Yet another overdue post

By December 24, 2016 Uncategorized No Comments

 

Hi everyone!

As usual, we need to apologise (yet again) for not updating this site regularly enough. It’s a bit long in the tooth and needs a visual overhaul soon, and it’s tempting to just stay heads down in development rather than setting aside time for non-development related tasks. It’s a bit cliche to say to you “trust us, we’re working on this project every single day,” so at the bottom of this post I’ll supply some evidence and you can judge for yourselves our progress.

The most exciting (and downright frightening) thing that is coming up is our Kickstarter campaign. We’re aiming to launch it next month. At the same time, we’ll provide a free version of the game for anyone and everyone to try to out. I hope that stating this plainly doesn’t get people from other studios sore at me, but the honest truth is that 4X crowdfunding campaigns haven’t exactly had a good run. A rather terrible run at it in fact. The closest thing we have to a success story has to be StarDrive, which is a game I personally enjoyed quite a lot for what it is, but is extremely controversial for reasons I won’t go in to – I’m not a journalist, and delving further into the topic could too easily extend into the realm of poor taste. Moving along, the general history is that a lucky few campaigns got in early and raised a lot of money, but so far have yet to deliver much. Later on efforts have had trouble making their funding goals in what can mercifully be described as a “skeptical climate.” Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t just the fault of the early birds, but of bad actors in crowdfunding as a whole who have weakened the integrity of the platform. Releasing the free version is us putting our money where our mouth is. It will show our ability and our sincerity. The hope is that backers will see that there is no worry of us bungling things the way that others have in the past. This free version will be based on the latest stable build, and won’t have any arbitrary restrictions like turn limits. It won’t be completely feature complete (missing things like random events and espionage), but fully playable from start to finish, with an AI that is already much more competitive than what most 4X titles are able to achieve even after release.

After the crowdfunding campaign is over, we may deploy a few patches to the free version to fix critical issues, but for the most part you’ll either need to have a beta invite or you’ll need to have had backed the project at an appropriate tier to enjoy regular new builds.

In the meantime to whet everyone’s appetite and show some of what we’ve been working on, please enjoy this first part of our AI developer, Alex’s (also known as AIL), inaugural session of Let’s Play Dominus Galaxia: