Bay 12 Games Forum

Arcen Game's is an indie developer of niche, experimental games including AI War, The Last Federation, Bionic Dues, and others.

Their last few games haven't met with the greatest acclaim, nor have they been financially successful, so they've had to lay off most of their staff. Their last-ditch self-funded attempt was In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor, which failed almost immediately out of the gate. It was promptly released for free on Steam just to keep it around for those that enjoyed what it was.

So now they've decided to break glass in an emergency, instead of releasing a raptor, and they're Kickstarting a sequel to AI War.

AI War is their most successful game - an asymmetric RTS pitting the last few human survivors against an overwhelming AI. It's reviewed extremely well, and lived a very long life - currently on 8.0 - with a fairly active Bay12 topic. With the sequel, the plan to polish up the parts that people loved, tweak the things that weren't-as-loved, and just all-around polish it to a shine on a new engine with a codebase that isn't a horrific nightmare.

They did a first attempt at a Kickstarter. It... didn't pan out how anyone would have liked, so they've gone back to the drawing board, learned to market, and trimmed down staff in order to go for attempt number 2. Less than 24 hours in, and attempt number 2 is basically funded.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcengames/ai-war-ii-0/description

Outdated info from Take 1 in the spoiler.

http://dobrazupa.org/tournament/0.15/

Rankings:
26) Bay12 Champions
38) Bay12 Nobles
49) Bay12 Blacksmiths
84) Bay12 Miners

Wins (compiled by vogonpoet):

Champions: 10 wins

    Tegga21   (7)
    Antioch   (2)
    Aelig   (1)

Nobles: 6 wins

    DrFeelgood   (3)
    BaronMunchausen (1)
    Mindmaker (1)
    vogonpoet (1)

Blacksmiths: 4 wins

    Train      (2)
    Un67   (1)
    Vactor   (1)

For background, I went to BSU (Boise State) for my freshman year of college. I then transferred to BYUI (Brigham Young University-ID; yes, a church school) and have been here for the past 3 semesters.

...3 semesters in, and I'm seriously considering transferring back. My current plan is to graduate in Applied Mathematics and continue on to graduate school, which BYUI isn't really prepared for. The math department itself is good, the teachers are great, but there just aren't enough mathematics majors to justify spending much money on extensive upper-level courses. Plus, the school doesn't offer any research opportunities at all, whereas BSU does. But I'm not sure what transferring back will do to my graduation schedule, though I'm not sure I care all that much...

That's the academic perspective, though. The trigger for this was the social perspective. BYUI has a track system, as they call it. The school offers three "tracks", essentially semesters, and each student gets assigned to two of them by default. Because of this, it's been difficult for me to make many lasting friendships, and it makes actual relationships a nightmare, because it's quite likely you'll only be seeing each other 3 months of the year. As for BSU, I grew up in the Boise area, and a large chunk of my friends from high school and last summer (the ...advantage? of the track system is that you're out of school 6 months of the year, and my six months are next to each other. My "summer" break was mid-April to early-September) all are at BSU, or are at least in the area. I haven't managed to make any good friends at BYUI, though that may be my failing... BYUI tries to help, it's a church school so we're basically required to attend church, and strongly encouraged to attend small social things with assigned groups on Monday nights*, but the groups are very hit-or-miss. Last semester was great, while it's been more of an annoyance than anything this semester. I'm just not sure if "I'm not the best fit socially" is a good reason to transfer halfway through my Junior year... or even later....

Then there's a few things about BYUI that irk me, but nothing too bad on its own...

But I'm worried about finding a job if I transfer back, because I do need money. Housing is less of an issue, I'll just live with my parents until I earn enough money and decide to find an apartment closer to the university, and I can always take another loan if I need to, I just don't want to.

What suggestions or comments or advice do you guys have?

Transferring back is so simple as to be irrelevant. I'm still technically a student at BSU until 2015, so all I have to do is withdraw from BYUI and register for classes at BSU, though getting money back for my apartment contract next semester might be a problem.

*The group meetings sounds odd the way I've phrased it, so let me explain. My church strongly encourages "family home evening", as they call it. Once a week, typically Monday nights, they advise families to meet together for something, be it some lesson or games or just to talk. Which makes perfect sense in a familial setting, and I have no problem with it there. What happens, though, is everyone leaves for college, and consequently isn't with their family, so they try to mimic that. We're assigned to groups from 10 to 20 people in size to be a mock "family" for the semester, the justification being that it helps keep everyone in the habit of meeting once a week and that it helps the social atmosphere. It doesn't work out quite as well in that situation, though.

Created in DF v0.27.169.33g.

[WORLD_GEN]
   [TITLE:STANDARD]
   [SEED:137172922]
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v288/Xgamer4/world_map-region1-1050-0.png

When I get bored with my current fortress (happens often) I don't pick a new spot. I just gen a new world and delete the old one. This popped up with zero rejects and I figured you guys might find it interesting. I have a ~3MB png of the full-sized world if someone has a place for me to host it and someone's interested.

Oh, random question. What would I need to look for if I want an area with a brook/stream/river that freezes in winter but thaws in summer?

So, I got bored and started a fortress in a snowy desert with Terrifying creatures. I accidentally used all my wood in bolt production (I thought I had selected bones -_-) so, while waiting for my towercaps to grow I got bored and channeled out magma to make a moat to protect the road. Realizing that all I had to do was slap two floodgates on it and I could flood the world I set that up.

Test pull. Moat works.
Test world flood. Snow melts revealing sand. Lava refuses to pass sand.

Map of fortress: http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-1123-clasprooms

The lower strip of lava is the moat. The upper strip is the road. The rest is snow-covered sand.