Arcen Games revealed a good amount of visual detail back in Februrary for A Valley Without Wind after announcing the game only weeks prior. Shown in a press release today, Arcen has been hard at work at updating its procedurally-generated post Ice-Age action/adventure game. As evident in Arcen’s AI War, the team has experience with random world building generation; they look to exploit this programming technique further in the months to come.

The team aims for a summer Beta release for A Valley Without Wind and an official release in October 2011. For the sake of progress, I wanted to compare the first and latest alpha build videos. I really like the watercolor painting effects here, but I think the retro audio doesn’t quite fit the visual theme in the team’s first video.

Now check out the changes the team has made in the past few months. The audio seems to have been slightly improved in the most recent video. However, the graphics have changed, and a lot of gameplay has been implemented. Enemies, battles, maps, and user interface are shown. The main sprites still need a little finessing to fit well with the background for me, unless the idea from the developers is to present a visual representation of a contrast of eras. There was an ice-age, after all. Check out the new trailer:

The end of this new trailer seems ironic. For a valley “without wind,”  there sure is a lot of windy noise! Those five seconds are surely worth a good Q&A. Visually, I suppose the characters seem to fit more with other objects on screen. The cars from the first trailer were abstract/watercolor, but now look more defined like the playable character. Regarding the music, the more I listen to it in the latter trailer, the more I feel like it creates that isolationism that accompanied the large and eerily empty worlds of NES-era games. The trailer also shows a new playable character; it seems one can control robot creatures in addition to humans at some point. These “enclaves of skeletal robots” are mentioned in Arcen’s dev blog along with monsters and tyrants as enemies.

More difficult to discern from than audio and visuals and more important overall is the gameplay. The interesting gameplay elements are listed in the blog, which states there will be tons of exploring, scavenging time-shards to find materials needed, and enlisting other survivors to help rebuild civilization. My aesthetic critique may be picky, but now is the time for everyone to help Arcen shape the game into a polished Beta and further final product. I look forward to hearing more about A Valley Without Wind as summer approaches.  What are your thoughts on the game so far?

When Chris Park was on Episode 19 of our Podcast, he mentioned a few details about what Arcen Games new title was going to be. But it isn’t until today that we actually get to see an early build of the game in progress (two weeks of implementation, six months of design).

A Valley Without Wind is a complete departure from the AI War series and the puzzle title Tidalis, but with all it has going for it in the ambition and features department it sounds like a worthy addition to the Arcen Games catalog.

Simply described by its creators, A Valley Without Wind is an adventure game “focusing on exploration in a post-ice-age world.” Each world is procedurally generated, meaning that upon each restart the entire landscape and layout will be different. But the intriguing element that the developers describe is that the game is “designed such that you’ll never have an incentive to create more than one world — ever.  Once you start your first world, that’s hopefully also your last, for as long as you play the game.  As new features and content are added, you can simply explore further afield to find them.”

In addition, death is a permanent part of the game. If your character dies, he doesn’t come back. But for the player that just means that you’ll assume to role of another survivor in the wasteland and have access to whatever items the recently deceased had collected along the way. In addition, the game is also built so that characters the dead player had encountered will eventually catch word of their death and reflect and react to it.

Arcen Games anticipates a March public alpha and and at that time players can also preorder and get a demo of the title. You can read more about this title on Arcen’s official site.

Here’s the pre-alpha trailer:

Arcen Games has announced that The Light of the Spire, the latest expansion to AI War, is now available for $10 through arcengames.com. It’ll hit digital distributors soon.

This expansion brings 180 new ships, new AI, new music, new classes and new factions, to name just a few additions. The developers have dubbed it “the game’s biggest expansion ever.”

In addition, AI War has hit version 5.0. Arcen Games remains devoted to their space strategy title with this free update. Here’s the official description of what the update brings:

“Nearly every combat ship in the game has been rebalanced in an effort to integrate all the new units added over the past year. Golems have been completely revamped and the AI have received major intelligence upgrades such as more proactive retreats, a network of core shield generators, and the new “stalking” mechanic where it lies in wait until the player is at their most vulnerable. Players should also be pleased with significant adjustments to overall difficulty and the shortening of the early part of the game — allowing you to “get to the good part” faster. Not to mention tons of performance improvements, as well as more of a general accessibility regardless of what level of player you are.”

Here’s a trailer showcasing the new additions:

For all intents and purposes this new “update” could well have been an expansion pack, or sequel with how much the developers have poured into it. I’m not joking, this is the largest and most robust update for a game I think I’ve ever seen.

