achron posts

More and more, small indie game developers are asking for gamers to donate money or pre-order the game the team is developing well in advance in order to continue development. Gamesindustry.biz (free registration required) is reporting in a new feature article that one of the teams that has used this approach has generated quite a lot of money.

Zero Point Software, the developers of the upcoming first person shooter Interstellar Marines, claim to have raised over $125,000 from fans even before the game is completed. People who do donate money get the final version before release along with extra privileges on the game's web site. The article also looks at other developers who have used similar means to fund their games such as Hazardous Software, who offer a beta of its upcoming time travel themed RTS game Achron to people who pre-order the game.

The indie game developer Hazardous Software has been working for a while now on their time travel themed RTS game Achron. This week the developer announced they are now taking pre-orders for the innovative game on their web site. However the full game isn't due to be released for a year or so.

So why buy the game now? Hazardous Software is offering pre-orders a chance to get early builds of the game for free. For now they are offering a five map single player alpha test build of the game but in the months before its release in early 2011 the team will add more content to the game including multiplayer and a map editor. You can check out a gameplay demo of the time travel gameplay features after the jump.

We love time travel stories at Big Download. However, they can also give us a headache when we think about them too much. Seriously, the whole "grandfather paradox" dealie keeps us up at nights. So when word got out of a new indie RTS game was being revealed at GDC this week, we decided to stock up on Tylenol.

The game is called Achron (not to be confused with the classic PC strategy game Archon) and its developers at Hazardous Software have offered up a YouTube video showing how the game uses time travel in its RTS gameplay. Clearly the graphics need some work but the gameplay ideas behind it (making units and then sending them back in time to go after enemies before the units were made) are pretty cool. Until you start thinking about all of the causality issues . . . then we reach for the pills. You can check out more videos at the game's official web site.