Happy New Year: 2046

Darkwind: War on Wheels

It's nearly 6 months since my last blog post. I'm still working on Darkwind: War on Wheels, of course. It's becoming a lifestyle rather than a project (I started it 3 years ago...)

For those of you that haven't heard about it before, Darkwind is a post-apocalyptic cars-with-guns MMO running on Torque, with a PHP/MySQL back-end looking after the master server, lobby, website, various updates daemons and event spawning. We now have two servers, one in France and one in Ireland, both running Linux/Debian.



The unique points about the game include:

* It is turn-based. That's right, turn-based racing/car combat. Many people see a strong resemblance to the classic board game Car Wars.
* It has perma-death. The lack of real danger in nearly all commercial MMOs ruins them, for me. By adding perma-death (and a plethora of nasty permanent injuries such as missing limbs and eyes) Darkwind gains a lot in terms of the dynamics of courage, cowardice and the consequences of player actions. We have a dynamic game economy driven by a systems dynamics simulation, and without dangerous travel, this would not be possible.
* It has an extremely detailed combat system, which includes over 500 critical hits, over 50 different weapons, over 50 different vehicles, and a detailed system of leadership, courage, demoralization and surrender. There is also a range of different skills and specialisms that characters build up over time, including weapons skills, mechanic skills, first aid, leadership, etc.

We now have more than 9000 players registered, with a few hundred typically 'active' at any given time. Most evenings you will find 30 or more players online.


Pedestrians

Since my last blog, the most significant new feature has been pedestrians...



The introduction of characters-on-foot allows players to get out and run away from a broken car before it explodes, engage in carjacking fun, and also to turn over a 'turtled' car. I spent some time working on pedestrian-specific features, for example they can crouch down behind cover and when they fire the engine does multiple raycasts in order to find an angle from which they can fire rather than blasting away into their cover.


Artificial Intelligence

I have also spent significant time improving the AI of enemy cars and pedestrians. Including Dan Keller's excellent pathfinding resource is central to this; every game played by my players is logged and the paths taken by their cars and characters are recorded for use by the AI. (In fact, car paths are cached for 5 turns before being committed, and thrown away should the car have a significant collision). I also put a lot of time into AI tactics - getting their peds to seek out and fight from behind cover, getting their cars to move themselves to their optimum range for their weapons, getting them to avoid becoming isolated in a combat, etc.




Player Community

If you're interested in reading up on some of the in-game happenings from a roleplaying perspective, our player-run bi-weekly (in game = bi-monthly) Darkwind Gazette is a good place to start.

The player-run Darkwind Wiki gives a good flavour of the depth of detail in the game rules.


Deathsports

The 2046 season has just started, and runs for the next 12 weeks. So now is a great time to try out the game and try your chances in our 13 different leagues and ladders, all of which are free to play in. This season sees the introduction of pedestrian combat leagues, including a paintball one.


Marketing

We have continued to turn over a modest profit, despite having near-to-zero marketing. (I'm a programmer and game designer, not a marketer). We had a publishing deal almost lined up last year, but I decided to pull out of it as the publisher seemed very unprofessional. A one-paragraph mention in the Games For Windows magazine earlier this year helped us to our best-ever month.

I'm very interested in obtaining help from someone with marketing savvy, and there is of course a modest budget for this, so please feel free to get in contact with me by email: sam # psychicsoftware dot com


Darkwind: War on Wheels - for all your persistent-world turn-based post-apocalyptic vehicular mayhem needs.