AI War, by developer Arcen Games, has always been a fun tactical strategy game where the player is tasked with fighting against a horde of sentient AI machines that have driven humanity to the brink of extinction. This new update, however, goes above and beyond the original game by adding new ships, AI types, factions and maps to the game’s already impressive line up.

Here’s a rough breakdown:

• 36 new ships, including:
• 5 new ship classes with a variety of abilities.
• Enclave Starships and Regeneration Chambers for direct unlock.
• 6 new AI special weapons.
• 6 new AI Types.
• 3 Neinzul alien minor factions (NPCs).
• Devastating new Hybrid Hives AI plot.
• 3 new in-game music tracks, plus a new title music track.
• Two new map styles: X and Concentric Circles.

Of course, this feature set is pretty limited in just what the new update offers. If you’re interested in checking out just what was included then I suggest popping on over to the developer’s blog and checking out all the nitty gritty details.

As mentioned in the title, for those of you who have bought the game this is a free update. Despite the massive amounts of additional content, AI War 4.0 is 100% free. For those of you who have not yet purchased, I urge you to check out the trailer below and buy the game from either the developer’s website or one of the various online digital distribution stores. It’s only $19.99 and well worth it.

[Buy/Try, Arcen Games]

Trailer

by: Christopher M. Park, developer of AI War

So, in my last post I talked about how I botched the PR for Tidalis, and mentioned that I’d started out with very poor PR when AI War first came out, too.  In the case of AI War, the game was utterly invisible until it actually came out, and then for the first two weeks after it was out, it had literally zero sales.  How did AI War get from that dismal spot to now having sold around 30,000 copies (including copies of the expansion) and still counting?

And, for that matter, how is it I’m planning to rectify the botched PR with Tidalis?  Read on…

Step 1: Make A Good Game

Perhaps this goes without saying, but this only works if the game in question is good.  However, I put this step in here because some folks will inevitably assume that the following steps are some sort of “marketing magic” that can make a bad game sell like hotcakes.  Nothing can do that, at least not on a shoestring budget.

The other reason I bring up this step is because a lot of folks think that this is the only step that is needed in order to achieve success.  “Build it and they will come,” and all that.  I’m here to tell you that only works in that one movie!  When you build it, almost no one will come, because no one will know you built it.  That’s why these other steps exist.

Step 2: Tell People About Your Game

Maybe this seems self-evident, but more indies seem to skip this step than you might expect.  If you build an awesome game and then just post it on your brand-new website, how many people have you told?  Probably almost no-one.  If you get posted about on one of the many indie-related blogs, how many people have you then told?  Even if they have a readership in the thousands, that’s still not many people.  A lot of those thousands of people won’t like the genre of your game, or just won’t be grabbed by it, or whatever.

Or, put another way: however many copies you want to sell, you probably need five hundred times that many people to hear about your game.  I just made that number up, but that’s probably undershooting it.  Average “conversion” rate for people who download a demo is something like 2% or 3% who will buy it.  That means that for every 1 sale you make, you need 33 to 50 people to actually download your demo.  I have no idea how many people it takes reading about a game to get one to download the demo, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the conversion rate there was 1% or less.

So: if you’ve only told a few thousand people about your game, and your game is awesome, expect a couple of dozen sales unless you’re really lucky.  Most sites have lower daily readerships than you might expect, and even on really high-volume sites in terms of traffic, not nearly every post or article gets read by all visitors.

Step 3: Keep Telling People About Your Game

When you’re a new indie, you’ll get the cold shoulder.  A lot.  Press won’t be interested in posting about your game, by and large, and most digital distribution sites won’t be interested in you, either.  It takes time to look at your stuff, and there are a thousand other hopeful indies out there also vying for attention.

You want to cast a wide net because you never know who it is that your game will particularly strike a chord with.  As soon as you get some positive press, you can often translate that into more positive press, but until you have any you’re going to really not get much attention at all until you find just those right early people to take a look at your work.  That also goes for digital distribution sites, incidentally.

Step 4: Make Sure There Is Something New To Tell People About Your Game

So, what happens if you send out a bunch of emails to press and distribution sites, and you get no response?  Do you:

A. Quietly give up?
B. Keep sending them the same message over and over again every so often?

Answer: neither, if you really want to be an indie developer.  If you start spamming press and distribution sites with the same message, how long do you think it will be before they actually flag your address as a spam address so that they don’t have to see your stupid identical messages over and over again?  Even if you mildly (or heavily) reword your message, odds are you’ll receive a chilly response.  You need something new to tell them, and you can bet they’re expert at recognizing content-less emails, which they received a lot of.

