- September Update: I'm All-In! - 2 September 2025
Hey Celestials! It’s Steve, back with an update, and I think you’re going to like this one.It’ll be short, sweet, and to the point: Going forward, I have decided to concentrate my full development efforts on Alliance. While I like the design of Boss Slayer, and it has served as an excellent learning tool for me to wrangle some of Unity’s more complex systems (animations, modeling, Cinemachine, etc) I frankly have too much invested in Alliance to just walk away from it for an extended period of time. So over the last month or so, I’ve been planning a restart strategy, and essentially this is what I have done, and what I’m going to do over the next several months:Update Alliance to the Unity 6.x EngineRewrite the game design doc more or less from scratch - this does NOT mean I’m completely changing the game (again!) but it does mean that there will be one true document in place to refer t…
- The Long Sleep: Boss Slayer: Zero initial build released, roadmap for Alliance! - 10 July 2025
Hey everyone! Steve here. First of all, I know it's been quite a while since I last posted. As I alluded to in my last post, I've been working through a lot this year after being dropped by HH, and while I've made a lot of positive progress, it's still hard sometimes to reach out, but I think I'm finally in a place where I can go back to regular updates and interacting with the community. I actually love this part of game dev - old-timers to Alliance/Imperia will remember that I used to be super-responsive and chatty, probably to a fault, but obviously the penduluum has swung way too far the other way, and I'm sorry about that.So first thing first - I've been busy the last several months working on a smaller passion project called Boss Slayer: Zero. Game description below:It's a tactical strategy/RPG game set in the near future where you are an inmate with a life sentence, but you are g…
- A New Year, A Comprehensive Update on Alliance - 15 January 2025
Hey everyone! Sorry it’s been so long since we’ve had an update, so this will be a pretty comprehensive one. This was a very tough document to write, and has gone through many revisions and pauses, but what you’re reading now is the end result. Be warned this will be a very long blog. First of all, I’m truly sorry I haven’t been more communicative across our various channels. Frankly, I’m quite glad to finally be writing this, as it will explain a lot of questions I’m sure many of you have had - I can finally answer most of them! I’ll start with the lead: Although we have been in negotiations with several major publishers - you would instantly recognize any of them - and in one case for over four months(!) we have not been able to find a publisher that will commit to the resources needed to properly complete Alliance. There is a lot of interest in the game itself - the game, per se, has…
- January 2024 Dev Blog: Military Matters - 30 January 2024
Hello everyone! Hope everyone had a good holiday and are ready for the new year! We’re so excited for what the new year will bring Alliance, and we wanted to focus on the revised and updated military system - this will describe the updated system that we will be testing in preparation for our next public beta! Please note: All development blogs that discuss systems in progress are snapshots of the game at a moment in its development process. Depending on feedback, those systems, including the military, may change further before release. These blogs are a nice way for you to get ‘under the hood’ with us to understand why systems are designed a certain way, and why certain changes were/are being made! This system as described may or may not represent the final 1.0 release system! ALL IMAGES in this blog are APPROVED DESIGN MOCKUPS that represent the look of the final UI. They are NOT scre…
- December Dev Blog: It's Cold In Space! - 11 December 2023
Hello all! As we get into a cold December (here in the US, anyway) we wanted to share some of the exciting things we’re working on! First of all, we’ve made tremendous progress in updating the UI. Last month, I talked about the UX at length, so I won’t rehash the general concept, but let’s take a look at how the experience is being refined! Previously, you had to explicitly click on a planet to be ‘sent’ there, and then you’d have a bit of an overflow of information – it could be a bit intimidating, especially for new players, with a lot of windows and tabs that weren’t always easy to understand at a glance. We have decided to go with a more independent navigation flow within the stellar view, with basic information about a planet ‘fading in’ as you approach it with zoom. You can still click on it, but you can also zoom in on it and the selected information panel in the bottom-center of…
- October 2023 Dev Blog: News that won't scare you! - 18 October 2023
Hello everyone! It’s time for our quarterly update, but before I dive into what’s new (and there’s a lot), I wanted to do a bit of housekeeping: These blogs going forward will be increased to every 4 weeks since we now have a lot more cool stuff to share! We will be updating our demo soon, be on the lookout for details! First, we have expanded our team! We have added Josh Atkinson as a UX/UI designer full-time. Josh hails from down under and has been invaluable in updating our ‘look and feel’ of the game. You will see his influence in the accompanying screenshots. Welcome Josh! ICYMI: Because of the new hires and all of the improvements we’ve made this year, we also just want to reiterate that our release window is now 2024. User Experience improvements Next, I wanted to talk about our User Experience (UX). As most of you know who have been following the game for a while, the Discoverab…
