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[SaintXi]

Hi, for the past year I've been working on a sci-fi strategy game with my brother. It is finally ready to share with the world in the form of a lengthy playable demo:
Light of Altair PC Demo

You can play the first three missions of the game (several hours of gameplay!), and also part of a mission late in the game to get a real taste of combat and tactics.

There are two difficulty modes, so if you beat 'Normal' and feel unchallenged - try Hard mode and prepare for a beating in the late-game mission!



Ship combat is focused on equipping and designing your fleet, then watching the combat play out in orbit over your planets.
Your fleets gain experience and unlock new weapons technologies the more they fight.



Colony building is at the core of the game, and while you start off with a single planet to develop, in the end you control many systems at once - but you never get bogged down with micromanagement - the colonies need you to develop, but will maintain themselves pretty well without you while you are expanding elsewhere or fighting a war against a rival faction.

More information, backstory and PR stuff can be found on our website http://www.saintxi.com

Edit: We've got a new interview up on other-gaming.com, with lots more about where this game came from, the gameplay and our experiences with the launch so far:
Reido Interviews SaintXi about Light of Altair on OtherGaming.com

[JoeHonkie]

Oooh yes.  Gotta put time in my schedule for this.

[Alex May]

You're in London? We should grab a beer together!

[SaintXi]

Sounds like fun Free demo with every beer

[hroon]

This looks very polished! I'll definitely try it soon. I especially like the focus on colony building.

[Lynx]

I've tried the demo and passed along some comments directly, but for Tiggers in general:

The colony building is more streamlined and stylistic than nitty-gritty.  You'll be building an empire here, not playing SimColony with individually named colonists.  Think 4X-style, focused on colony management.

The graphics are indeed very impressive, and I'm curious to see where the story will be going.

[SaintXi]

We've got an interview up on other-gaming.com, with lots more about where this game came from, the gameplay and our experiences with the launch so far:

http://reidos-blog.other-gaming.com/#post4

[Alex May]

Is there any way to get your demo other than filefront? It's a horrible site which is riddled with popups and ads. Is it not possible to host it yourself?

[SaintXi]

We have official mirrors at:

GamersHell
StrategyInformer
AtomicGamer
FileFront

and unofficial mirrors many other places too.

The download costs (especially at launch) would cost $1000's if we hosted this purely on our own site - our http host is not suitable (price-wise) for massive downloads. I've looked at the alternative systems for download (eg: Amazon Cloudfront) and FileFront seemed straight forward to use with a good speed.

If anyone has some hard numbers on hosted/external demo download-conversion rates... I am open to persuasion!

[Alex May]

I got it in the end off filefront - had to refresh the page a few times and stuff. No problemo. The game is excellent. Will buy this. BUT MAYBE ONLY IF YOU COME OUT FOR BEERS 

(one thing, any chance of making the zoom a bit more forgiving? I feel like I can't touch the mouse wheel for fear the view will change dramatically!)

[SaintXi]

Alex -
Warning Tech Talk!
You must have a new smooth scrolling mouse perhaps. The old type always rolled in big chunks - say 100 units at a time, while the new ones scroll any smooth number of units - so at any time you could be 1 unit away from triggering the zoom.

I've not got one of these to test on - but zeroing the scroll counter after a delay might fix your problem (or add more issues!)... will have a think

Beer Talk
You know I'm up for that! Look forward to meeting you.

[SaintXi]

We have moved the main demo link to FilePlanet, to fine tune our web traffic flow.

It always amazes me how sites manage to flourish simply by hosting and advertising - in any case it saves me the bandwidth and makes for a more interesting browsing experience.

[Lynx]

It's a trust issue, I think.  The presumption is that hosting site X has checked out the download in some way, at least virus and trojan scanning, whereas stuff you download off random site X could be a trojan, since you don't know their reputation.  Building trust takes a while, once you're familiar with a place, you'll be more likely to go back there rather than try other places.

Anyway, it's a great game, has an addictive quality to the levels that I wouldn't expect from the simple colony management.  I just pre-ordered one for a friend that I think will enjoy it.

[SaintXi]

Alex, It was good meeting some London Indies last night (To be honest I was a bit star-struck meeting the guys behind so many cool games).

It also brought home the big E3 gamble - Light of Altair is launching on the last day of E3 this year (this week!)

[Alex May]

Yep, I had a great time, great meeting you and GregWS too

[Mipe]

Personally I like the game, so...

It also brought home the big E3 gamble - Light of Altair is launching on the last day of E3 this year (this week!)

 

[SaintXi]

E3 or no E3, the gamble paid off and we are getting a decent amount of attention on the main retail sites (especially Steam).

Also we are now listed on the BMTMicro affiliate system, and if you are an upstanding TigSourcer we will up your cut to 30%