So, the real answer to the above question is actually secret option C, which is to make sure that if you re-contact press or distributors, you have something genuinely and significantly new and interesting to tell them every time.  How do you do this?  By continually updating and improving your game.  Add in some fun new content.  Make it something significant and interesting, something that you could picture reading about from some other developer on Blue’s News or ModDB.  Anything less is just going to be spam to a lot of folks.

Step 5: Keep Updating Your Game

I know I just said this in #4, but this is important enough to warrant its own step.  You need to keep adding to and updating your game, improving it based on player feedback, that sort of thing.  Every so often, do a big release with all your little changes summarized, and the most exciting ones highlighted.  Send that to the distributors, and to the press that would be interested in that sort of thing.  If you’ve had some positive reviews lately, you can also mention those (especially to distributors), but they aren’t news in their own right.

This fifth step is also important in that:

1. It actually makes your game better, and your players happier.
2. It’s legitimately news-worthy.
3. It keeps your existing players playing the game longer, and talking about it.
4. Best of all, if you like your game (hopefully you do), this is fun and rewarding. You wanted to make games, right? Rather than rushing off to the next title, why not spend some time making your current title the best it can absolutely be?

Granted, if your game is not already solid, this won’t work.  If everyone thinks your game is terrible, and no-one will talk about your game or play it much, then the advice a lot of other successful indies give is correct: it’s time to treat that game as a learning experience and move on to the next one.  Don’t try to salvage it, you’re just as likely to make it worse as anything else.This whole process is assuming your game is already good or great, right?  But I’ve yet to see a game that couldn’t be made better at least in small ways with a few tweaks and additions.  It might be some little side quest.  It might be more settings options or some improvements to the controls based on player feedback.  It might be a new enemy or a new item or weapon.  It might be some improvements to art, or a new music track, or improved sound effects.

Step 6: Be Hyper-Critical With Your Own Work

This is really a corollary to step 5.  I have never met a professional game developer, a professional novelist, or a professional creative of any sort, who thought their work was perfect.  Perfection is the delusion of amateurs.  Professionals are always look at their work in a critical way, seeing all the seams a cracks that almost no-one else will see.

Since you’re trying to sell and distribute digital games, you are in the unique and fortunate position that you can revise and extend your work at will.  You should never have an initial release that is full of known bugs, but it’s inevitable that players will find some that slipped past you.  Fix them.  If you’re at all like me, you were probably also boiling over with other ideas that didn’t actually make it into your initial release of the game.   Release some of those ideas in patches, as “free DLC” that just comes right with the standard patches of the game.

Step 7: Take Suggestions From Players

Even better than step #6 above: solicit suggestions from players.  You might have to swallow your auteristic pride a bit at first, but once you get used to it you’ll find that players are absolutely full of cool ideas you would never have thought of.  Every person views the world a bit differently, and that’s really something useful in your case.  Players love to make suggestions, and if you implement those, they’ll be really thrilled.  And your game will be better for it, if it was a good suggestion.

You want a way to build player investment and word of mouth?  Make them a part of the process.  Show them you value their opinions and their ideas.  These are exactly the sorts of things big companies never do.  Doesn’t it drive you nuts?  Isn’t that feeling of powerlessness with the major AAA games part of the reason you started making your own games in the first place?  Well, many of your players will have that same sort of feeling with your work unless you actually let them have a voice.  It’s a good thing to do, for you and for them, and you’ll be surprised at the positive community that can form around this.

Step 8: Give Away Free Stuff

You notice I said “free DLC” in step 6?  Yeah, all of this stuff only works for promotional purposes if you’re giving it away for free.  If you try to nickel and dime the players for every little addition (or worse, ever charge them for any bugfixes), they’ll quickly leave in disgust

The best part of giving away free updates to an existing game is that it’s only free for players who actually buy your stuff.  This gives existing players a reason to stick around and continue to give you suggestions and talk to their friends and such.  But it also gives people who have yet to try your game a strong incentive to check it out.

Think about it this way: if I tell you a game is a year old, how do you think of it?  Is it mildly crusty and not a newsworthy sort of game?  Maybe you’ll play it anyway, or you might be the sort that thinks there is enough new stuff that you’d rather see the latest and greatest games, instead.  But what if I tell you a game came out a year ago, and has had free monthly or bimonthly updates for the entire last year?  How does this affect your perception of both the game and the developer of that game?  See what I’m driving at here?