- Hooded Horse Strategy Publisher Sale - 5 October 2023
Hi everyone! Alliance of the Sacred Suns and other games published by Hooded Horse are all featured at the Hooded Horse Publisher Sale. Come check it out! Hooded Horse Strategy Publisher Sale
- Spring Update - Lots of Awesomeness to tell! - 25 May 2023
Greetings, presumptive rulers of the Celestial Empire! I know it’s been a while since we’ve updated the game status, but don’t worry - we’ve been very busy, and although there’s a lot of news, don’t stop reading - we come bearing gifts. First of all, we have spent a lot of time reworking the UI and UX to be… well, more fun to use, cleaner, and more visual. We have two recent examples of this. First is the Rank Map, which is selectable from the Nexus Bar on the main UI. This screen shows graphically the entire hierarchy of the Empire - viceroys, governors, and Primes can now be seen clearly where they fit into the Empire. And it gets better!! No more cumbersome ‘fire’ Actions or begging a House Leader to allow you to fill one of their Holdings - you can make all of your changes on this screen, through the magic of drag and drop! Fire a Viceroy, and drag a Courtier into their place. Promo…
- Nov/December Dev Blog - How Do I Win? - 23 December 2022
Hello everyone! Hope you’re all having a happy holiday season, and are looking forward to the new year! I want to talk about a very important part of the game: the Reign Score System, AKA ‘What am I supposed to be doing in this game, anyway?” When you start Alliance, in the 1.0 release, we aim to have the option to play either a Sandbox mode or a specific Campaign - these will have their own win conditions, special rules, etc. In the Sandbox mode - the only mode that’ll be available in Early Access - you’ll always start in 3050, as the newly-crowned, 18-year old ruler of the Celestial Empire. Your primary goal in Sandbox mode is simply to be humanity’s greatest ruler, and this is reflected in the Reign Score System. Your Reign is judged through your Reputation (Fear, Popular Support, and Power), your internal personality, and things that you do during that time. The more you do, the bet…
- October Dev Update, AKA All The Cool Stuff - 8 November 2022
Hello everyone! Steve here again with another exciting update - we’ve had a busy month, so let’s get right down to what’s improved and changed in Alliance since we last spoke! MASSIVE PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS We took a hard look this month after the last demo feedback at the memory and storage systems of Alliance. Some people who were running 8 GB of RAM were unable to play, or the game would partially load before timing out. We want the game to run on no more than 4-6 GB of RAM, with an integrated graphics card, and we want a consistent 60 FPS target on all facets of the game, including the UI. So we went back to the drawing board, and Brandon, our lead UI programmer, was able to use and integrate Unity’s Addressables system, along with intelligent resource pooling, to dramatically improve load times, game generation times, and most importantly, memory usage! The game should now run on…
- New Beta Test Inbound! - 8 November 2022
Hello all! It's time again for a new beta - it's been a little while since we had the last one, but we've added a ton of stuff on the stability and performance end, as well as more internal help! The beta will kick off this Friday, Nov. 11, and will operate in a similar fashion to other betas we've had - you'll need to sign a new NDA form even if you've been on one before. The link is here: https://forms.gle/H66v1agWEvEMAqVNA This is a limited beta, and we welcome both former beta testers and people who have not participated before! We are especially looking for people with lesser spec machines - 4-8 GB RAM and integrated graphics cards are OK, even welcomed, as we're nearing our optimization end and while we know the game performs great on high and mid-level hardware, we need more info on things like laptops and lower-spec hardware. So don't be shy! Once you sign up, if you have signed…
- Build your Dynasty - 9 October 2022
In celebration of Next Fest, Alliance of the Sacred Suns will be streaming on the store page. Come join us! Alliance of the Sacred Suns is a sci-fi grand-strategy RPG that begins with your coronation as the head of an interstellar Empire, and ends with your demise. Manage feuding noble houses and the schemes of would-be usurpers as you try to revive the glory of an Empire on the brink of collapse. Come join us at Discord: https://discord.gg/sQ3bWWv https://store.steampowered.com/app/1113400/
- Grand Strategy in Space - 8 October 2022
In celebration of Next Fest, Alliance of the Sacred Suns will be streaming on the store page. Come join us! Alliance of the Sacred Suns is a sci-fi grand-strategy RPG that begins with your coronation as the head of an interstellar Empire, and ends with your demise. Manage feuding noble houses and the schemes of would-be usurpers as you try to revive the glory of an Empire on the brink of collapse. Come join us at Discord: https://discord.gg/sQ3bWWv https://store.steampowered.com/app/1113400/
- Do some imperial space politics, don't get deposed in Alliance of the Sacred Suns - 3 September 2022
lliance of the Sacred Suns is a space-y blend of 4X and Grand Strategy RPG percolating out there in game land, and its developers have shared some interesting news about big changes to the core game ahead of its Early Access launch this year. They've revamped the in-game encyclopedia and tutorial functions, and beefed up the tooltips, to make the overall user experience better... Read more.
