Receiver was finally released on Steam today -- check it out here! There is a one-week launch sale bringing the price down to $3.99. If you already have Receiver or Overgrowth, then you can claim your Steam key on your Humble Store download page (linked from your purchase email).

Whenever a game is greenlit, there are always two questions that come up over and over: "How did it take THIS LONG for this game to get greenlit?", and "How did THIS game get greenlit?" In this post I will try to answer both questions about Receiver!

We put Receiver up on Greenlight the day it was announced, because … why not? There was no fee yet, and we had no luck getting it on Steam via the traditional method. Receiver already had a pretty significant following thanks to our supportive and vocal community, and great ‘Let’s Play’ videos like this one from Robbaz. So, when we got set up on Greenlight, it didn’t take too long to reach the top 20!

Our first thought was that once we’re in the top 20, it’s just a matter of time until we get picked. But that’s not necessarily true! There are great new games joining Greenlight every day, and some of them shoot straight to the top. So, when we were #11, and the top 10 got greenlit, we were briefly in first place! But sure enough, along came 10 super-hot games that pushed us right back to #11 right before the next batch was picked. This happened over and over, until it seemed like Receiver might never get on Steam.

Finally, we got a surge in votes following an Idle Thumbs podcast about Receiver, and that kept us solidly in the top 10, and we got greenlit in the fifth batch! It’s tempting to say that this final surge is what got Receiver greenlit, just like a tie-breaking point wins a sports game, but ultimately every vote is just as important as any other when the total is what matters. In the end, Receiver got Greenlit by accumulating 54,266 "Yes" votes. Let’s consider this graph of daily votes over time for Receiver:

The first thing we see is a massive spike at the very beginning. I suspect this is partly because we got on Greenlight so early, when there were so many users rating games. If you look up Steam Greenlight on Google Trends, you can see that there was a big spike in interest when it was first announced in September 2012, followed by a steep decline. Since only "yes" votes matter, it was a big win to be there for that rush of voters! For the remaining traffic, I don’t have access to any extra analytics data for the Greenlight votes themselves, but I do have access to the stats for "wolfire.com/receiver"! That traffic seems to correlate fairly well with the Greenlight traffic, so I marked some corresponding spikes in the picture above.

There is a pretty significant noise floor of apparently random spikes, from small threads on Reddit, Tigsource, and even TVTropes. However, the first large spike came from a Penny Arcade article about a different game jam, mentioning Receiver as a notable example of what can be done in seven days. Our next significant spike came when we announced Linux support, which got us a lot of traffic from sites like Ubuntu Vibes, and made us a useful example in discussions of the Unity game engine’s Linux support. When we released Desperate Gods, that brought some traffic back to Receiver, because whenever anyone mentioned that game, it made sense to mention our previous work as well.

Finally, the case of the Idle Thumbs podcast is the most interesting, because as an audio stream, it could not drive any direct traffic. However, it did seem to kick off a lot of discussion of the game across the Internet, which manifested as a large spike in traffic from seemingly unrelated viral sources. First there was a spike in Twitter links (blue), then a spike from the SomethingAwful forums (green), and finally, a spike in Google searches (red) along with a video by Giant Bomb. I don’t really know how all these events are related, but they all happened very close together!

To answer the first question we started with, Receiver took so long to get Greenlit because there’s very stiff competition on Greenlight. There are serious contenders joining every day, and only a handful make it through each month, so you can be accumulating thousands of votes, and still see your rank decrease.

To answer the second question, Receiver got Greenlit for several reasons, including help from the faithful Wolfire community that has gathered over the years! Another important factor is that Greenlight voters are starving for novelty, and satiated with polish. Why else would they be spending their time voting on Greenlight instead of playing the latest AAA games? We put a lot of novel ideas in Receiver, and while it wasn’t the most polished game on Greenlight, apparently it was what voters were looking for! Here is the design overview video, for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet:

document.getElementById('hs-youtube-GCThInmzjXw').outerHTML = "\x3Ciframe width='520' height='381' allowtransparency scrolling='no' frameBorder='0' style='border:none;' src='http://www.humblebundle.com/store/video/receiver?youtubeid=GCThInmzjXw'\x3E\x3C/iframe\x3E"
Be sure to watch it in HD!

Thank you everyone who voted for Receiver on Greenlight, and I hope you enjoy adding it to your Steam library!

the game has drastically changed in the past few weeks, so its time to update you with all the info you need.
the game has drastically changed in the past few weeks, so its time to update you with all the info you need.

Version:  v01 Spring Maps Freeware

Ok, so, Knorke didn’t address some very serious issues with his theme. The most of which being that someone using the original mother’s mapconv will have vastly different filesizes from someone using Beherith’s mapconv, as will someone using Spring Map Edit or L3DT.

With that in mind, I stuck with the spirit of the competition and used Beherith’s MapConv, which yields larger filesizes, but is pretty much all around better.

Map without SSMF is 2.8mb. With SSMF it is 7.8mb (the splat texture is 4mb and doesn’t compress well).

What I have linked on springfiles, is with SSMF, as I feel that this competition is semi-worthless if not using the latest methods and trying to minify them.

This also acts as a nice demo as to the HUGE difference that SSMF makes.

Dependencies:  Spring Features Author / Publisher:  Forboding Angel

Hail Knights!

I'd like to announce two exciting new features that will be released in a future update: dashing and shield bashing. Both of these features will be available to all knights as part of their core set of actions.

