There was an article just yesterday in the Chapel Hill Herald-Sun about the upcoming for-charity micro expansion that we’re doing for AI War. I didn’t even know that article was going to be coming out! Charity accesses games for children’s hospitals This is the main article that was in the Chapel Hill Herald-Sun yesterday, discussing…
The day that puzzle fans have been waiting for has finally arrived! After three months in public beta, the official version of Tidalis has finally launched! The game is now out on Steam, Impulse, Direct2Drive, GamersGate, myGameIQ (who just had their own launch this week, too, by the way), MacGameStore.com, and our own site store.…
Today through July 4th, there’s an incredible discount on AI War: Fleet Command and AI War: The Zenith Remnant via the Steam “Perils of Summer” sale! We’re experimenting a bit by trying out a discount rate of 66%, which is unusually large for us. We recently did something similar with Direct2Drive, and now we’re trying…
The Kotaku Review is a great article by Jordan Rivas, presenting what I think is a healthy way of thinking about game reviews. I’ll let you read the full article, but the basic gist is that the numeric scores are meaningless (which lots of folks have said), and that the long-form describe-everything-in-the-game-briefly is fundamentally flawed…
It’s been a while since we’ve done an update to the installer for Tidalis, but if you’ve been following the Tidalis forums or the budding Tidalis wiki, you already know that the game has been seeing massive nearly-weekly public beta releases since mid-April. The latest version, 0.854, represents the culmination of everything we wanted to…
Two big trends in game design these days are “cinematic” game design (ala Uncharted 2), and “sandbox” games (ala Grand Theft Auto). These are trendy things to talk about, and tons of people have really strong opinions about one or the other type of game for various reasons. However, I think that both cinematic and…
In the fifth installment of this series, I talked about the reasons for not over-engineering AIs and thus letting them fall into traps by making them too predictable. That was intended to be the final article in the series, unless more questions came up that I needed to address. Recently a new topic has arisen,…
Arcen’s primary focus has still been on Tidalis since the release of our last massive 3.060 update to AI War: Fleet Command, but nonetheless a ton has been happening over the last few months with our massive strategy title. The AI has learned some new tricks, performance and balance are better than ever, Golems (from…
Normally I don’t cross-post topics from the Arcen Wiki, but this one I wrote tonight, and was so fundamental and helpful in explaining many of the intricacies of AI War in broad terms that I thought it would be a worthwhile one to share directly here on my blog. Q: The game doesn’t seem to…
Bold statement, no? But this is a pretty simple post, actually. It shouldn’t come as surprise to anyone that we live in a complex world, but we tend to rely on mental models that oversimplify things. Even without discussing heuristics and the problems those can create, we can simply think of this in terms of…
