Projekt "W"

**Sascha Willems** · 20-01-2007, 01:35 PM

Yeah that's true, and I guess that's why so many games go for a historical (like those myriads of WW2-games) or for a totally futuristic (just think of Warhammer40k, which takes places 38 thousand years in the future) theme. The current world is moving so fast that it would be almost impossible to make a realistic world-scenario, cause there would be too many changes during the time of developement. Just take a look at what happened on a world-political scale during the last two years and you see what I mean. E.g. I just read yesterday that China shot down one of their satellites with a rocket launched from ground, which makes the world-political situation even more hostile than it actually is (anyone seen CNN yesterday? China want's to ban a starbucks coffee out a holy temple and the chinese ankerman wasn't very friendly towards that western tv station).

So I just went with that semi-realistic scenario so I don't have to adjust things on a weekly basis and to also be able to put in my own take on world-politics (which can bee seen as a satiric hint towards what's happening in reality). And other than the scenario there are so many considerations to be done on a game-design basis that having to deal with the above situation would leave you spending half of the day on tweaking and changing your game-design without actually getting anything done.

And to just give you guys out there a sample, yesterday I was working again on the tidbits of the army management feature, and here is just a partly list of what things I had to take into consideration while implementing just this single feature (note : it's still not 100% finished and things may and will change) :

How many divisions can be stationed in a single player-owned region?
How big can a division become? Or should it be unlimited in size?
If it's limited in size, should the limit be determined by the strength of the units in the division or just by their number?
What should be the maximum size of the unit building queue? Or should it be unlimited in size?
What happens to units that are deassigned from a division, should the player be able to directly assign them to another division or shall they be locked for one turn?
How is health regeneration handled? Does the region need a special building for that or will there be a "natural" regeneration over time?
Should each unit gain experience in battle, or should only the assigned (if one is assigned) general of the wole division gain it? The later would make the generals more valuable, the first one the units, so what way to go?
Should each nation get it's own pool of different units, or should the have the same units (or maybe just with different skins)? Or should there just be some units that are special to each nation with a basic unit pool that is same across all nations?
How to calculate damage caused by units? How to calculate this against defensive values of units?
and so on...

And the above list is just an extract of what to take care about for just one single feature of the game. So as you can see the game design of such a big project is a huge undertaking.

**Sascha Willems** · 09-02-2007, 12:05 PM

Just a quick update again :
Progress is coming along nicely (as suspected) and right now I'm mostly working on polishing so that I can soon start to add the missing rest of the content to release the demo. This means I'm working on all that small things players won't directly notice but which are important to have a nice gameflow.

Over at my blog I did several updates and also uploaded some new pictures of buildings along with some new screenshots.

And here is one you right now can't see on my blog as it's still a work-in-progress :

As you can see I have repalced the huge water-only plane with something more sophisticated as the water-only background looked to bland and to sterile. So now you'll have different 3D basins for each different nation. The one on the shot is the first one and will be for the new asian nation, but it's also still just a work-in-progress, the one on my HD is also a bit more detailled.

And almost forgot it : I recently released an in-game video over at the german Delphi-OpenGL-Community that shows the game in action. I didn't post it overe here at PGD cause the whole interface is in germa, but if you're still interested gab it here (13 MBytes, WindowsMedia format).
Note that it's already "kinda" outdated and misses some changes I recently made but already shows a lot of the game. Also please respect that I don't want this to be posted elsewhere or uploaded onto pages like youtube!

I would update this one more often, but time sadly permits, so you won't find each update from my blog here.

**WILL** · 09-02-2007, 03:16 PM

Thats just so cool.

**technomage** · 09-02-2007, 03:20 PM

Amazing

I wish my german wasn't so rusty ;-)

**Traveler** · 09-02-2007, 05:03 PM

Just,... WOW! :shock:

**Robert Kosek** · 09-02-2007, 05:30 PM

You already know my thoughts Sascha... same as before. Stunning and awesome! I cannot wait for the final product.

**savage** · 09-02-2007, 11:08 PM

Looks great! As I already mentioned on your blog, if you need anything translated from English to Spanish to extend your target market let me know. My wife is a translator.

**AthenaOfDelphi** · 10-02-2007, 07:55 PM

That looks awesome Sascha... nice job :-)

**Sascha Willems** · 10-02-2007, 10:30 PM

Thanks for the feedback, and Dom I may get back onto that offer at a later time. First I want to finish the demo and see how it is recieved, after that I'll decide on the future ways of the game.

Meanwhile here is another teaser :

This is the backdrop setting for another of the five nations (the arabic world) which was heavily inspired by persian architecture. Aside from the first four hour long try yesterday (which i totally scracped) it took me almost 8 hours to have this one look the way it's now. That's mainly because I have certain vision of a 3D model and then try to get as close to that vision as possible, including doing a lot of different version, looking at pictures of real persian buildings and creating a lot of textures so that the colors look exactly the way I want them. In my opinion this one is very close to my vision and I'll only add some minor things like some plants.