Rock, Paper, Shotgun

If indie developers know one thing, it’s how to turn national political warfare into cheap-and-nasty monetization. Mode 7 Games are having 20% off their Frozen Synapse Pre-order (including Beta Access) in their Tactical Voting offer. You can order it here, and need to enter the coupon code WELLHUNG to get the reduction, before 1pm tomorrow. I fear that code’s pandering to my twitter rubbishness. I rambled about Frozen Synapse here, if you don’t remember. In short: Aces! Also, Positech are celebrating the decline of our democratic values with a decline in the prices of their Democracy 2. There’s a massive 50% off today. And now to get drunk and stare at the TV in mounting horror, I suspect.

Positech’s popular hands-off build-and-release strategy game Gratuitous Space Battles have just released an expansion pack. How does it expandier the game’s expansosity? Well, for six dollars you get a whole new race, 2 scenarios and a cent. The aliens in question are the swarm who deploy masses of fleets with smart bombs and focusing-in disruptor beams. All the while looking like the big gold bird out of Mysterious Cities of Gold. And a trailer follows! Yes! No, really.
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In an example of the sort of shameless marketeer behaviour with we loathe, fear and high approve of, Cliffski of Positech has celebrated the just-announced opportunity to choose our evil masters for the next few years and/or until a mid-00s Fascist Putsch by putting his Democracy 2 on sale. Just for today, it’s 50% off if you enter the code, meaning you can pretend to do a better job than any of the actual candidates in the comfort of your own whatever-room-where-your-PC-lives. Press release follows…
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…which sounds like an account of what happens when you buy the game, but is actually a new race that Cliffski has added in over the weekend. I’m downloading it to take a proper look, but in the meantime you can cast a theological eye over the details and then watch the trailer below.
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Aw, I feel so proud. It’s like seeing your own children in the papers, but without their having had to stab someone to get there. For winning a really tough swimming race or something. Because today on the real actual Queen’s official BBC News is a story about Mr Cliff Harris and Mr Dan Marshall. That’s Cliffski and Dan Off Of Time Gentlemen Please to you and me. It’s a story about the “return of the bedroom coder”, focusing on Positech and Zombie Cow as examples of British independent developers, and explaining that they can be successful in the larger world of gaming. Cliffski and Dan! We know them! They’re on the news!

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Blimey, space-fleet management game Gratuitous Space Battles already has an expansion, called The Tribe. Creator Cliff Harris says: “The pack adds an extra playable race to the game, complete with shiny new spaceships to blast apart in gratuitous slow motion. As well as new ship hulls, the game adds two new missions and a scattering of new tribe-specific modules to reflect their emphasis on ’strong hulls and weak shields’. It also introduces the first use of kinetic weapons.” There are also improvements and changes in the pipeline for the vanilla game.

The Tribe is out now, and it’s $6. (Trailer below)
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News of a mini-expansion for GSB arrives over on the Positech blog. Cliffski says: “…current plans for the pack are to introduce a new race to the game. It will have the same variety of ships as the other races. The ships will also have a few race-specific modules, and some quite drastic ship bonuses. It was a relief to work out that ship bonuses can be negative, meaning this new batch of ships will have weak shields, weak armor, and very strong hulls.” He’s not yet decided on a price for said expansion, claiming he only wishes to recoup the cost of making it.

Positech’s battlefleet manager game, Gratuitous Space Battles, is now available to purchase. To celebrate this space-fact the demo for the game has been posted, which means you can all have a play of the game without having to pay a penny. Get it here. Cliffski says to expect more development, as well as mods, in the coming months.

It looks like Cliffski wants modding to start for Gratuitous Space Battles even before he’s properly released the game, as he’s releasing the ship models for people to fiddle with. “Basically I couldn’t think of a good reason not to give modders access to the raw models that are used to make the art in the game,” says Cliffski, “and I know that if I was a modder, I’d find that very handy indeed, and be churning out lots of variants and tweaks of it.” The full game launch is apparently happening this week, with the release version of the game going up on the Positech site on Thursday.

Jim and Kieron got to talking about the beta of Gratuitous Space Battles. Their ruminations follow.
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