Granted, this doesn’t mean you can’t do paid expansions and DLC.  But those should be reallymeaty and worthwhile, in addition to all the significant stuff you’re already giving away.  Players know when you’re not giving them a good value, so strive to always do so.  And hey, it’s just the right thing to do in general.

Step 9: Have Patience, Have Persistence

Don’t go spamming any press or distribution sites, and for goodness sake don’t make a marketing-y bother out of yourself.  Don’t be sending messages to the same nonresponsive press/distributors any more frequently than monthly, and make sure you have noteworthy new news every time you do contact them.

But goodness, don’t give up after one failed contact, either.  For AI War, it took us 3 months after initial release to reach 1,000 sales, or to get our first really big reviews.  It took 5 months after initial release to get on Steam.  It took 6 months after initial release before we had a MetaScore.  It took us 7 months after initial release to hit 10,000 sales.

During that timespan I added literally thousands of features to AI War (over 46,000 words of release notes just to version 2.0, no joke), and I sent hundreds of emails and inquiries, over 90% of which never received a direct response.

But press eventually did respond, and once there was a certain amount of momentum some of them even contacted me directly.  Impulse wound up being interested in AI War early, and then GamersGate was, and then finally Steam and Direct2Drive came around to it.  For other developers the order is different, or all the distributors might not even be interested.  There are definitely still a few distributors that won’t give me the time of day or answer my emails, and AI War was a massive success as far as non-contest-winning indie games go.

I perhaps went a bit overboard with how many features I added to AI War, but I was having a fun time doing it, and the player response was really great.  If I hadn’t had all that encouragement from players, the press, and ultimately from the distributors, I wouldn’t have done that much.  Put another way, if you’re not gaining any traction, then the advice of the other indie developers is right and you should just move on to another game.  But assuming you are making progress with the players, press, and sales, you should keep at it: persistence wins the day, just not always very fast.

Step 10: Discounts Never Hurt

Another way you can get a lot of “free” publicity?  Discount your game for a brief period.  I put free in quotation marks because you pay for that publicity in the form of all those discounts you’re giving.  But it’s vastly more effective than advertising, I’ve found, so it’s quite a good investment.  And having a big rush of new players is great for the ongoing publicity and word of mouth of your game, too.

If you can time your discount promotion with or near the release of some new free additions to the game, so much the better.

Conclusion

There are many, many ways to build a successful indie company.  I only know the way that I did it, and that this worked very well for me.  It’s been a solid business model for Arcen, and it’s made our players really, really happy in the main.  Want to have a dedicated fanbase?  Show them that you’re willing to go above and beyond what you’d have to do.  Also?  That, again, is just generally the right thing to do, anyway.

On the PC side, I can’t think of many other developers using this same strategy as us, but there definitely are some doing it.  Dwarf Fortress essentially does this, BOH seems to do this, and so on.

On the iPhone, though, this sort of thing is incredibly common.  All the most popular iPhone games (and even many of the less-popular ones) are getting updated all the time.  Doodle Jump, Defender Chronicles, and Angry Birds are just three examples of many I could name.

This sort of thing really works.  And doing right by your customers is always a good idea.  Good luck!

[This article was republished, with permission, from Christopher's own blog. To read more about what Chris is up to follow him at: http://christophermpark.blogspot.com/]

Arcen Games has released a mother of an update for its ever growing (both in content and popularity) space strategy title AI War: Fleet Command. Owners of the title can download the patch here. The change log was massive and had tons of crazy words, so we decided instead of applying ourselves we’d just go ahead and lob Arcen founder Chris Park an email and get the word straight from the horse’s mouth.

He promptly responded and was happy to share some of the highlights of the v3.120 update, and explain what the major additions and changes do for the game. First he touched on the newly added “AI Plots” mechanism, a way for the title to produce more varied endgame scenarios. Park notes that this is just the introduction to these plots, and with a full list of different ideas for plots (many coming from the community) we should expect expansion on the feature soon:

“The AI plots are basically a mechanism for us to have varied endgame scenarios. Right now the final planet encounter is always pretty similar compared to the early and middle game, which varies a ton. That is something it took players a really long time to notice, because even really good AI War players tend to finish way fewer games than they start (in terms of winning, anyway — I’ve lost 5 out of my last 6 games on difficulty 7, for instance).

