Check Out Our New Look!

[x4000]

http://www.arcengames.com/

Notice anything different?  The site has gone through a major overhaul.  It's a platform shift to Joomla from just raw PHP, it includes a ton of visual upgrades, and it's organized way better.  In general, it's just more functional, easier to get around, and more attractive.  Not to mention long overdue!

My personal blog has also undergone a transformation, and is now called "Games By Design."  We'll be doing development diaries there as we work on A Valley Without Wind, so watch that space.  That's where I generally talk about in-depth game design stuff in general, actually, but it's been a bit quiet the last few months because things have been so busy.  Hopefully as AVWW progresses, other team members will also be able to contribute there.

Speaking of AVWW, there's a new preview page up for it.  Later this week our goal is to have the first in-game screenshots posted, but the three images that are posted in that preview are all in-game art assets just shown out of context.  We'll be sure to put up some forums for pre-alpha discussion about AVWW soon, too -- though there's a lot with that game we're not quite ready to share, we'll be opening up more and more over the coming weeks and months through the development diaries.

Stay tuned!

[Ixiohm]

A very nice new look 

After reading the preview page on AVWW you got me super hyped,
can't wait to read thru the first dev diaries, so please hurry 

Good luck with the new project and hope it catches on as well as AI war.

[x4000]

Thanks so much!

[Castruccio]

Looks great!  Arcen has such a bright and exciting future, it seems.  Can't wait for 5.0 and AVWW.

[Arcain_One]

I was wondering why it has been quiet lately

Very spiffy

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Very nice, while I am slightly disappointed to read no tower-defense in AVWW, I already have another indie-game Tower Defense holding me for now .  But this sounds 10X better so no complaints from me, I am really thrilled because it sounds like your going to make a game that I've been desiring for far too long a time, but I'll hold my excitement in check until more information is released. 

Keep up the awesome work guys

King

[BobTheJanitor]

I'm not sure if it's supposed to look like I'm seeing it, but the extensions on the left and right side of the central graphic just look bad to me. If I shrink my window down so they don't show up, it's fantastic. But with the pictures shown at the sides with the top and bottom cut off, I thought some graphics hadn't finished loading until I saw the scroll side to side buttons. Here is a terribly shrunken jpeg to show what I'm talking about:

If those weren't visible it would look a lot better. Otherwise, I like it.

[Invelios]

Nice looking webpage! I really like the games being shown on that big banner on top, where you can switch between them. Its also good you labeled which ones where expansions. When I first learned about AI War, I can to the site and was a little confused on where the game download actually was, and once I found them it took me a while to figure out which one was the base game. This should hopefully solve any similar issues other new users have. Also glad there is a link to the bug tracker on the main page. The AVWW Preview has me more excited about this game than ever. I love games with randomly generated content! I really can't wait for March now!

[TechSY730]

but it's not actually the tower-defense-meets-JRPG title that we'd been describing in the past.

There's no tower defense here at all, and it's not really a JRPG, either.  Though it does have some JRPG inspirations, it's an adventure game through and through.  There are also no zombies.  Sorry, there's just way too many zombie games out there (and tower defense games, for that matter), so we decided to focus on the more unique elements.

Aw, why not an exploration based adventure RTS tower defense game with zombies and JRPG elements?

[x4000]

Thanks, all!  Glad there's some excitement there, Keith and I are really jazzed about it, too.  Keith is really involved in the design on this one, so it's got a lot of fresh ideas that aren't just from me.  Some of the core ideas from my old Alden Ridge and AVWW concepts are there, but then there's a lot of various new stuff from Keith, as well as new things that he and I came up with together.  As happened with Lars and I on Tidalis, Keith and I have really been riffing off each other in a really positive way.

Bob, that's actually an intentional effect, part of the Joomla template we use: http://demo.rockettheme.com/?template=maelstrom  I didn't design it, but I really like it.  At any rate, what you're seeing is what it should look like.

Arcain, a lot of the quietness has actually been Keith and I working on AVWW to get it so that we could have a first screenshot this week.  That's been a ton of work in design finalization, art stuff, and programming, but it's coming together surprisingly fast.  The other part of the quietness, of course, has been all the work I've been doing on the website.  The Joomla program and the Maelstrom theme really do take a lot of the work out, but it was still a ton of content to port over and reorganize, plus a ton of extensions to find, configure, and get displaying right, etc.

All in all a good week's work, though, and I'll be excited to share more about AVWW on Friday.

[Echo35]

Bob, that's actually an intentional effect, part of the Joomla template we use: http://demo.rockettheme.com/?template=maelstrom  I didn't design it, but I really like it.  At any rate, what you're seeing is what it should look like.

That slider effect is freaking cool.

EDIT: Not familiar with Joomla. Any JScript in there or straight up PHP?

[x4000]

That slider effect is freaking cool.

EDIT: Not familiar with Joomla. Any JScript in there or straight up PHP?

I know, I love it -- that's the main thing that sold me on that template, was that slider.

Joomla is an open-source CMS, one of the more popular ones.  It's got a lot of Javascript stuff, although none of the stuff on our version includes any JQuery.  There's plenty of AJAX through other tools, though, so definitely lots of JScript in general.  I haven't poked around in the innards too much on this one, obviously -- a departure for me since my old job was hand-coding ASP.NET and Javascript and such, but that's part of the benefit of the CMS idea, is that I can focus my attention on things I'm more up-to-date on and more interested in.

[Fleet]

I'm so excited for an adventure game...it will have online multiplayer, yes?

[Teal_Blue]

WooHoo!!!  You Guys Look Beautiful!!    And the New AVWW page is AWESOME!! 

Please excuse all the hollering going on here. Just a beautiful job and looking forward to
LOTS and AVWW, and to be honest any game you all want to put out. Am Trying the New Tidalis Lite, looks interesting. 

Congrats on the New Look,
Very Snazzy there,



-Teal

[x4000]

it will have online multiplayer, yes?

That's something we aren't promising yet, but hopefully so.  That will involve a very new kind of networking for us, and if the project isn't gaining a lot of traction that's something we're likely to cut.  Also, it's unlikely the multiplayer component would be there for alpha.  But we are making notes in the code for places to go back and fill in networking code at, if we get to that point, so it's certainly something we're thinking about.

And we're specifically not doing anything to make the online networking impossible, or any more difficult on ourselves than it has to be.  But it's definitely different programming an action game, which is something we managed to avoid with AI War and Tidalis.  Most game developers seem to think that the strategy game way of network programming is vastly, intensely harder than the action game sort (one word: desyncs), but that's what I'm used to programming so it feels the opposite to me at the moment.

You know me, though: I love co-op in gaming. So it's definitely something I really want to have there, and I know Keith feels the game.  We'll just see if reality matches up with our desires.  At worst, if AVWW has a similar amount of popularity to AI War, then we can probably implement the multiplayer as a free DLC addon in tandem with work on a paid expansion, or something like that.  Who knows.  

We're hoping that the game will be massively more popular than AI War, though, and in that even the multiplayer would be an absolute 100% no-brainer.  Me being wary and without a crystal ball, I'm not ready to commit to that feature yet, though.  If we have to make an amazing non-networked adventure game, it wouldn't be the end of the world.  Though I'd have to find some clever way to get some form of local co-op in there, in that event (otherwise it would be network-only, not local).