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Chris

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Everything posted by Chris

  1. Chris
    Interesting. We'll have to figure out something particularly worthwhile for the $50 price point, I think...
  2. Chris
    The US company wouldn't help (and can't be set up that quickly either), as I'd still need a US-based person to do the Kickstarter. That just puts me back to square 1 unfortunately. @Jean-Luc - RPS are British as well, I'm afraid.
  3. Chris
    Yeah there'll be a slightly longer research tree than there is at the moment. There's a total of 22 projects going in.
  4. Chris
    OK, so Build V9.3 is not going to be out today I'm afraid. It'll arrive at some point this week. Probably best to assume the weeked, but we might put it out earlier if we can. Why the delay? It's actually quite a big upgrade over V9.2. It includes bugfixes and further upgrades to the air combat UI (right-click contextual menu etc), but it also has some fairly big additions to it like base defence missions and terror sites. We thought these would be fairly simple to add, but predictably they haven't been as straightforward as anticipated. So, basically, hold tight. I think you'll be rather impressed when you see the new build.
  5. Chris
    Welcome back!
  6. Chris
    I'd expect a lot more than just RPS to pick up on this - if we couple this with the press preview build I'd expect some pretty heavy coverage from a lot of sites. That's why I don't think IndieGoGo would be a disaster, but Kickstarter would just be easier for the more undecided people. A lot of the reason that Xenonauts doesn't get THAT much coverage is because I've not been willing to send out press builds thus far because we're a closed single-player game rather than open-ended games like Minecraft and Terraria etc which can be previewed very early in development. I'm fairly certain we can burst out of our niche pretty convincingly once we're ready to show the game off. Maybe I'll send Brian a twitter message about it, see if I can hook his attention that way. Cyllan, I'm not really sure how much we need. The great thing about the Kickstarter is that it's not really raising investment as such - it's a way to raise the profile of the game and convince more people to pre-order the game (the majority of the funding will come from people pledging in the $20-$30 range in exchange for a pre-order, I think). That means we don't really have to give the investors anything - it's just increasing our sales, which is far more appealing from a business point of view. Except we'll then spend those sales on making the game better. If we make the press preview build pretty good I honestly don't see why we couldn't raise $50,000 to $100,000 based on what other similar projects are raising. I think it'd be much better to crowdsource that than to get it from a single investor.
  7. Chris
    Bleh the lighting there is really inconsistent. I might have to look at that...
  8. Chris
    I emailed Brian Fargo asking if he'd be willing to set up a Kickstarter on our behalf if we joined his Kick It Forward pledge, and he didn't bother replying. Yeah, it's frustrating not being able to find a reputable organisation who is willing to help us out because I do think Kickstarter would be a lot better than IGG - but if we're stuck with IGG, we're stuck with it. I'm still reluctant to trust a random individual I've never met with what may potentially be upwards of $100,000!
  9. Chris
    Just an update on V9.3 - expect this on Monday. We've got a few fixes to make with the terrain editor which we won't be able to do until Monday I'm afraid.
  10. Chris
    I don't think setting up an associated but not real Kickstarter page would be a good idea. It'd make us look unprofessional. I think the key would be getting the message out to all the gaming sites so people are aware of it. Most of the attention projects get comes from gaming press coverage rather than people floating around on Kickstarter looking for something to donate to, I think.
  11. Chris
    Ah crap, I've left levelsetup.xml on, which is forcing every mission to be the Industrial tileset. That would explain a lot. Also, re: the research mission numbers, the number on the right is actually the ticker score when the UFO starts appearing. If you bring down Scouts to 200 or 150 they'll completely replace Light Scouts on that mission at that point. We'll do some balancing on the game this week, I think the light scouts are around for too much of the early game.
  12. Chris
    Glad you like it. The tooltip fix and a few more small visual updates (as well as a contextual right-click menu for your interceptors) is coming this weekend.
