Darkwind Retail

Lots of exciting things have been happening over the summer with the development and promotion of Darkwind: War on Wheels.

Recent In-Game Features

Since May, the substantial new features that have been added include: a detailed courage+morale system (you need to carefully manage your troops to stop them deserting when things get nasty); a destructible environment (which is a precursor to player-owned camps, a feature currently under development).

Also a lot of work has gone into balancing the wilderness scouting/travel/pvp systems. When you take your cars away from town, the stakes get very high ('permadeath' is only one of your worries) - so we need to have a well balanced system that suits newbies, veterans, pvpers and non-pvpers alike. The victories and defeats of the wilderness NPC gangs feed directly into the amount of danger you will meet on the road, as well as the piracy factors that are applied to the economic simulation. When things start getting a bit nasty in a particular region, players are forced to band together and form large vigilante squads to go and hunt NPC pirates, in order to clear the roads and allow trade items to start flowing again.

Retail Sales

We have finalised a contract for the manufacture and distribution of the game via retail channels - here's the current state of the box and CD art:








In-Game Media

We have also continued to add new missions (29 in total now) and new chassis types (34 in total now) - including some big lorries, musclecars, and rare vintage ones. The dynamic economy and real-world-timescale travel makes sure that a busy player-run market distributes the rarer items around the game world.


Interviews and Reviews

We are currently under review at wargamer.com and will also be featured in a ~4 page interview in the print magazine "New Age Gamer" in the next few weeks.


Who's your audience?

I'd have to say the main lesson learned since we went 'officially' live in early May is that you have to know your target audience. The fact is, an uncompromising turn-based vehicular combat wargame isn't exactly mainstream. A small amount of exposure on sites such as rpg.net and wargamer.com have brought excellent return, while much larger exposure on the more mainstream sites such as mmorpg.com, while bringing decent traffic, have had a much lower rate of return.

If you feel like trying your hand as a post-apocalyptic highway combatant, pay us a visit ;-)

www.dark-wind.com