*There is currently no ETA for these features, though they will soon be available to test on the Test Server*

Dash
The dash is used to evade enemy attacks quickly, providing a burst of speed and limited invulnerability. It provides a great 'escape' from monster attacks or from being surrounded by more agile monsters.

Weiterlesen

Cake, music, two-player emotes and more – grab your party pack now, only from Solomon’s General Store.

Test your mettle on your terms, with new private God Wars Dungeon instances and the option to fight its bosses in a brutal new hard mode! We've also given each piece of armour in the game a type - gearing it towards defence, offence or versatility - and increased the benefits that your skill levels have on your hit chances.

Test your mettle on your terms, with new private God Wars Dungeon instances and the option to fight its bosses in a brutal new hard mode! We've also given each piece of armour in the game a type - gearing it towards defence, offence or versatility - and increased the benefits that your skill levels have on your hit chances.

Cake, music, two-player emotes and more – grab your party pack now, only from Solomon’s General Store.

It’s time to work on some larger proteins.

We’ve just posted a new puzzle with 398 residues. This protein is too large for the normal Foldit client to handle. Because of this, we've introduced “centroid mode”. Where normal “full atom mode” puzzles have to calculate the score based on individual atom positions of all the sidechains, “centroid mode” uses approximations to speed up the process.

This new method of scoring is a radical change compared to the normal “full atom mode” score function. Tools such shake, mutate, and wiggle sidechains have been disabled because the data required to run them is not longer being generated. Other tools such as wiggle and clashing importance are ostensibly the same, but under the hood they are working in a very different way. You will find these differences require your Foldit strategies to change. We encourage you to try out new methods of working with the protein that take advantage of these differences.

One of the most apparent changes will be in how clashing importance works. In “full atom mode” when you turn the clashing importance down, there are many other elements of the score that normally take over and generally compress the protein. In “centroid mode” these scoring elements do not exist to the same extent. Because of this, you will see that the clashing importance slider does not perform exactly as it did before.

We would appreciate your input on these changes, and want to work with you to improve this new method of folding proteins. This is the first step towards Foldit players being able to tackle entirely new sets of problems that were untenable before.

Hello everyone. The moment has finally arrived, and we're both excited and terrified. 'RC2.9' is finally available to test on our forums! Go easy on us!
Hello everyone. The moment has finally arrived, and we're both excited and terrified. 'RC2.9' is finally available to test on our forums! Go easy on us!

/FreeOrion/Test/FreeOrion-5995-MacOSX-10.6.dmg

/FreeOrion/Test/FreeOrion-5995-Test-Win32-Setup.exe

/FreeOrion/Test/FreeOrion-5995-Test-Win32-ExecutablesOnly.zip

"KRUNCH has an awful lot to offer gamers who really enjoy punishing themselves." ★★★★☆
"KRUNCH has an awful lot to offer gamers who really enjoy punishing themselves." ★★★★☆

Between May 24th and 26th, Ankama will be attending the London MCM Comic Con, and you’ll get the chance to complete your DOFUS/WAKFU goodie collection! But to make sure you’ll find the goods you’re looking for, you’d better preorder it!

How does it work ? it’s very simple: starting today and until May 14th - 10 PM GMT / 6 PM EST / 3 PM PST,  you can preorder any DOFUS/WAKFU goodies below in the comments section, chosen from all goodies offered in the Ankama Shop website (all languages included). We will pack your order and deliver it to you at our booth, and because it’s a special occasion, you’ll also benefit from a “Buy more Get more” offer: for each following purchase level, you’ll get the following freebies:

• £10 and up = 1 lottery card (offering you a free ingame item)
• £20 and up = 1 lottery card + 1 phone strap
• £30 and up = 1 lottery card + 1 phone strap + 1 inflatable sword
• £40 and up = 1 lottery card + 1 phone strap + 1 inflatable sword + 1 papertoy

Find more information about Ankama at London MCM Comic Con in the dedicated WAKFU news.

See you there!

The new version of Project One features something from a very early release of the game, which was later removed - Enemy Groups.

After beating the last boss of an area, you unlock the Classic Run mission. There you fight against various groups of enemies with different attacks and behaviors. In between are the bosses and mission events, which will challenge you throughout the entire run.

    

In this game type, bosses don't drop power items, (currently) every 6th destroyed enemy does. You retain your power level until the end of the mission up to a maximum of 300%. At this point the whole fighting gets really fast and intense. To make it a bit more fair, bosses drop repair items, which regenerate some of your armor.

Rewards for those missions are not yet implemented, but the first Classic Run and first three bosses are unlocked from the beginning in the current version to test them. (equipment from those bosses is not unlocked)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emm9Peq6y2Y Project One - Area 02 (music by Alex Beroza)

Another big change is the implementation of the Fragments of Darkness (or dark bullets).

Some of the standard-bullets the enemies and bosses shoot are dark now. You can collect them and instead of getting damage you increase your score multiplier. When reaching x10.0 you enter darkmode and get increased firerate and reduced collision range. 

Every damaging hit you take halves your multiplier, and dropping below x5.0 removes the darkness again. You benefit more from the fragments when outside of darkmode and doing damage also increases your multiplier.

The full Update Notes are available here. The game is available for free from here or from IndieDB.

Thank you for reading
- Martin

Other Freeware

Source of poster made by Firestorm, edit with GIMP.

Author / Publisher:  malric

Build 133 is a fix for a showstopper bug in Build 132.

Build 132 is a minor update and bug fix. New episode coming soon.

If you've registered, you should follow the member feed instead of this public one, so the links with the release announcements will take you to the page where you can download the member version of the updater, instead of the free one on the front page.