Puppy Games today released Alien Flux 1.4.
This new version, apart from being slightly smaller to download (hurrah!), now features IMPROVED and ALTERNATIVE CONTROLS for the dextrously challenged or lazy! Check out the Controls menu for all the new things.
Grab the demo here:
Win32 exe version
Webstart version (requires JRE1.4+) for Win32 and Linux x86
Let us know what you think!
Cas 
We’re trying an experiment:
The full version is now also the demo version; it’s an unlockable 3 level trial weighing in at 10mb. We’re going to see if this has any effect on download numbers and conversion rates.
Hence the full version is now webstartable too (hurrah!) and when you buy a copy you don’t have to do any more downloading! It Just Works!
Cas
Let’s see if the 5 MB-Limit is important or not. I hope the number of download doesn’t get down.
the next thing to test would be 15 mb ;D
I’m expecting the download count to go down but the conversion rate to increase slightly to cover it.
Cas
Are you willing to share your numbers? d’loads/registrations?
I think Quake once had a 12% shareware registration. AFAIK this still is world record?
I’ve always promised to tell everyone what our downloads, sales, and conversion add up to, but only after it’s been going for a few months because the figures don’t add up to a great deal of happiness right now So far we’ve had about 15k downloads (excluding mirrors!) and sold 25 copies, and given away about 30 copies to the press and unfortunate souls who had a lot of difficulty getting it to work (we reward perseverance 
) There’s a bunch of stuff in 1.4 that (I think) makes the game much more fun so I’m hoping that once everyone gets back from holiday it might pick up a bit.
Cas
Gee, 15k to 25 isn’t the ratio I would have expected :(!
Maybe if you put some more nagging into the free download… or limited some aspect of the game to a trial period you could coax more upgrades?
(e.g. maybe some people are satisfied playing the demo, they might really suck and can’t actually get to the end anyway… if the demo stopped working maybe they would shell out a few bucks?)
In 1.3 we reduced the demo levels from 5 to 3 because it was taking most people a very long time to finish the demo!
Now it finishes just about at the point where you have “figured out” the controls and know what kinds of stuff happens in the game, eg. a new thing on every level.
Hopefully that’s going to excite a few more wallets.
Cas
yes - never reached level 5
From my feeling, $20 it is just too expensive. Maybe if it was about $2 and could be bought with a single mouseclick when the demo finished, more people would be willing to do so.
Remember what you get for $40-$50!
Well that’s something you could try… have a “sale” where it is half price or something for a limited time… see how much it effects sales and try to determine the sweet spot where the price:sale ratio is optimal… If the lower price doesn’t bring significantly more sales… then your efforts are better focused elsewhere.
$20 just about buys you a takeaway curry and a sixpack, so I think it’s a fair price for the amount of game you’ve got in there. I reckon the average player’s got at least 20 hours of play out of AF.
There’s very strong anecdotal evidence that sales will decrease if I lower the price.
There’s also very strong anecdotal evidence that if people actually want something they’ll buy it if it’s even at a halfway reasonable price at all. I couldn’t get away with $40 but any way you look at it $20 just isn’t much for something you can enjoy playing for a few weeks. So that’s one thing I definitely can’t change.
An Instant Buy option would be excellent but I haven’t quite figured out the mechanics of this yet. I’d need to SSL to my server and forward the request in realtime to some payment processing net service, and that’s where it starts getting complicated because there’s all sorts of pesky ways for it to break which I’ll get wrong for the first few cuts.
I think the next big thing I’m going to put in is a feedback form on the demo to ask people things about the game like whether they think it’s worth $20 or whether it’s too hard or crap or whatever.
Cas
I agree on the price issue. I haven’t seen a piece of shareware for less than $20 bucks, and if it was a piece of software I wanted - $20 bucks wasn’t a big deal.
As 1 of 25 lucky owners of Alien Flux I must say something I quess. 20$ isn’t much money, not if your working anyway. I bought Alien Flux as a gift to my girlfriend as she really loved the cute fluffies in the demo (but I have to say I played it even more than her ;D ).
15K to 25(0,16% shareware registration) isn’t very good unfortunate. This shows how hard it is to survive as a small game company. My best of luck to Cas.
Do I feel that 20$ was a fair price for Alien Flux, yes. Alien Flux both is fun, a real challenge and a real time spender. Try to play to level 25 under 1 h 
So the $/h price is small for Alien Flux.
To be fair versions 1.0 through 1.4a sucked in some way or other for most people It’s a much improved game now for a lot of people. This was all to be expected. It’s got another 5 years of shelf life after all.
Must get on with Invasion of the Jellies now.
Cas