Upcoming AIA Game Release

Caption: Networked Multi-player Title Screen

After a healthy round of tweaks, it looks like AI Apocalypse will be ready for release soon. It’s something that myself and everyone at Cogmation have put a lot of work into. I do think we have something that will differentiate itself in the market – I think the idea of being able to develop your own AI code without needing an extensive technical background will draw an audience.

The announcement of Unity 2.1 comes at a good time as well. Fixing a few key issues (the fix to stop OnGUI from executing before Start() would have saved a lot of time in workarounds and gotchas during development, but better late than never) will ease development considerably, but it’s the concept of dynamically loading assets using WWW that really has us all interested. This has some really exciting implications for the game, and could really launch the customization aspect of the game into a completely new realm.

Caption: Configuring a hovertank

We’ll also see how my idea of a user created back-end game story pans out. I’ve added a Wiki to the game site, and we’ll let users contribute to the game story. One of the most useful comments we received from our focus groups, was that the more input and customization ability a player has within a game, the more connected and invested the player.

There’s a lot of work in general ahead, but it’s an exciting stage for the game, and the user base is starting to grow even during beta.

Official Game Site