Selected links to news/blog coverage of dev 9:

• Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Kieron Gillen covered the game, mentioning its crew management and monkey hunting aspects amongst others.
• Nine Over Ten just put up a post on dev 9 and the upcoming plans for dev 10.
• Star Controller, who previously previewed SE:SS, have a new post on the game, talking about some of the new features and significance of names.
• RPG Codex also posted an update about it, adding a RPGCodexese in-joke about Adhara that took me a while to unravel.
• Inside Mac Games covered it in their news section.
• RPG blog "I Waste The Buddha With My Crossbow" had a look at it and liked it a great deal.
• The game also appeared in the news roundup of Norwegian site Gamer.no. I admit to speaking no Norwegian at all, but I think they liked it.
• German site Gaming XP also reported on dev 9.

Furthermore, amazingly, this site is now on the first page of the Google UK search results for "space exploration", crowding out various real-world space probes. I feel almost a bit guilty about this. (And Metal Beetle's site is on the second page for "beetle".) The algorithm seems to have taken a liking to my sites.

I haven't been posting here all that often due to being busy, and a lot of my activity happening at SE:SS and notpowerless these days.

Anyway, I've been playing with Firefox search plugins for a bit, which it turns out are very easy to make yourself. Just write a short XML file and plonk it into the appropriate folder.

I've made two plugins I find quite useful:

• Google & Wikipedia uses Yubnub to display a split frame with the Google results on the left and the salient Wikipedia page on the right. For example, searching for "kittens" yields this. Install via Javascript
• Google Translate translates any word or phrase entered, taking a guess at the language used. For example, searching for "Katze" yields this. Install via Javascript

The other useful thing about search plugins I've discovered is that if you click on the search plugin selector drop-down on the top-right of you screen, there is a "Manage Search Engines..." option. There, you can set keywords for your search engines. These keywords allow you to select a search engine by typing them into the location bar. So if you choose "t" as your keyword for the translate engine, you can enter "t <some words>" into your Firefox location bar and get an instant best-guess translation. Which is fairly neat.

One of the questions I asked in the feedback form for Space Exploration: Serpens Sector dev 8 and 9 was about the intended distribution model for SE:SS. As I have stated before, I intend to release the basic game for free, and sell expansion packs that add more content.

While a lot of people were happy with this idea, a lot also had their reservations. The reason for this, as far as I can tell, is that a number of large game publishers are abusing the idea of "episodic content" to more or less fleece their customers: They release a game, and then pump out dozens of minor add-ons which they hope people will buy.

For example, two people mentioned a case where Bethesda Softworks released a $2.50 add-on consisting of nothing but armour for your horse. Other examples mentioned are Half-Life, where the first episode was "meaty", but the second one was not - and cost the same as the first. Another one is Spore.

They appear be to thinking: "If we do add-ons, we can chop up the gameplay into lots of little bits to sell to the customer at a higher price, and end up with more money for no extra effort. And we'll just keep on cranking out more content until no-one buys it anymore."

This is not what I want to do.

In the rest of this post, I'll explain why I want to use the "expansions" model for selling SE:SS, but first some promises:

1. Even without any expansions, the full game will be entirely playable. There won't be nearly as many encounters, so they'll start to repeat themselves rather quickly, but there will be no game features (as opposed to content) that are only unlocked by buying something.
2. The expansions will be few, and meaty. Each of them will take me several months of work.
3. If I do feel the need to release a minor expansion or add-on, it will be free.

So why the expansions?

I've spent about half a year of development time on Space Exploration so far. I expect to spend another three months or so on the game itself, and then maybe another three doing nothing but writing encounters for the first expansion. I will then release the game and the expansion. If the expansion does well in terms of sales, I will start work on another expansion. If not, I will move on to another project. Assuming people really like the game, and I have enough ideas, I might do three or four expansions, spending maybe a year of my life doing nothing but writing content for the game.

So I could spend that entire year up-front and release all of the content rolled into one release people can buy, and which costs about as much as the three or four expansions put together. (That is, about as much as a normal shareware game.) But if the game proceeds to sell badly, I will literally be unable to buy food, and will have thrown away a year of my life. Which is a rather depressing outcome.

So I want to have a dialogue with my customers that goes something like this:
Me: "I made this game, do you like it? If you do, I'll spend more time making more of it."
Customers: "Yes!"
Me: "OK, I'll go and make more."

or, alternatively:

Me: "I made this game, do you like it? If you do, I'll spend more time making more of it."
Customers: "No!"
Me: "OK, I'll go and make something else you might enjoy more."

For the customer, the end result of a game with expansions is the same as if I'd done a single big release, or a small release followed by free upgrades. Customers get X amount of enjoyable game playing time for Y money. The difference is just that with expansions, it happens in instalments of say ¼ X game play for ¼ Y money.