Underneath Mother Nature’s ancient tree,
were five children playing wild and free.

The first child with hair snow white,
loyal and brave, wants what’s right.

The second child with hair of raven black,
strong and fast, always on the attack.

The third child with hair of flaming red,
rash and valiant, eager to get ahead.

The forth child with hair of sky blue,
quiet and smart, a friend to turn to.

The fifth child with hair of sun yellow,
patient and shy, a peaceful fellow.

But darkness spread across the peaceful land,
and an ancient evil raised a wicked hand.

The children no longer could remain in play,
as they viewed their lands in dismay.

Heroes now the children must become,
to face the terrible darkness still to come.

-DonnieDarko

Summer has been pretty busy since Turf Battles went down, as some of you know I’m taking some college classes to gain me some learning and I’m still doing GameSage work over at Aeria Games.  I spent a short month being a GS for Caesary before I was given a special position helping Valkyrie and Andosky (along with guys like Nekhra) release new games like Legendary Champions.  I suggest anyone with a higher powered laptop give it a chance because I’ve heard its kinda similar to Turf Battles, including special transformations aspect.  Might give you something to do while wait for more information regarding Turf Battles situation.

On the topic of Turf Battles, I’m glad to see that Vaicine is keeping you all informed of the goings-on and that the news looks positive.  Hopefully some new version can become readily available to the players who recognize its value and legacy. At the moment however, there is not much for me to contribute to the situation as the question of server hosting and business management is outside of my realm of expertise and falls more squarely into Vaicine’s lap.  However if Vai need’s something, he knows where to reach me.

That being said, once Turf Battles is out of the discussion stage and into the actual implementation, I will get more involved with various aspects of the management and publishing.  As it stands, I’m comfortable with Vaicine discussing the situation with SmileGate and relying on his information.  Both SmileGate and Vaicine know where to reach me if a problem or concern does crop up and I’m usually available.

Game on my friends!

My contact has confirmed that Turf Battles will 100% be coming back! They are working on it right now to get it fixed and ready to be played. I haven’t been given confirmation on whether they will be publishing the game themselves, or if they will be looking for external publishing.

There is also no date set for when the game will be coming back, and there’s no news on exactly *what* they are fixing/changing/preparing/updating, but I think it’s going to be fixing all the glitches, bugs etc. And as we all know, there were quite a few problems – so it’s going to take them a bit of time to fix it all up.

The only news is that they are still sorting things out their end, and for us to be patient basically.

I wish I could give you a better update, but that’s all I have.

We’ve added a forum games section to the forum – if you want something to do, go have a browse around there!

Also, a few members are getting the wiki back up at http://wiki.turfbattles.co.uk and i’m sure they’d appreciate your help!

It looks like this is officially the end of Turfbattles for Aeriagames.

If you know of any players who had not signed up to the forums at turfbattles.co.uk, tell them they have a home here now that the Aeriagames site is down.

As I said in my previous post, I will post an update in regard to the game as soon as I get one.

Now we’re in the week following the Aeria Games Turf Battles closure, we hope to continue our conversations with Smilegate.

We’re going to have to play the waiting game now. The ball is in their court – we’ve just got to wait for them to make a reply. This could happen any time from now onwards.

I’ll post on the forum and the website as soon as I get any further correspondance from Smilegate.

Until then, notify all the players you know to sign up to the forums and post their interest in the game. Without a substantial amount of support, we won’t be able to get the game back.

Currently, this is how the support for Turfbattles looks:

Total signups to the forum as of 21st June 2010: 93

Average daily views on the site: 210

Breakdown of views by continent:

Asia: 66.5%
Europe: 20.5%
America: 13%

As far as i’m aware, none of the asian players have signed up to the forum or posted their interest in donating to the game.

Here’s a message for the Chinese players:
如果你想要玩TurfBattles,那么就来论坛注册吧。

I expected this would be the case anyway – they were interested in getting my initial proposal to see if it was serious. Now that they see I am serious, hopefully they will continue email conversations with me once they’ve finished up with the current TB.

And as you all know, I wasn’t going to get into costs etc until TB had closed anyway, so we could get a proper idea of the user base (as per who signs up to this board)

That’s all for now – I probably won’t do another update until around the 18th of June when Smilegate restart our email conversations.

So, despite the fact that they wish to continue the Korean Sephiroth game, they’ve given me the option of either aquiring an EU license, or aquiring the game source code – and continuing the Turfbattles game as a separate project.

While the difference between just having a license, and having the source code is quite big – the cost will presumably also be quite different.

If we are to make this game exactly how we want, then we really need to work together as a community and see if we are able to obtain the source code.

Please if you haven’t already, post in this thread whether you are able to donate: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=14

The more people that post in there about their situation, the better idea we will have of whether this is possible.

Thanks everyone