We've got various things that we're considering, but a lot of that I'll leave to Erik to discuss more -- it's still early days yet, and just getting some preview coverage and general awareness on the other hardcore gaming sites (RPS, etc) is the main goal.
Tidalis was a poor fit for those audiences, so that was a particularly tough sell. If AI War was a tough sell there, too, but in a different way -- like Dwarf Fortress, you have to really "want it" to play it. AVWW is more in the "mainstream hardcore" demographic, and the numbers of units that are sold for similarly-targeted games on platforms that we're already members on is encouraging that we'd be able to prosper on that.
I can't discuss details about Steam pricing on anything, or any other vendor for that matter, but we're not planning on spending significant money on advertising unless that's bringing a really obvious return. So far, it never has, so I think our total outflow over the life of AI War has been about $800 on adverting. A $350k return, and climbing, is pretty good for that.
AI War is a niche within a niche within a niche -- very hardcore strategy within the strategy gaming niche, within the PC gaming niche. AVWW is more of a niche within a niche, being the substantial adventure game within the PC gaming niche. So far the enthusiasm within that niche has been greater than for anything else we've ever done, so part of the plan is to see what opportunities arise, and of course also to focus on doing what we can to get the message of the game out in a fun, viral way.
A lot of that is waiting until the alpha period, though, because right now all we have to share is previews, essentially. But Erik and I need to get down to more specifics before too long, for sure, and we'd of course love you guys' ideas and any help you feel like providing.
P.S. -- The "AVWW guy" is actually just one NPC/player-character design among many, he just happens to be the first we did. He's designed around the main character in a book I was writing not that long ago, though, so his GameEntity name is Darrell. In-game there will be many different characters with his visual look, all with different names. Kind of like how you see various townspeople with the same sprite in FF6, for instance. The difference here is that any NPC can also be a player character. By 1.0, I'd love to have around 60 different character sprites, but we'll just see how it goes. As of this moment, we have two -- Darrell and a new "Neutral Skelebot" that is blue instead of yellow, and has slightly different dimensions. More are coming quite soon, though.