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Quick progress update: Localisation has been performed for French, German, Spanish, and Russian. I’m currently integrating the translated text into the game. As of this writing, all four languages are basically functional, thanks to some localisation-related bug fixes and a quick font swap to enable Cyrillic support. However, there’s still a lot of work to do in sanding off the rough edges (overlapping text, for example).

Onwards!

As you may have noticed, things have been a little quiet lately at Mayhem HQ. The sirens only sound every hour or so, and it’s been days since we had a decent alien invasion to contend with. Well, all that is about to change…

First up, Mayhem Intergalactic v1.3 will be out sometime soon. While the list of changes isn’t finalised yet, I can confirm that v1.3 will contain some UI conveniences, a smattering of audio improvements, and miscellaneous bug fixes. More importantly, this will be the first version to support languages other than English.

I’ll announce the supported languages closer to release. Let me know if you’re keen to see a particular language in the list.

Secondly, in keeping with these times of cheap games, I’ve adjusted the price downwards to $9.99. It’s pretty clear that gamers want more value for money than they used to, which is fair enough. The new price is live here and at Desura right now. Steam and Impulse will be following suit any day now.

Three! Do you like Mayhem Intergalactic? Are you on Facebook? Have you ever wondered how to combine these facts into a delicious fact smoothie, possibly winning a FREE COPY of your favourite Mayhem Intergalactic game in the process? Click here and all your questions will be answered, on Mayhem Intergalactic’s shiny new Facebook page.

Once the page has 100 likes, one lucky Facebook fan will get a free copy of the game. Keep it, give it away, your choice.

Finally, I know there are some of you running Mac OS X or Linux who’ve been hanging out for a port to your platform. I’m pleased to announce that porting the game to other platforms is my next priority after releasing v1.3. If you’re interested in participating in a Mac or Linux beta test, drop me a line.

That’s all for now – stay tuned! Same Mayhem time, same Mayhem channel.

If you’re in the area and interested in independent games development, I hope to see you there!

Thanks, Good Game!

* At least, you’ll be able to do that once they fix the video player. In the meantime, the episode can be freely downloaded in full via the ABC’s vodcasting site, in either WMV format or MP4 format (~100 MB in each case). And you don’t even have to visit dodgy websites and infringe copyright to do it. Isn’t public broadcasting awesome?

Fires are still burning north and east of Melbourne, and the official death toll has recently risen to 209.

Even after seeing the devastation and dozens of traumatised victims on TV, it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like. It seems like half the state was on fire at one point or another.¹ I do have some inkling of what they’re going through, having had a bushfire come perilously close to my house about 5 years ago; but that fire, terrifying as it was, was piddling in comparison to these bushfires. It “only” killed about 2 people and destroyed a few dozen homes. Even that much left scars on our community which took a long time to recover from. The scale of these fires in comparison staggers the mind.

At times like these, it is up to the rest of us Aussies to help, knowing that the people affected would do the same if our positions were reversed. That’s why I’m pledging 50% of Inventive Dingo’s proceeds towards helping bushfire victims, dating back from the day the fires took hold (February 7th) and lasting until the end of the month March 14th.

To be clear, by “proceeds” I mean the money which I actually receive, calculated after e-commerce fees and conversion to Australian dollars. So about 45% of the purchase price of each direct Mayhem Intergalactic sale will be donated. The percentage of the purchase price in the case of Steam sales is slightly lower, since my cut is lower than in the direct case. The dates reflect the times that the sales are made, not when I receive the money (there is usually about a month of lag time).

The money will be donated to the Bushfire Appeal set up by the Australian Red Cross; 100% of the donation will go directly towards assisting victims and reconstruction efforts, as they have promised not to use any of that money to fund administrative overheads.

I figure it’s the least I can do.

1. The burnt-out areas in Victoria actually comprise about 1% of the state’s land area, which is a pretty significant chunk of land. As a point of comparison, Victoria is larger than the average US state, according to Wikipedia; 237,629 square kilometres, compared to an average of 183,238 square kilometres (calculated based on the total land area of the 50 mainland US states).

Edited 14/2/09: Updated number of houses destroyed and hectares burnt.

Edited 21/2/09: Appeal extended for two weeks, until March 14th. Updated official death toll.

This applies to download links sent from the Download Updates page as well as replies to emails sent to my contact address.

The worst part is that if you email me from a Hotmail address saying that you haven’t received a download updates email, I’m not able to respond!

If you used a Hotmail address when purchasing Mayhem Intergalactic and want to use a different email address instead to avoid this problem, please email me from that Hotmail address and provide the alternate email address.

I recommend Fastmail.fm or Gmail as good free alternatives to Hotmail.

(Checks and money orders are still constrained by the speed of the postal service, unfortunately. No free pass there.)

Oh, and from my point of view, FastSpring is slightly cheaper than BMT Micro. That means more of your dollars going towards future Mayhem Intergalactic updates and new games!

A funny thing happened while I was in the process of setting this up… well, it was funny in retrospect. While checking a detail of BMT Micro’s ordering process, I discovered to my horror that Mayhem Intergalactic’s purchase link wasn’t working, due to a subtle Google Analytics misconfiguration error which occurred exactly two weeks ago. Yikes! Sorry to anyone who tried to access it during the past couple of weeks. I try my best to keep everything working, but unfortunately I’m just one guy. If you see something broken on this site, let me know and I’ll fix it lickety-split! Or die trying.

On that note, please go ahead and email me, post on the forums, or leave a comment here if you’re having any difficulties with the new system (or anything else for that matter). I live for your feedback, positive or negative!