and tweaking the engine. So I guess there is nothing wrong with making a few dollars, though I see this more in the 5-8$ range than above. Have you seen what games you get on Steam for 14,95$?
Find me any full-fledged RTS game that sells for $5 and doesn't suck, and I'll show you a RTS by a major game company that has hit rock-bottom bargain-bin pricing, and it's 5 years old.
To add further to this... let's put it into perspective, guys.
If you have a job anywhere in the First World, $20 isn't a big deal. I admit, it's totally out of the reach of folks in really poor countries, but they don't have computers that can run the game anyhow.
After I pay distributors / credit-card processors and taxes, that $20 is more like $10.
So, if I sell 1,000 copies, on a game that took 2 years to build, and make $10, I made $5,000 a year. This math is just how things work, folks. Game designers have to eat and pay the rent just like anybody else.
I don't think there are any better RTS engines, frankly, only commercial projects with basic engines who have shoehorned in better map and model formats and artificially limited the scope of play so you don't see all the flaws.
Making a commercial project on a shared resource attracts people to improve that shared resource, which in theory improves options for many other people. Just because you need to pay for something doesn't mean it is any more worthy of use.
@SinKing - Heh, yeah, there were negative comments along the lines of the price range and what other things are in the same price range.
But anyway, haven't tried this, I'll try getting the demo when I can. Not really into big robots usually, though if the gameplay is solid it could be worth it.
However, I have used the Spring engine, and I have a question: Have you changed the camera system at all from the original Spring Engine? Personally, I didn't find it very friendly and usable, and I'm curious.
Thanks!
The camera system is really flexible, and all of the major options are supported- traditional RTS camera, free camera, and "Total War" camera views.
I can't imagine any issues with the Camera since you can literally set it to any angle and type of zoom you wish... or is it just the initial setting and no movement to another mode?
It's probably that the other camera settings aren't available to end-users unless they have read the Spring guides.
My Options Menu gets around that problem by providing a simple UI for these things.
Yeah, I didn't go through the Spring documentation much, so I didn't really fiddle with it.
If I remember correctly, the camera felt like the one from World in Conflict, except without being able to use WASD to move around. Or something like that, not sure. Can't remember exactly what threw me off.
Hmm... Unfortunately I don't have a proper computer at the moment, nor anywhere in the foreseeable future. Wonder if this would work on my Eee...
You can use the arrow keys, pageup / pagedown zooms, middle-mouse on minimap moves to location, etc.
It's all in the manual :-)
Oh, and it might... barely... work on a EEE, depending on which EEE. But that's a "barely", and you won't get the OpenGL 2.0 shader goodness.
looking pretty nice i really like the snow... good job!
The Linux Demo's up, btw. Please let us know how it works for you :-)