Improvements!

It's been more than a month since the last announcement about Hive releases, so here's what's new:

• Fixed a weird edge-case bug for some async games which had passes in them, and then would not let users re-connect to the game.
  
• Fixed the Online Game Menu Screen crash that was happening on Mac OSX.
  
• Redid our release-process to remove a bunch of un-needed assets that were left around but weren't being cleaned up. This leads to less hard-drive space being used for the game, and significantly less bandwidth used for the initial install. This was a pretty big change. If you were to install Hive game 3 times (once on Windows, Mac, and Linux) the total download required would have been 909.4mb and now it is 583.5mb... for installing on all three OSes, the total hard-drive space required would have been 321.4mb, now it's 247.9mb. :)
  
• The logFile now has a .txt extension instead of .log. This makes it easier for users to open it, and makes it easier for us to open on our mobile-phones so we can provide support to people even when we're afk.
  
• Reduced some of the log-spam so logFile.txt will be smaller.
  
• Added "Join Steam Group" button.
  

Free game!

BlueLine Games has released our next game, "Simply Chess"! It's a straightforward Chess game made to be widely-accessible and is geared towards casual and intermediate players.

Also unique: this one is Free-to-Play! To encourage the widest use (we felt that Steam needed a flourishing Chess community) we made ALL FEATURES FREE. After a couple of matches, you'll see a 7-second cross-promo for one of our other games. If you upgrade to Premium (~$4.99) then you won't see the cross-promos (soon, if you own all 3 of our games, we're going to remove that promo automatically, so you won't have to have Premium). Since 7-second cross-promos aren't such a big deal to most people, you can think of the $4.99 is kind of a donation to say thanks... and we do appreciate it! :)

This style (free-to-play) is likely just a one-off for us and our next planned game will likely be sold the same way as Hive, Khet, and Reversi. People love Chess but very few people want to pay for it since there are so many free Chess features scattered across different platforms... even if you bundle a ton into one game, people don't feel like it. I've always wanted to be able to play Chess on our engine, and now we can! :D Also, we're hoping this increases the number of people exposed to our game engine, so people might consider taking a look at our other games... which should grow the Hive, Khet 2.0, and Reversi communities! :)

http://store.steampowered.com/app/312280/