Hey there AFF Community!
Turns out there’s a Halloween Sale on Steam right now and AFF is a part of it! Why? We have no idea, maybe space is spooky enough! Regardless, it’s a good occasion for putting the game out there for a tenner, so here goes:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/367270
Let’s address the elephant in the room then: it’s been over a month without a new update. Usually that means we’re working on some massive system overhaul and it’s true this time as well - there’s indeed that big AI navigation update incoming very soon. This extra delay is surely because of extra rigorous testing and has nothing to do with the flu season and cold weather…
There’s one upside to half the team having a bit of a downtime - we played a lot of games this past month. We strongly believe one needs to play games to design games and it’s doubly true in AFF’s case - we’re making the game we would love to play after all! So we went through a lot of titles recently, from PUBG and Destiny, through EndlessSpace2 and Factorio to Divinity, Battlefront, No Man’s Sky… the list goes on and on. As you can see it’s very diverse genre-wise but that’s always what inspires AFF - the whole spectrum of awesome things you can do in games.
One other thing we thought we should mention is that AFF has been in Early Access for two years now. We are not exactly sure what to think about it - our store page still claims “maybe year and a half (...) reality will verify this” so it’s understandably something our players might be fed up with. At the same time it almost feels like an occasion we should celebrate - it’s been one hell of a ride with our Community, we managed to largely avoid feature creep, the majority of the massive changes we’ve made (and admittedly didn’t expect we would have to make to that extent, hence the extra development time) were dictated by the feedback from You, guys and girls! We’re a little bit proud of those last two years, is what I’m saying. Cheers!
Now we’re doubling our efforts to get as much done as possible before the end of the year. The final part of the big AI upgrade is coming, then the next update after that will very likely focus on user-friendliness - tutorial, better explanation of objectives, ironing out the kinks in the UI. There’s obviously the AAA releases season going on right now too, a very sub-optimal time for anything independent and low-budget. Logically, we’ll be using those couple months to work on AFF some more and schedule more of an organized promotional effort in early 2018.
In the meantime we’re working on getting our website back up and running, we owned the thing for like 10 years and there’s been some issues with its hosting service recently. It should be back on a new proper host soon and bring with it some exciting new content, stay tuned for that if you’re interested in the wider AFF lore.
Again, we invite everyone to drop by our Discord! Come say hi, drop some feedback on the game, have a great space Halloween!
Onwards and upwards!