  13. Chris
    I'll add some new maps at some point. Making them is a pain in the ass and I've not got round to it yet. The planned tilesets are: Farm Industrial Arctic / Tundra Desert Town (Terror map) Alien Base Xenonaut Base We're working on the base attack missions at the moment.
  14. Chris
    It's a bit tricky really - we're not going to know if you've already pre-ordered or not when you donate, I'm afraid. It'd be quite a lot of effort to do some kind of cross-checking given the number of pre-orders we have both on Desura and prior to the move. Will there be extra goodies for the standard pre-orderers? No, I don't think so. There won't be extra goodies for the premium pre-orderers either, it's just that we're going to have to work out exactly what these long-awaited premium pre-orderer bonuses actually are and give them to them. They're likely to be something that is easy enough to pirate - the game's soundtrack and some wallpapers, perhaps, or maybe me writing up the development diary I've been keeping for the past couple of years into e-book form to go with the game etc. Probably both. Basically stuff that doesn't have extra unit costs for every unit sold. That way if you've donated $30 to the project one way or another you could just pirate it with no problems at all. If we do physical goods (like posters etc) that'd be for the $50+ market I think. I'm still not entirely sure though.
  15. Chris
    The following joke springs to mind: A man walks into his doctor's office and says, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." The doctor says: "Don't do that!" See if it's still occurring in the new UI when we implement it (I imagine the dialogs will be wider so it shouldn't be such an issue) and post it up again if it does.
  16. Chris
    Can anyone replicate this?
  17. Chris
    Thanks. This is helpful.
  18. Chris
    Hmm. You shouldn't be able to destroy the UFO at all. I'll look at that. The door thing is known and we'll sort it in the beta.
  19. Chris
    Ah right, thanks Gauddlike. I'll update this in the dev build so it filters through in the next build.
  20. Chris
    Yes, the Premium pre-order will be one of the funding levels. If you're already a premium pre-orderer you'll be entitled to the bonuses as if you'd contributed at that level. Quite what they'll be or how we'll distribute them yet I don't know. But you won't be penalised for having given us the $30 prior to this. I'm not really interested in potentially having a very large sum of money go through the bank account of someone who I don't know. We've approached some US-based gaming-related organisations but they aren't interested based on the risks involved. That includes people like Humble Bundle and Doublefine etc. Believe me, we've tried everything suggested in this thread.
  21. Chris
    No - that's the whole point of the Desura updater. It means you don't have to download all that stuff every time we make a relatively small patch. If you don't want to use that then that's fine but the other method has disadvantages too.
  22. Chris
    We've already looked into the Kickstarter thing and it's not possible to circumvent it unfortunately.
  23. Chris
    They're all Murphy's Laws - something doesn't literally have to happen every possible time to be a Murphy's Law. That's the point - that's why it's a Murphy's Law rather than an immutable law. Obviously the list posted does not actually occur very often in X-Com (you wouldn't be able to complete the game otherwise) but the point of it is that they happen often enough to get a sigh of recognition from most people who played the game.
  24. Chris
    Thanks. Tooltip for the afterburners I already know about, we'll get that fixed up. Looks like the invisible fighter bug is back though. I'll wait for Matthew to log that one...
  25. Chris
    A quick update re: AI - we have now got a good AI coder who is working on the AI at a decent rate. It took him a few weeks to get into it prior to V9.1 but things are now coming along well. Basically the AI is going to be fully customisable and moddable based on the existing behaviours. The behaviours and preconditions will be hardcoded in the code (and I'm not overly interested in how they work as long as they do), but you can edit how they interact with each other in the XML files as they are all data-driven. Basically, should be easy to customise what triggers an alien to, for instance, throw a grenade. Or change their targetting priority for a given weapon. The AI coder initially sent me this Gamasutra article as a way of explaning the basics of the AI model: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1862/creating_all_humans_a_datadriven_.php
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