Alien Flux has been released again (only for Win32 right now until I figure out how to make bouncy castle work with webstart).
Grab it here (12mb)
(Existing 1.4i need not upgrade - this is mainly an experiment in selling technique)
Also notice the new special price of $9.95 / £9.95 / ¤9.95 (depending on where you live!) How’s that for a bargain? And there’s still the 60-day money-back guarantee.
As usual we’re on the lookout for affiliates still - drop me a line if you’re interested.
Cas 
If you’ve got a ‘click and run’ version for OSX, I’ll bite.
We’re very nearly there.
Cas
i believe cutting the users off completely from being able to try out the game is not a good market strategy.
ok the demo is a good idea but maybe if you were to have up to the big triangle boss playable then as soon as he appears have the AI take over, that would be a bit of a teaser.
you have to have the people crying out for more. Don’t give them any to begin with and they dont know what they’re missing.
[quote]Also notice the new special price of $9.95 / £9.95 / ¤9.95 (depending on where you live!) How’s that for a bargain?
[/quote]
It’s actually fairly bad, it’s ok if you are buying in $ or ¤ as they are about the same, but you you buy in £ you end up paying roughly $15 because of the exchange rate. If you are going to change currency you probably need to have accurate exchange rtate information that is updated regularly, or just stick to USD, most poeple can pay that, especially if you are using a CC, I do it all the time for domains and game subscriptions etc.
HTH
Endolf
The price is actually a special offer for Christmas. If it doesn’t do anything for sales I’ll put it back up in January.
Because of VAT wrangling you don’t actually have any choice over what currency you pay in. If you live in the EU you actually end up paying about $11.69. This complication meant that I had to differentially price the game for the different currency markets. Unfortunately because of the psychological “9.95” factor this meant that the prices are a fraction uneven. We’re only talking about £3 which is hardly a big deal though. Fun For A Tenner.
I’ve tried the demo strategy for 6 months now and it hasn’t helped. I’ve tried giving away levels 1-5 and 1-10, but sales never changed. When I put the logging thingy in I discovered that a huge number of people - hundreds of people - played the game for well over an hour, until I put in a usage limit (6 goes or about 1.5 hours play time, whichever comes later). And still no-one is buying it, despite the fact they’re obviously having a bloody good time. You don’t play a game for an hour and a half if you don’t like it! So I thought, let’s see if we can show people what to expect but not give anything away, and get the impulse buyers to check it out. That’s why the psychological factor of “9.95” was so important. I personally am reluctant to get my credit card out for anything much under a tenner.
Only time will tell.
Sales == 0 still as we speak…
Cas
Hi
damn governments, who needs them anyways :P. I had forgotten those nasty new rules that mean something the gov had nothing to do with, and helped in no way (unlike UK businesses which they help) earned them money. Spose there is nothing we can do about it, ho hum
Endolf.
with the java version at least there seem to be a few graphics issues:
the 50 point number that you see (and 100 200 etc) when you hit an ememy now only shows up every second or third enemies killed, the target scope for the homing missiles causes the green scope that shows the location of trapped fluffies to dissappear and vice versa. when 2 fluffies get caught at once it may alternate randomly between which scope it displays… seems like a lot of the display effects are not necessarily forgotten but seem to cancel each other out.
have you put a limit on the number of on screen ‘target’ things now? it worked fine in 1.4x
demo issue:
i think it’s when a homing missle kills a baddie that the ship is trying to kill, the ship will start orbiting it’s scope, but it also did it when the triangle boss appeared. dont know if it was intentional or not…?
edit:
Inspiron 1ghz
GeForce 2 go
256mb ram
will try in 16bit and see if it fixes it. will edit post if it does.
Hm yes, I seem to have introduced a glitch somehow into the label effects.
And I have noticed the demo player going a bit funny sometimes 
I will fix it at some point.
Cas
I can’t buy it because I do not have a credit or debit card. Are’nt there alternatives? E.g. ShareIt allows me to pay directly from my bank account.
Anything planned for the future?
Get one then 
Chequebooks are being phased out in the UK altogether right now, and the rest of the world will probably follow suit. Having said that you could go to the puppygames site and click on the buy now links but I’d really like to phase that out (after all if you’re going to write a cheque out or do paypal etc it might as well be direct to us and avoid giving 15% away to swreg).
Supporting cheques and cash-in-the-post is rather like webservers supporting Gopher. Or it will be, in a couple of years.
Cas
Oh, I should add - chequebooks are not only being phased out but they are being replaced by payment cards which will be acceptable online. And you will still be able to request a chequebook if you want but it won’t be the default any more.
Cas
I realized that PayPal is a suitable option for me but does this still work? You said something that buying is possible only through the game itself?!?
Yeah, you can still get it via swreg http://www.puppygames.net/purchase
Hope to phase that out one day…
Cas
Finally get a runnable version for OSX and you can’t even play the demo 
AND the price has risen… damnit!
Haha! Missed the offer! Actually you can play the demo. Not sure why you can’t…? The latest 1.5b version gives you an hour and a half of play time.
Cas
The latest version that I downloaded at the time that I wrote that post put the game into some sort of demo loop and when i tried to get at the keys, it pretty much went into ‘buy me’ mode.
I’ll be adding more in-game GUI code to handle PayPal I think. As it is it already handles most credit and debit cards and I can’t be arsed with trundling 10 miles to get to the bank to cash cheques (Yeah, I really do live in the middle of nowhere)
Cas
Just bought a copy. Now you can go get that take away and 6 pack ;D