Airship Dragoon on Steam Greenlight

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I Am The One Percent: Airship Dragoon is Released

Today I enter the hallowed corridors of those amateurs, tinkerers, modders and aspirers (aspirers? is that even a word?) who have actually finished and commercially released an indie game. I am the one percent.

After 2 years and 3 months (note to self, we have got to shorten the blinking heck out of development length next time around) of what seems somewhat akin to self-flagellation ... and even more disturbingly - 5 years and one month after deciding to make some sort of indie game - I have finally managed to release my first commercial indie game.



There she blows! A box shot of ... a box which doesn't exist obviously ... because it's a virtual product.

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But you can't have a release ... without a trailer .. so here's one of those ... looks best in HD but you knew that already.




Also, www.yorkshirerifles.com is now a thing.

A retweet of this, would be appreciated.

Airship Dragoon: X-Com style Steampunk Tactics. Finally released! http://t.co/simAWZWBt3 via @Steve_Yorkshire RT appreciated
— Steve_Yorkshire (@Steve_Yorkshire) September 17, 2013

It's early days on the whole shipping front. I've set up my own site shop with FastSpring (as used by numerous indies including Frozen Synapse's mode7games - and the soon to be released FriendZone American Robot Hand-Egg Simulator ... does that joke ever get old? ... er yes ... :S ).

I am negotiating with Desura at the moment, and once that is sorted out, it's time to mount an assault on Greenlight and spam the gaming press with review copies. Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey - or embarazi as they used to say when I lived abroad.

I have set up an IndieDB for Airship Dragoon, for anyone who may use it.

The whole shipping/e-commerce/desperately seeking attention thing is all a bit new to me ... and like everything else ... in life as well as development ... I'm making it all up as I go along.

Eventually I will get around to doing - what is likely to turn out to be a huge - post mortem of the last 2 years and 3 months of development.

In the meantime, you may want to play Airship Dragoon which of course has a free demo.

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So, amongst all of this, I might actually get around to porting my old Valkyire Chronicles Style Action-Tactics-Hybrid over to the new Torque3D MIT version, and start umming-and-ahhing about which of the various projects whirling around inside my head will be my next game.

Softly softly catchee monkey ...

Achievements Achieved! Anals Of History! Err ... Annals

Achievements Have been achieved. Function creep has creepeninged (!?!?!?) ... Really dumb bugs which I had not noticed before have been fixed. Post-it notes have been posted - to the bin. Embarrassing anus related typos have become history!

Maybe that should be anals of history have been rectumfied ...

Current Status:
FEATURE COMPLETE

http://www.instantsfun.es/hallelujah-short/

There had been a sudden outbreak of the dreaded Function Creep lurgy and some alterations and additions found their way in. Some new animations, a lot of messing around with audio - the majority of which I then discarded after compeleting it because it sounded awful - and the introduction of Achievements ... which ... as expected ... introduced a shed load of new bugs which required hunting down and giving the thrashing of their lives.

I'll have to admit, I'm not a real fan of Achievements, nor of gamepads --- but I understand some people are, and the functionality for both are now in.

I did have fun thinking up a few of the names.

Both of the campaigns - Pangea, the Main Campaign where the dirigibles of the player's chose regime compete to conquer the Strategic map against the 5 Ai factions, and the Pirate Citadel, bonus Campaign where the player fights their way through enemy territory to storm the base of the Dastardly Pirates of Pangea - now have their own little intro screens, just to add a little description and background story flavour.

Also each of the regimes which the player can take control of or fight against now have their own visual description which displays the standard trooper alongside light and heavy armoured versions (stealth armour version isn't shown as it's the same as the light armoured trooper but in camouflage depending on the environment - and there are 5 of them, so that would have meant displaying 5 more models and it seemed a bit too much). Each regime also has a quote from it's leader - all with a heavy lean towards comedy, whether it's the Zulu Nation's horror at the cliche of leopard skin, Invincible President SteamLincoln's annoyance at having his opera disturbed and his hat singed, to a good old joke about the noble British crumpet.

Anyone good with Roman numerals? :P


I updated the whole single battle system ... for those who don't want to fight a 90+ battle campaign and just want a single, one off taste of tactical combat - apparently some people have lives ...

The new additions are the Task Force size - how many troops are deployed - and the level of technology available (each class has 4 levels of specialist items). There are seven - count 'em - levels of difficulty which increase or subtract troop experience, troop numbers, technology and budget for the battle.

Amongst all of this finishing stuff off - like the new dirigible models, new charge/sprint animations - guess which numpty couldn't get them to work before because of using the wrong naming convention even thought he coded the naming convention *cough*derp*cough* - there was a whole lot more bug fixing. Most of it was caused by the function creep, but some of it was exposed because of the function creep. In fact a couple of days ago I declared myself "bug free"! And within 5 minutes had found a new one ... I got twittered a joke about "day 1 patching".

But now, we are, bug free! Which means ... I have fixed all the bugs! ... which I know of ...

I had a few more fixes after this ... :/

We've also had ...

wait for it ...

Fame and fortune!

http://indiestatik.com/2013/08/11/screenshot-scrutiny-10th-august-2013/

Okay, we haven't ... but we did get noticed in the Saturday Screenshot and mentioned in an indie news site, which was all very, very nice. And then my inbox melted under the retweets and mentions. This was pandemonium for a fella who's lucky to get 1 email a day ...

And on GameDev.net
http://www.gamedev.net/page/showdown/view.html/_/steve-yorkshire-r10015

And the offending screenshot ... which wasn't actually ... er ... offending ...

https://twitter.com/Steve_Yorkshire/status/365867725429563392/photo/1/large

So, my post-it note pad is empty ... well, actually it's not, it's just free of fixes and functions to do. It is currently got a few notes on it about creating a "Release Candidate" and demo version. Ah, yes, the demo version I hinted at over a year ago ... and still haven't got round to doing ... ahem ...

There's a few things which I need to sort out, both code and logistics-wise for the shipping versions, and having a look at beamNG's demo release was a great help! They included the dx9updater because ...

In fact if everyone could retweet this, it might help: https://twitter.com/Steve_Yorkshire/status/366577223114838016

Who?



Thanks Gary.

Maybe someday they'll actually take notice ...



Thanks, Professor.


As I've completely gone off tangent-wise, best to end, on a video of the action, menus, regimes, instructions, options, and a little bit of the Pangean Campaign in a "Sloop" class dirigible. Starting dirigble is now randomly generated for all factions - and it really does play differently between the fast, low troop capacity one and the huge, ultra slow Dreadnought version.




Looks nice full screen on HD ... but you knew that already ...

Anals of History ... *sigh* ... Annals - what a difference a letter makes ...