The drawing for the #loveindies Giveaway is now complete, and we have our 20 winners. Thanks to everyone who entered! In particular thanks to folks who left us encouraging comments on the form, that really brightened our day. I wasn’t sure why I put that field there, but it was a pleasant surprise on the […]
We’re taking part in #loveindies week! If you’ve enjoyed any of our games and want to give a brief impression, or even just a thumbs up, that’s a really big deal to us. If you feel the burning need to go in there and warn folks off of one of our titles, that’s of course […]
Another two updates! These one have four enemies, three of which are community-created. This also fixes the performance-eating aspects of our own recently-added Demesne enemy. And there was a performance regression in 1.010 in general that is now fixed. Sorry about all the hitching that was causing — it was worst on linux, but happening on […]
Well @#$#@%$. The TLDR is that almost all the Arcen staff are going to lose their jobs, effective Monday. The Good Starward Rogue is out now, and it’s getting glowing steam reviews (76, all positive, as of this writing) as well as a lot of positive youtube and twitch coverage. Mostly from smaller channels with […]
First up the good news. You may recall that we were doing a series of visual shorts set in the world of Stars Beyond Reach. Well, the final part of that is now here! Since it’s been a while, here are all three parts of the video in one series: “Tales of Woe” is a […]
Interview with Arcen Games, By Edward Varfalvy This was a great Q&A with Edward about the game — he asks some really great questions that get at not just what the game is, but what the motivations were behind it. Some of the questions get at future intent as the current beta progresses, as well, […]
Chris: This was written by Sean Johnson, one of our beta testers for Stars Beyond Reach, and I’ve only added formatting and images. Sean: I have never had so much fun losing at a strategy game and have certainly never felt compelled to write something about it. Sean: All seemed well in our budding Zenith settlement […]
StraX #17 – Interview with Arcen Games Rob and Nate speak with founder of Arcen Games, Chris Park, about their upcoming 4X hybrid, Stars Beyond Reach. They learn about how the game plays, what their time line is for release, hints about the story connection between SBR and AI War and The Last Federation and […]
First off, the news: the release date for the game is shifting to early July rather than early June. Why? More time for polish, mainly. Our first wave of beta testers (the redshirts) have been awesome, but there have been enough things going on that we haven’t even brought in the next round of testers […]
Two exciting things yet again! First of all, the beta has started. The beta is absolutely free (though tips are appreciated if you want to give them), and we are taking people in groups. Right now our first group has gone in, but we still do have room in later groups if you are interested. Last time […]
So our players have been (and continue to be) a huge help with working on a system where we’re able to procedurally generate literally hundreds of thousands of names of items in various categories. “Items” include things like sports broadcasts, entertainment broadcasts, different categories of poetry (romantic, crude, epic, angsty, etc), scientific periodicals, military equipment, […]
Two exciting things for you today! First of all, here’s the first video of the game: I know it’s very short and skips through things pretty fast, but I wanted to keep this under a minute and give you an overview of a number of things without getting bogged down in details. It’s a sort […]
How did you enjoy our accidental pre-April-Fool’s day prank on ourselves? I’m not really a fan of how the internet turns into a big pile of mostly-unfunny jokes one day out of the year, but this time the joke was unintentional and on ourselves. Gremlins with the servers! Anyway, it’s been a while since […]
Memorandum ————————————————- From: Skylaxian Diplomatic Corps HQ, Betamax To: Skylaxian Embassy, Burlustia Subject: Re: Incident on the previous Thursday ————————————————- Under no circumstances whatsoever should any of our personnel ever walk in to a Burlustian bar again. . P.S. surveillance indicates that all of their buildings are actually bars. . .
Apologies again for my slowness regarding Stars Beyond Reach updates at the moment. I’ve been active in the forums since this project answering questions here and there if you haven’t been there. But carving out the time for organized posts sometimes is a bit tricky. The last week or so has seen Keith working like crazy on implementing […]
Some things that I’ve been thinking about regarding Stars Beyond Reach, adapted from an email I originally sent to Keith. In my testing at the moment, despite all the early-alpha things that either Keith or I need to fix up before we bring in more players (ETA still hopefully the start of March), I’m finding […]
Are you kidding me, self? It’s really been since December 4th that you last posted an update? Sorry about that, me. I, uh, have been really busy. First of all, we’ve been working like crazy on the game itself. Plus some other fun stuff related to the game. And, you know, Christmas and New Years. […]
Keith and I were emailing back and forth about some of the design specs for the internal Stars Beyond Reach prototype that we’re working toward having done in the next week-ish. Cemeteries and crematoriums have been a part of the roster of buildings since way back, and I had the design for them in my […]
A bit ago, I announced Stars Beyond Reach, which you can read a lot more about at that link. The very-short explanation is that this is Arcen’s first true 4X title: think Civilization meets SimCity meets AI War meets New Stuff. More recently, I posted some updated screenshots and some portraits of some of the […]
New details for you, and some new art! A bit more than a week ago, I announced Stars Beyond Reach, which you can read a lot more about at that link. The very-short explanation is that this is Arcen’s first true 4X title: think Civilization meets SimCity meets AI War meets New Stuff. A much […]
It is with great pleasure that I formally announce this next game. Finally, Arcen is doing a true 4x! People have been suggesting that we do this for years, and I’ve wanted to, but I wasn’t really ready yet. Even so, bits and pieces of 4x infuse a lot of our games, particularly AI War […]
This week I went on the excellent Perceptive Podcast once again, which is always a pleasure. This time we discussed a variety of things: Open-ended development and how that differs from traditional linear game development. Why I think the new Curator system on Steam is the bee’s knees, and why I hope other stores do […]
Bear with me, because this is going to sound strange. First, let’s get the premise out of the way: naming games is hard, and it’s also incredibly important. Why is it so important? Well, take the following screenshot of Steam: Unless you have banner rotation featuring, this is ALL people see of your game. Even […]
Spectral Empire is our upcoming 4X title, which is slated for release in April 2015. This is something that we’ve been working on in tandem with the current expansions for AI War and The Last Federation, as well as the general ongoing work on those two games, and the linux ports of all our other […]
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 […]
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