Anyway, the AI plots were conceived as a way to spice that up. Right now the only plot is “avenger,” which has the AI creating a massive floating fortress filled with smaller guns and headed right for your home planet. So that lets you either have the challenge of taking that thing out (really tough but doable), or rushing to kill the second AI before it kills you. This first plot is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Like the minor factions that were introduced in 3.000, this is something we plan to expand greatly with time; we asked for community ideas for plots in particular, and we have a full subforum full of good ones. Basically we hope to make the endgme ultimately be as varied as the other two parts of the game, while at the same time we are always working to make them more varied, too.”

Park summed up the rest of the update, specifically highlighting the major addition of the new “border aggression” mechanic, which gives the AI a completely new attack vector, adding more realism to how the particular border relationships grow:

“Beyond the plots, 3.120 is a release of many small but notable things. The rebalancements are notable, the border aggression gives the AI a really new attack vector that adds more realism to how those border relationships grow, and there are a ton of other subtle things in there that expert AI War players really were salivating over, but which probably would just be minor niceties to the less hardcore fans.”

Moving on to Arcen Games’ upcoming addictive puzzler Tidalis, I was politely berated for labeling the title as match-3, and Park was quick to show his excitement for the upcoming game, throwing A-listers Tetris and Bejeweled around when referring to the game’s essence:

“I would like to clarify that is not a match 3 game. I find that moderately insulting, as those are hugely derivative. Rather, Tidalis is a completely new block-based mechanic, as similar to Bejeweled as Bejeweled is to Tetris, in essence. We’re pretty excited about that game, it’s really fun and already quite feature-packed.”

That line about Tetris, Bejeweled and the game’s essence certainly grabs your attention. Park also confirmed that the title, currently targeted for a July release this year, will be entered in the PAX 10 this coming September. We’ll have more info on the game and all of what Arcen Games’ is currently up to soon in an upcoming interview with the developer.

Vote for Your Favorite Indie Game!

We here at DIYgamer.com have started our very own bracket-styled tournament to find the best indie game, as voted on by you, the gamers. So head on over to our tournament page to vote on your favorite games!

The Tournament
Cave Story vs. Torchlight
Braid vs. Runman: Race Around the World
Spelunky vs. 5 Days a Stranger
Dwarf Fortress vs. Trine

Indie Sales, for the people. As we’ve been forced to in the past (fortunately!), we must highlight the stand-out of the group: Sleep is Death, two copies, pay what you want (min. $1.75). This is a whole different kind of experience that is at least worth what you’re willing to contribute to give it a try, it’s not for everybody but give it a chance to sweep you away with the possibilities.

While far and away the best sale out there, SiD is not the only offering of Indie discounted goodness this weekend; oh no, not by a long shot. Oh and remember, if for whatever odd reason you haven’t come across and donated to The Humble Indie Bundle, it’s still on until midday tomorrow, Saturday May 15. The rest of the offerings from across the web:

Sales

AI War: Fleet Command, its expansion The Zenith Remnant, and an already discounted bundle of both have been slashed in half on GamersGate as part of the distributor’s Space Battle Week promotion.

Come to think of it Gratuitous Space Battles (along with its ‘Complete’ bundle), Flotilla, Armada 2526, Light of Altair and Evochron Legends and Renegades are all half-off with the promotion with other smaller discounts offered up as well, check out the full list here through the weekend.

Bob Came in Pieces is 50% off on Direct2Drive, bringing the ship rebuilder down to just $4.95 as the distributor’s Deal of the Week. The sale runs through May 21, check out Peter E’s review.

Both Steam and D2D are offering Torchlight for 50% off. Note that’s $10, not the $5 which the game has been discounted to before and probably will again.

Gamerizon’s puzzle game Quantz is 70% off on Steam, bringing the title down to just $3, you can check out my review if you wish.

Steam is offering The RailWorks Glasgow Airport Rail Link add-on at $10 off its standard $40 price (25% off), with those who have purchased the Class 380 add-on for the train sim title receiving a much better discount at nearly 75% off.

Mode 7′s (The guy’s working on the much anticipated Frozen Synapse) sword-fighting multiplayer title Determinance is $11 down for $17 on Impulse.

Pre-Order Discounts

Frictional Games’ upcoming survival horror Amnesia: The Dark Descent is being offered for 20% off on GamersGate for those who purchase before its release on August 15. The title will run $20 but can be had for both Mac and PC for just $16 prior to launch.

Other Offers

Impulse is offering up Quantum Flux Games’ Make Something Unreal Contest stand-out Prometheus for free, as in no munnies.

Vote for Your Favorite Indie Game!

