- Solar War is Available Now! - 17 March 2025
Solar War is now available for purchase. And as promised, there will be a 25% discount for the next 7 days. I mean, it is the 17th of March, and I did say that I would release today! (Though depending on where you live, it may already by the 18th...) And honestly, I don't really have anything else to say. This is just a release announcement, what else is there to say other than "The game is now released, go play it!" Until next time! -Andrew
- The Demo is to shut down on March 16th - 14 March 2025
The demo version of the game is going to shut down by end of day March 16th. My reasonings are: Generally, when both the full release and the demo of a game are available, the demo is expected to look and feel exactly like the full game (though with limited features, we don’t want to be giving the game away for free!) However, the current demo of Solar War is missing some key QOL features that are going to ship in the full release, so it is not an accurate representation of the full game. So, I’m going to make the demo unavailable right before I make the full game available. If you’ve already downloaded the demo, you should still be able to play it. If you’re seeing this and still want to download the demo before it goes offline, now’s your chance! If you’ve missed the demo, don’t worry! The period between the demo going offline and the full release of the game should be very short (les…
- Development Blog #7 - 14 March 2025
Greetings, Earth dweller! You and your other fellows may be living your ordinary lives on this lump of rock, but little do you know, your planet BECAME ONE WITH JUPITER!!! But oh, don’t worry about that! As your planet engages in a dance of death that it is most certainly bound to lose, immerse yourself instead in the new arcade game Solar War, and all of the features that it has to offer! About the release date of my game Solar War is releasing on March 17th. I teased in the trailer that I was aiming for March 21st; however, that was still my “best guess” based on how everything was going. For once, things actually went faster than anticipated (they usually go slower), so I’m bumping it up to March 17th. Since this is in the middle of the Spring Sale, there will be a discount on launch as well. It is a mere coincidence that this release just so happens to be in the middle of a seasonal…
- Development Blog #6 - 1 March 2025
Hello! You are currently reading one of my development blogs. I write these development blogs so that I can talk about my game, Solar War. (If you’re not here for Solar War, then something’s gone terribly wrong!) This is the 6th development blog in a series that need not be read in any particular order. (Mostly because I don’t care.) This development blog will talk about difficulty options; there have been some major changes because I felt that 4 difficulty options were just a bit too lacking! The New and Improved Difficulty 4 difficulty options are simply not enough! This clearcut and simple system (Relaxed, Standard, Challenge, and Insane Mode) leaves the potential for players to find one difficulty too easy and another too hard! This has to change!!! Obviously, I needed to make a more intricate system; simple just isn’t my style! So, instead of pressing a difficulty option to start t…
- Development Blog #5 - 10 February 2025
Welcome, everyone, to yet another development blog, where I pour my heart out to the bleak empty void! I’ll be talking about more shiny new features today in a desperate bid to get more people to buy this game!!! All jokes aside, this development blog will be quite long; I have a LOT to talk about. Some of the highlights include: The third solar system, and a method to tour through all of these solar systems instead of sticking with a single solar system until you wear out and die. The Third (and final, for v1.0) Solar System will be called Epsilloni Welcome to Epsilloni! Although this solar system may be a bit lacking in planets, there is still plenty to see, because each of those planets has a ridiculously large amount of moons. Seriously, who put them all there??? (Spoiler alert: it was the developer) As you can probably see from the description I put in the last paragraph, this sola…
- Development Blog #4 - 25 January 2025
Hello again! It sure has been a while, hasn’t it? Life has been keeping me busy for the past few months, preventing me from writing to this blog. But here I am now! I haven’t forgotten about this game! This development blog will be on the shorter end, and although I won’t be talking about any shiny new features today, I will be going over a lot of technicalities regarding the release of the game. (TLDR at bottom) The Demo is to shut down on full release Unfortunately, I have decided that it is in our best interests to shut down the demo version of the game at full release. This is because so many things have changed, that it almost feels like another game at this point. Plus, I really don’t want to be maintaining two versions of Solar War. And, because newer versions are more polished, I don’t want everyone to think that the demo, which is an older version of the game, is an accurate de…
- Development Blog #3 - 14 September 2024
Greetings, and welcome to my development blog! In these blogs, I like to share features that I am working on incorporating into the full release of my game. This is my third development blog, but if you are new here, then don’t worry; reading them in order is not strictly required. :) About the release date of my game When I first created the game’s webpage, I wasn’t really sure when I would release the final product as I was still pretty early in development. At the time, I thought “sometime in 2024 sounds good to me!” so I put that in as the release time. Now that I am further along in the development process, I can now say with slightly more confidence that, assuming everything goes well, I will still be able to release this game before this year ends. However, something always goes wrong in the development process, be it programming difficulties, real-life time conflicts, etc. So, I…
- Development Blog #2 - 6 August 2024
Hello again! Welcome to my second development blog! It’s only been around… 2 months? since my last development blog, so I’d thought I’d give an update on how things are going. To be honest, though, summers have always been slow for me, so there hasn’t been as much stuff done as I would have hoped. But still, I’ll be showing you my progress anyways! Why it’s important to balance your game Because, of course, an unbalanced game does not play well! But no, seriously, I’ve been trying to balance the game for months now. Well, to be honest, I’ve been trying to balance this game since I started working on it… which has been a few years at this point? But more recently, I made some changes to powerups that make them more balanced. (Fortunately, all of my changes make them stronger. This time.) You may have seen some of those changes in the demo update that I recently released, but I’ll talk ab…
- Demo Updated to v0.5.1 - 24 July 2024
Greetings! I am pleased to announce that I have updated the demo! (to v0.5.1!) This update brings a lot of QOL features and some new UI improvements that make the game generally more enjoyable to play. New Start Game Screen (They say a picture is worth 1000 words which is why I put a screenshot of the aforementioned screen up top.) We’ve added a new “Start Game” button in the title screen that takes you to this screen (see image above). Here, we’ve rearranged everything to give it a more coherent look. Speaking of which, we’ve also changed the font to “Retro Gaming”. This change has appeared on (almost) all UI objects. You may have noticed something called “Fun Options”. These are options that change the game in a small but significant way when enabled. These features actually already existed in the demo, but they were hidden under the Gameplay Settings, which required a few button pres…
- Development Blog #1 - 2 June 2024
OK, so I guess that this is the first time that I’m writing something that the whole world could see… Here goes! Hi, I’m Andrew, the main developer for my game, Solar War! I know that it’s not generally “best practice” for game developers to announce a game, release a demo, promise a full release “sometime in the future” and then not say anything for 7 months… Well, better late than never, I suppose! I guess I can at least partially attribute my absense to the fact that I am a full time college student… I don’t think I need to explain more. Anyhow, I probably should get into the topic that I wanted to discuss today: full release plans! I know that I was a little vague on some of the features of my game, especially the ones that were not already implemented into the demo. The main reason for this was that I had actually not quite figured out in fine detail what I wanted to implement at t…
