New Lugaru page

I hinted that we were trying to use some of the money we generated from the Organic Indie Preorder Pack to improve Wolfire. In the same vein of using some of the proceeds to improve our servers, I asked Iiro Jäppinen to tune up the Lugaru page. This is not really news to people who have been helping me test this in the secret preorder forum, but I'd like to announce it on the blog too.

Click to check it out

The old Lugaru page (which is now the IE6 fallback) has been bothering me for a long time. Not because it looked bad, or was not fancy, but rather because it just was not a clear page with concrete goals. It's more like a long texty article about the game. When you visit it, it is not immediately obvious how to download the game, purchase the game, or what Lugaru is.

On the other hand, the new page was designed to be extremely clear. Its main purpose is to present you with a big HD video of Lugaru gameplay, which I think is the clearest way to demo a game right now (something that was not actually possible until recently). It has also been updated to highlight mods which have come into existence as the game matured.

We also took the time to include Tim Soret's awesome HD texture pack into Lugaru by default, with his permission. This gave us an excuse to heckle the awesome Ryan Gordon for updated versions of the Mac and Linux builds of Lugaru, which are probably worth discussing in their own blog post.

Here's a quick run down of the new site's features.

• It hooks in to our latest payment system, which supports Amazon, Google, and PayPal (as well as gifting).
• It uses YouTube instead of tiny QuickTime videos.
• It features some of the best Lugaru mods, which are the most amazing things about Lugaru.
• Purchasing now gets you a pre-registered copy of the game, instead of using the original serial number system, which was responsible for a good chunk of tech support emails.

Thanks again to Ryan Gordon who made time in his busy schedule to help us create updated and immaculate Mac and Linux builds and to Tim Soret for letting us bundle his HD texture pack directly into the game.