I just thought I’d throw this in here for those who may be interested:
If you’ve got any questions at all, shoot away.
Cas 
just curious, why aint you guys on kickstarter exactly ?
Well, I briefly touched on it on the Patreon blurb, but it’s worth going into more detail here…
Kickstarter is a fickle and unreliable vehicle for funding. Its all-or-nothing approach could leave us with nothing after reaching, say, 90% of the funding required to finish the project. What’s more we’d have to spend two whole months basically setting up and curating a Kickstarter project in order to build up the hypegasm needed to give it a shot at success. So that’s two whole months wasted instead of doing more useful stuff. And then of course there’s the problem that we might have got our funding requirements slightly wrong and we’d end up run out of money and need to release something a month or two months early and it might be a disappointing buggy mess. With Patreon we can fund it till it’s good and ready.
And thank you massively for your patronage KevGlass and basil_
As a kickback to the JGO community I think we’ll make our Steampuppy library available to everyone here. I hope it comes in as useful as LWJGL has over the years!
Cas
sweet!
tbh, i didn’t know kickstarter is all-or-nothing. 
… never looked into it, nor into greenlight. too old, too new-fashioned
Hi Cas,
First off kudos on building another game.
your projects were one of the first I found when deciding to work on a game using java and you’ve definately done some nicely polished work!
This latest game has me a bit confused as to how you play / what the game really is.
can you elaborate on the concept / mechanics?
It’s complicated to explain as there aren’t really any other games like it.
So imagine you’ve got this persistent online world (Earth) and it’s divided up into territories (in a grid, in this case), and each territory that’s got some land in it is “owned” by somebody (or “nobody”, to begin with). There’s an army of robots in the territory, placed there by the owner (or, if nobody owns the territory, there’s a pushover random army there instead).
The objective of the game is to conquer as many territories as you can, and it is preferable though not required conquer them in a contiguous fashion. The more territories you have, and the size of your largest contiguous territory, governs certain perks in the game. We’ll get to that. Each territory that you own also has a single perk in it, which is yours as long as you own the territory. Every territory on Earth has a randomly generated perk.
You can select any territory that belongs to someone else and download it. You can see the entire, complete data set describing the incumbent army, and all of the terrain. What you then do is place your own army as an invasion force in the space that the enemies have left you (they’re allowed to occupy at most 1/3rd of the available space including an exclusion zone). Your army is made up of robots of varying sizes (and turrets, which are just robots that can’t move), barricades, and landmines. To begin with when you first start playing you have an infinite supply of the weediest most boring robot. You gain access to more interesting robots by conquering territories - the perks that these territories hold will be robots, barricades, and mines in varying quantities and customisations.
The maximum number of robots you may place as an attacker is governed by a points system (and your own inventory). You may not place more points’ worth of robots down than the defender has. You may place less down if you think you can get away with it, which is the basis for earning honour. More on that later.
When you’re satisfied with the composition and deployment of your attack, you can tweak the AI parameters of individual robots using some simple sliders and checkboxes to control a bunch of variables such as aggression range and preferred targets.
Then you’re ready to test.
You hit “PLAY” in the corner and the two armies have at each other. All you have to do at this point is sit back and watch the battle being simulated in front of you. It will be the same battle - identically the same - every time you press play with that attack. You will either win or lose the attack. If you lose, you’ll probably want to go back and change things according to what you saw occur. If you win the simulation, you will then want to submit your attack for reals on the server.
When you submit your attack to the server, it goes into a battle queue, and it is eventually - hopefully very quickly - taken from the queue and the entire battle is then simulated on one of our several battle servers (nonvisually). We can simulate a 5-minute battle in about 10 seconds. You won’t know whether you’ve won or not until we notify you. The notification contains the seed number that the server used to run the battle with; we can then transmit the entire battle to you to watch the real outcome simply by giving you the seed.
If you win, the territory becomes yours, and whatever perk it granted is taken from the loser and given to you instead. Perks are gained immediately but only lost when you log out of the game (and you’re forced to log out at least once a day). The enemy army is captured temporarily and remains in the territory but is now defending for you. You can, at any time, replace an army in a territory you own with a completely new one, but only made up of robots in your inventory.
When placing a defensive army, the number of points you are allowed to use is based on the largest contiguous territory that you own. The number of units you are allowed to place is based on the total number of territories you own.
We planned to sell customised veteran robots in the shop. These robots are unique. Every time you win an attack, you gain a number of honour points which is the difference in points between your army and the defender’s army. You can level up your customised veterans with honour points, buffing one of about 15 characteristics each level.
That’s the game, in a nutshell.
Cas
I would suggest you make a more indepth video showing all the features and using narration like blizzard does:
Explaining everything, pointing out why its unique and interesting, why people should get excited.
I understand that making a video like this is exactly part of the reason you didnt do a kickstarter because it takes time, but Puppygames is not unknown and pushing a piece of marketing would really give you a boost
'twas only a “soft launch” so to speak… haven’t really got our act together on it. Sadly that’s all the video there is to show of it, unless I get my ugly mug in front of a camera and start talking :o
Cas