June through August (and beyond) Development Schedule

[keith.lamothe]

Well, with the exception of a few retail agreements outside the U.S., all distribution of AI War is digital, even from our own site.  All you need to activate any copy of the game (downloaded from anywhere, including steam) is your license key.  If you lose your license key just get in touch with us and we'll get it sorted out.  Tidalis is handled the same way.  But if you like handling all that through steam I can certainly understand that

And Tidalis (the puzzle game) has not been officially released yet, it's still in beta and not all of our distribution partners opted to carry the beta (logistical reasons, mostly).  But the pretty-certain official release date is the 16th, so not long to wait there

[x4000]

Many thanks for the congrats, and Keith is exactly right that we don't have any reason to not put our game on Steam other than them not being interested (which so far, they have been for all of our titles, and I don't have any reason to believe that won't continue).  I imagine that with some other puzzle games, either Steam wasn't interested or the developer was trying to only do sales directly through their own site to maximize revenue (which is inadvisable, in my experience, unless you're really lucky to already have a huge press, etc, presence).

Steam will be having Tidalis on the launch date of the 16th, as Keith noted; we were set to have the beta for Tidalis on Steam sooner than that, but for logistical reasons on their end and ours it made sense to wait until the official with them.

Anyway -- thanks for the support!

[Fiskbit]

Do you know if we'll be having the same product activation deal where users can activate Tidalis on Steam with their non-Steam key? I absolutely love the fact that we have that for AI War.

[rubikscube]

they not being interested or you being so awesome you won't let them distrubute it

[x4000]

Do you know if we'll be having the same product activation deal where users can activate Tidalis on Steam with their non-Steam key? I absolutely love the fact that we have that for AI War.

I don't know for sure, hopefully that will work out. We should know in the next week or two!

[strangelight]

Any updates on when we can pre-order/get the beta of CON?   also,

We've also been working on a remastered/upgraded sound track for both AI War and The Zenith Remnant, so hopefully that will also be out as part of the big 4.0 release.

I just noticed this - this is cool. I really enjoy the soundtrack, which is a huge plus in my book for any game I play. (I'm a music fan even more than a game fan) Mr. Vega does good work.

[Dragon]

Speaking of sound tracks....  Do you have it available as plain MP3's for download? It would be cool to be able to load it into my music player and stuff...

[superking]

the mp3s are in the AI war directory

[x4000]

Actually, it's ogg vorbis files in there, but same end effect.  You can get them on a music player pretty easily, or at least you can convert them if your music player doesn't support ogg directly.

Pablo and I are both really looking forward to the release of the newest batch of AI War stuff, when 4.0 comes out.  The AI War base soundtrack is completely remastered now, and he's working on the CON soundtrack as well as remastering the Zenith soundtrack.  I'm a huge music fan, too, and I think you'll really love what he's done here.

Regarding the beta date for CON, we're running about three weeks behind.  I expect that might either be sometime around the 30th of this month, or else around the 6th of August.  Hopefully we'll have the full CON/AI War 4.0 out by the end of August or middle of September, but it's hard to be sure at the moment.  I'll be off for three weeks of paternity leave at the start of September or thereabouts (depending on when the baby really arrives), so that complicates things substantially, and could set us back another three weeks if the 4.0 version isn't done first.

At any rate, all of the art for CON is done now, the maps are about 80% done, some new AI features that will be used in CON and outside of CON are maybe 60% done, the music is 1/3 done, and the rest of the programming beyond maps and the partially-implemented AI addition is 0% done.  But once we get a chance to actually work on it more, I think there's only a week left before we hit beta on CON.  I just don't know where that week will fall, if it will be the week of the 26th or the week of the 2nd.

[strangelight]

The delayed release could be a good thing from a business standpoint - StarCraft 2 is being released end of July, and that's some stiff competition.

[x4000]

Heh, that's a very good point, yeah.

[superking]

AI War vets will purchase the add-on without hesitation mind

[x4000]

For sure, I'm not worried about that so much.  I think most of the core fanbase of AI War is not the sort to be into Starcraft heavily, anyway.  Now, Civilization V... that's more likely to be a larger conflict.

[Ozymandiaz]

AI War vets will purchase the add-on without hesitation mind

Indeed!

Actually, despite being a huge SC fan from way back when SC was released (I got some doubts about this new version of it...), I will likely get the new AI war first

[Shardz]

As a self-admitted hardcore Blizzard fan (Pre-World of Warcraft days) I can honestly say that I won't be buying Starcraft II this time around. Blizzard today is not the same company it once was back in the Diablo 2 days; almost that entire team is actually Runic now working on their Torchlight IP and that group listens intently to their fans. Blizzard tried to implement that Real ID thing for Battle.net that required you to use your real name to post on forums - and what a horrible idea that was and it's still in the plan, just not mandatory like they wanted it to be.

I think they have lost their edge working on WoW all these years (and the Activision merger which isn't setting well with fans with Bobby Kotlick in charge) and honestly after ALL these years...Starcraft 2 looks like they did a conversion of Warcraft 3 - simply replacing the art assets to fit into another universe. Once again, there is no epic management in Starcraft 2 and you certainly won't be commanding hundreds of unique units and having a unique game experience each and every time. We ALL know the old Starcraft multiplayer drill - just pick Zerg and pump out the maximum 1st tier units and go charge your opposition and win in 8 minutes. That ain't strategy to me and is also the reason why I'll be $50 richer than most gamers at the end of this month. The corporates took over the headlining RTS titles and completely ruined them in my opinion. Let's see here...

Command & Conquer 4 - A complete bomb of a release that destroyed the main mechanics of the franchise. Utter garbage.
Supreme Commander 2 - Gas Powered games ignored their fans & created a console-accessible scaled down version of SC1.
Starcraft 2 - Basically, this is Warcraft 3 with mechs with little innovation except for privacy leaks in the Battle.net 2.0 system.

Ironically, I don't have any of those games loaded anymore...but I do have the complete AI Wars package installed and I do check for updates every day.