Pleae take your time!

[fishy]

Arcen rocks and puts out some really good ideas and games. That being said, please take your time on this one, its your baby. I think this user on reddit said it the best:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/50cmu1/less_than_a_week_after_launching_in_case_of/d72xsqy

Arcen puts out some decent games every once in awhile, but I think they'd be really well served by slowing down. Instead of putting out game after game, followed shortly by whiny blog post after whiny blog post, maybe take some time and make something really special. This is, what, just a couple months after the whole Starward Rogue thing? That had its own set of boo-hoo blog posts about low sales. Rather than hopping on the EA bandwagon and cranking out a game that was pretty clearly intended to be YouTuber bait, that would have been a good point to stop, slow down and reflect. Arcen doesn't really do stop, slow down and reflect.

I think they can manage a really solid hit if they try, but they can't if they keep just throwing out games and then acting confused when nobody wants to buy them yet again.

[x4000]

I've addressed the whole thing with youtuber bait in the posts on the cancellation of Raptor in general.

Regarding not taking time to reflect, I think that there's quite a bit of misinformation there.  We've spent enormous amounts of time on a number of projects, sometimes to our detriment.  Some projects have been quicker, most have not.  I think that the reddit user there has a very shallow understanding of events as they have transpired, and I find it interesting that clarity and transparency in times of trouble is considered boo-hooing.

In terms of AI War II, the purpose of a kickstarter is to give us the proper amount of time.  If the kickstarter is not successful, then we'll have to take our time in a different way as Keith will have to look for other work, and who knows what else.  We need to move to the state of having a kickstarter ready to go relatively quickly, but the purpose of the kickstarter itself is to allow for the proper amount of time, with buffer.

[Misery]

Something I've noticed:  If a game doesn't take like, 2 bloody years to make, you always get people saying things like that.  "Oh you put it out so fast, you didn't even take enough time to TRY!!!".  They assume that everything CLEARLY must work like the AAA side of the industry does.   I'll never understand why.

[x4000]

There are a lot of indie developers that take extremely long times to work, too.  Often they are either brand new and thus don't have built-up assets to work with, or they have much smaller teams (often one person).  We did SBR in only something like 2.5 months, but there were 11+ people working on it, the majority fulltime there.

[Kahuna]

I've also got the impression that Arcen has been shoveling games out a bit too quickly. Gives the impression of quantity over quality mentality. Now I don't know if that's actually true nor am I saying that's the case but that's the impression I've got and apparently I'm not the only one. I noticed something similar some time ago when AI War was being patched multiple times a week. It really changed the game. Perhaps too much and too quickly.


About graphics. I agree that gameplay is always way more important than graphics. But even if the gameplay is good I'd probably not play it if it looks terrible enough. I still remember planet graphics patch for AI War that brought the "Rotting Cow", "cardboard planets", etc. I think the nebulas were also updated in that same patch.
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,11201.msg112354.html
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5FDEIlNNthY/UAig654Z79I/AAAAAAAAAzo/lnChgJSYJNY/s1600/Screenshot_2012_07_19_17_52_08.png
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZgxanVC7tts/UAig5zLErNI/AAAAAAAAAzg/DehOgXfoTUE/s1600/Screenshot_2012_07_19_17_52_01.png
https://get.google.com/albumarchive/111524973507026076668/album/AF1QipOFCtoLZu5ns_YCJBnfDH_HZ-fHLqClNN-qV2_-/AF1QipMmc76Q2kqYPgnKGqzXMThrG-bbXkgF1ioyPfNz?authKey=CJW21ObizOvpDg


And that "Less than a week after launching "In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor" in Steam Early Access, Arcen Games decides to stop working on it, makes the (unfinished) game available for free and is offering refunds for anyone that purchased" sounds pretty obnoxious. Didn't something like that happen with Shattered Haven or some other game too? Don't know I haven't been following Arcen's other games pretty much at all. I did try Last Federation few years ago but back then there was no real way to impact the flow of the game so haven't bothered to get back into it. I still respect Arcen because of AI War and am really excited about AI War 2.

[x4000]

We haven't pulled any other games.