We here at DIYgamer.com have started our very own bracket-styled tournament to find the best indie game, as voted on by you, the gamers. So head on over to our tournament page to vote on your favorite games!

The Tournament
Cave Story vs. Torchlight
Braid vs. Runman: Race Around the World
Spelunky vs. 5 Days a Stranger
Dwarf Fortress vs. Trine

The fourth week of Direct2Drive’s spring sale continues with two more well-known indies getting a discount.

Through next Monday morning, you can snag Trine for $4.95 and a bundle of AI War Fleet Command & AI War Zenith Remnant for $9.95.

That’s 75% off Trine and 67% off AI War.

Snag ‘em while you can. Both title are well worth it, discounted or not.

Strategy designers turned puzzle heads.

Arcen Games, best known for their AI War: Fleet Command have changed up their style and created a puzzle game called Tidalis.

Developed with Unity 3D, it’s coming to Windows and Mac, with open beta just having begun yesterday, April 15th. The full version should be available in early July.

You can preorder the game from Arcen for $9.99, and will get you full access to the beta once you’ve ordered.

Check out the trailer for a glimpse into the gameplay:

Beta participants are asked to submit their own puzzles which may end up in the final game, so that the launch content holds an enormous amount of variety.

Here’s the official word from Arcen Games:

“What happens when a notable indie strategy developer makes a puzzle game? We have no idea. Arcen’s first game happened to be the notable indie strategy game AI War: Fleet Command, but Arcen’s staff never considered themselves tied to any particular genre. Their second standalone title, Tidalis, is a puzzle game with more of a casual leaning because the Arcen staff likes puzzle games and wanted to innovate in that space.

The “streams” mechanic employed by Tidalis is what makes it so unique — chain reactions with a dozen blocks are trivially easy to create. This makes the game really easy to get into, but also makes the creation of advanced multi-stage combos more challenging than in other block-based puzzlers. At an advanced level of play, it’s the difference between Chess and Checkers; with Tidalis in the hands of an expert, there are more variables to keep in mind as you set up truly elegant interactions.

But never fear: the easier difficulty levels are quite relaxed, and the Zen mode provides a particularly no-rush style of gameplay. The core mechanics are so simple that the two-year-old daughter of one of the developers enjoys playing along with him. And perhaps it goes without saying that many of the staff’s wives and mothers are hooked on it, too.

Whether players are looking for a casual fun time, a deep and strategic puzzle experience, or a series of brain-bending puzzles, Tidalis has them covered. About half of the five developers working on this game are the hardcore puzzle types, and the other half have completely casual tastes. Arcen has approached this with their usual attention to detail: the mechanics of the timing, chain merging, and other mechanics have been refined to a ridiculous degree to provide an optimal experience in all play styles.

Other noteworthy features include our co-op modes in particular. At present only the single-computer, shared-well type of co-op is supported, but in the coming month the multi-well and network play modes will be added to the mix. As well as pvp modes against other players or against the AI.

The current beta allows anyone to get early access to the demo of the game, and players who wish to preorder get early access to the full thing. Arcen is also soliciting player-created puzzles and levels to add to the hundreds that Arcen itself will create, so that the game’s official launch will have a truly staggering amount of available content for players. This is a chance for players to get credited by name or by handle in a video game (as has happened for dozens of players who contributed suggestions to AI War and The Zenith Remnant). The full version of the game is expected to launch in early July.

For further details on the game and the beta process for it, please see this link: http://www.arcengames.com/tidalis_features.php”

Arcen Games, Cryptic Comet, and Positech Games are each offering a game (Gratuitous Space Battles with The Tribe Expansion, Solium Infernum, and AI War with the The Zenith Remnant Expansion) in one $50 package deal. That’s nearly half of what it would cost to pick up the games and their expansions for normal price.

Even though the games fall in the strategy genre, they play very differently. AI War is an RTS set in space with an AI that learns as you fight it. Solium Infernum asks you to rule hell with a mix of diplomacy and sin. In Gratuitous Space Battles, you set up your pieces and watch the battle play out.

Chris Park of Arcen Games says the trio banded together because “we’re here to make innovative games, not corner markets. There’s a lot more for us to gain by working together instead of by being antagonistic.” And Cliff Harris says “We need to unite against the common enemy, and that enemy is obscurity, not each other.”

You have until Tuesday, March 9, to act on the deal. Read the DIYGamer review of Gratuitous Space Battles, or play the demos available for each game over the weekend before making a decision.

[via Christopher M. Park]