- Alliance of the Sacred Suns July Dev Update - 4 August 2022
Hello everyone! Man, July was a long month, but we got a tremendous amount of work done, and we got a lot of great feedback about Alliance that we are putting to good use! In this blog, I wanted to talk about some of our feedback and what we’re doing, talk about the final few game play loops that we’ve installed, and showcase our in-game help system. This is a long blog, but we had a tremendously productive July, so here we go! First and foremost, the feedback from our third beta test showed that we needed to rethink our tutorial. We had a guided tutorial that ran alongside a generated galaxy, but there were 2 main issues with this setup: a) it was buggy - it depended on reading the dynamic generation galaxy and changing some static parameters after the game was generated to ensure that we had workable tutorial conditions. While it worked, it wasn’t perfect, and once in a while it could…
- Alliance of the Sacred Suns News! Release Info, Closed Beta Signups Starting! - 3 June 2022
Hello everyone! Steve here. I know it’s been quite a while since we’ve given a substantial update about Alliance, so I wanted to give everyone an update on the game, our next beta, and some information on some new and updated systems in the game. But… first of all, I wanted to share some very exciting information, and in doing so type some words I thought I’d never get to type when this project started almost seven years ago: As of the end of next week, we will have completed the core game of Alliance of the Sacred Suns. What does that mean? All core systems are locked down and are in the game, much of our new art, music, and characters are in, and 98% of UI updates will be in. And believe me, it’s been a long, twisty road to get to this point, but we are unbelievably excited to share that news! In addition, partially as a result of the tremendous progress we’ve made with the game since…
- Alliance of the Sacred Suns at PAX East - 8 May 2022
Alliance of the Sacred Suns was featured in Hooded Horse’s Publisher Showcase at PAX East. The publisher showcase revealed new content and announcements across Hooded Horse’s strategy games, including a special message from Alliance's Lead Developer Steve Hawkins introducing the latest visuals and content of the game. Alliance of the Sacred Suns can be wishlisted here. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1113400/ The trailers for Alliance of the Sacred Suns and the other games featured in the showcase can be found at the Hooded Horse Publisher Page on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/HoodedHorse
- Alliance releasing in Q2 - 16 March 2022
Hey everyone! We’ve got a slight delay to announce for the early access release–from Q1 to Q2 of this year. The game is almost ready, but we’ve made the decision to take a couple extra months to really ensure Alliance lives up to your expectations. However, if you are eager to start playing right away, we also have some good news–we will be holding a final playtest in April, to iron out any final feedback before release. There’s no need to sign up in advance for this one–we want as much feedback as possible, so we’ll be posting it for all to download as a demo on Steam. This final playtest includes: All the reported issues fixed from the last playtest Several updated Nexus windows The entire Emperor System complete for Early Access (392 skills, 42 Emperor Personality Effects, 77 Oratory Moves, 81 Emperor Actions, new Guilt System) Many more Events A whole new main UI and Galaxy/Province…
- Alliance of the Sacred Suns Playtest and Release Plans - 14 December 2021
Hey, everyone! Steve here, and it’s December. Here in Texas, it’s not really cold yet, but we’re still busy with moving full speed ahead in getting Alliance ready for release! Since it’s been a little while since I posted an update, I wanted to tell you in our own words what we’re working on, the state of the team, and some of the new game systems to look forward to upon release! First of all, we are delaying the game until Q1 2022. I know that seems to be a common thing nowadays, but I can assure you that we’re doing it for the right reasons. Now that we have a complete team of seven working on the game essentially full-time, we’ve made more progress in the last 3 or 4 months than we have since the end of 2020, and we’re moving faster every week! The game is fully playable and at this point quite stable (I routinely play 40-50 turn games every evening now as a quality check to check lo…
- Space Strategy Stream on Steam Store - 29 October 2021
Hi everyone! We will be streaming Alliance of the Sacred Suns footage on the store page, including some past broadcasts from Streamers and YouTubers Nookrium, Cringer, and ZergGirl. Come check them out!
