Archive for July, 2014
Posted by Keith LaMothe on July 31st, 2014
This one is a break from your (ir)regularly-scheduled bugfixes and polish to bring you a large engine upgrade and native-linux support. NOTE: as of this writing distribution of the linux build is still being worked out. We’d been planning to release 8.0/DoW during the week of August 4th and then wait until a week or […]
Posted by Keith LaMothe on July 24th, 2014
This one makes a number of improvements, such as: Bot Rebalancing The details are in the notes above, but basically each bot type now has a “Pain/Irritation/Traumatization Assessment Rating”, or PITAR for short. This is used to better regulate the relative frequency of bot types (in a normal mission) and presence and quantity in the […]
Posted by Keith LaMothe on July 23rd, 2014
This one is another coat of polish for the new expansion and 8.0 in general, so nothing earthshaking here. That said, there are changes I think will make some folks pretty happy: – The galaxy-display-modes for fabricators and golems are now much nicer to use, with both showing the names of the actual units on […]
Posted by Keith LaMothe on July 18th, 2014
This one contains several changes, including: It’s Dangerous To Go Alone (But Now You Can) Now when starting a new game you may select “(None)” for one or more of your exo slots (but not all four). This allows you to increase the challenge of the game and/or simply reduce the number of exos (and […]
Posted by Chris McElligott Park on July 17th, 2014
This one brings official linux support to the game for the first time, as well as a 64bit build for OSX. There is also one minor bugfix in there, too. License Keys No More Another nice thing about this version is that the license key that was previously required is now optional instead. If you […]
Posted by Chris McElligott Park on July 17th, 2014
This one brings official linux support to the game for the first time, as well as a 64bit build for OSX. There is also one minor bugfix in there, too. License Keys No More Another nice thing about this version is that the license key that was previously required is now optional instead. If you […]
Posted by Keith LaMothe on July 17th, 2014
This one is yet more polish work for the new expansion, and also for the rest of the game in preparation for the 8.0 official release. That means almost entirely bugfixes, balancing, etc. Including a lot of text work and updating the Objectives screen logic, etc. Here’s what’s left (not yet done) between now and […]
Posted by Chris McElligott Park on July 16th, 2014
UPDATE 10/31/2014: Since the name of the game has changed to Stars Beyond Reach, and the logo has changed, I’ve come back and updated this post to reflect that. Everything else was already accurate, so there was no point having any confusion. The old name was Spectral Empire. Stars Beyond Reach is our upcoming 4X […]
Posted by Chris McElligott Park on July 14th, 2014
Last June I wrote a postmortem of AI War, which also wound up being a form of history of Arcen as a whole. But now a whole year has passed, and we’ve released Skyward Collapse: Nihon no Mura, Bionic Dues, and The Last Federation in that time. We also have a lot more data on […]

Posted in
A Valley Without Wind,
A Valley Without Wind 2,
AI War,
Bionic Dues,
Game Design,
Most Popular,
Newsworthy,
Shattered Haven,
Skyward Collapse,
The Last Federation,
Tidalis
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Posted by Chris McElligott Park on July 11th, 2014
Recently I said that we weren’t going to port Tidalis to linux, because it’s just not a profitable enough game for us, and it’s on a super old version of our engine. Well… man if I didn’t boot this game up and just fall in love with it all over again. I get to say […]
Posted by Chris McElligott Park on July 11th, 2014
Skyward Collapse and Shattered Haven have both gotten official linux support this week, but that’s not all that’s been going on. The Arcen Store has had a visual and functional overhaul and now both looks better and works better. There are a number of things that are easier for me on the back-end, but more […]
Posted by Chris McElligott Park on July 11th, 2014
Version 2.500 brings official linux support to both the game and its expansion for the first time, as well as a 64bit OSX build. There are also a couple of bugfixes in here, as well. Not only that, but there is now a “complete edition” for Skyward Collapse that you can get from our store […]
Posted by Chris McElligott Park on July 11th, 2014
This one brings official linux support to the game for the first time, as well as a 64bit build for OSX. There are also a couple of other minor tweaks in here for your enjoyment. Enjoy! This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any […]
Posted by Keith LaMothe on July 3rd, 2014
This one introduces two new options for your beta-testing pleasure (if you use the in-game updater to get the beta version) : Dead Is Dead If you enable this optional rule at the beginning of the game, and an exo is destroyed during a mission, it is not replaced after the mission. On Your Toes […]
Posted by Chris McElligott Park on July 2nd, 2014
This one is very very small, simply updating our Steamworks integration and fixing achievements on linux. Enjoy! This is a standard update that Steam will automatically download for you. However, if you want to force a quicker update and are currently running Steam, just restart Steam. Edit: Just another quick note to add that Bionic Dues is in […]
Posted by Keith LaMothe on July 1st, 2014
This one is more polish work for the new expansion, and also for the rest of the game. – Fallen Spire has been substantially rebalanced in favor of powerful capital ships (on the human side) and powerful FS exos (on the AI side), and away from its naturally high AIP causing runaway wave sizes (due […]
Posted by Chris McElligott Park on July 1st, 2014
Version 1.027 is out, and has some very nice goodies! The biggest thing here is the increased power of a number of the dispatches — not just those related to the RCI at planets, but several of the others, as well. There are also 4 new dispatches, which allow you to affect RCI negatively at […]