Darkwind Testing & Development

It's a month since my last blog, and development and testing in Darkwind have been continuing well. We have built up a great bunch of testers who meet every weekend for races and timetrials. We've also been running a league and with one race to go there's still 3 players in the running for overall victory, which brings with it a rather nice 5L Dodge Viper.

Darkwind is a turn-based, persistent online racing/vehicle combat MMORPG with many original concepts. The key gameplay elements include:
* Race and combat leagues (a great way to keep things challenging and interesting, in many ways better than quest systems, IMO)
* Strategic trade and resource management, with a carefully designed trade and stock level system. Supply and demand, resource entry points, as well as on-the-road piracy affect stock levels and prices. More exotic
hardware is rarer and therefore harder to get spare parts for.
* Real-world time scale: it takes several days to travel between towns, takes days to build and repair vehicles, to heal character injuries etc.
* Long-term gameplay: you can only compete in 2 or 3 events per week, so the game won't negatively impact the other aspects of your life! We believe a particular game will keep you interested for a given number of hours, and these hours might as well be spaced out rather than crammed into a short period.
* Turn-based gameplay (max. 30 seconds to set your move) makes for a more sociable experience. Essentially, we consider this to be a boardgame. You have time to chat/banter as well as watch other people's manoeuvers. Because it's turn-based, players also have three 5-minute timeouts at their disposal. The server calls a timeout on your behalf if your connection drops unexpectedly.

This weekend we were racing Preludes, Suzuki Altos and Transit Vans! Here's a gratuitous selection of pics from the weekend:

Pre-mayhem screenie in a Transit style:


A few (game) seconds later and things are getting interesting:


These two show off the dynamic texture aging system which applies rust and grime to vehicles depending on how old and battle-worn they are. Plus the lovely Torque sun! The size of a vehicle's bumpers indicates how much armour it has.



As usual our vehicles were a bit the worse for wear as the race wore on. But you have to love racing Transit vans, if only for the comedy factor!


This track always ends up a bit like a backroad from Hazzard county (well, more so if the cars are a bit faster than these Altos):


Setting record laptimes in souped-up Honda Preludes:


Darkwind has detailed vehicle component and character injury systems. Weapons will be added soon:


We have been scaling up our testing and welcome new players: feel free to sign up at the website :-)
www.dark-wind.com