Darkwind Testing & Development
by Sam Redfern · 04/24/2006 (5:21 am) · 10 comments
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
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
About the author
#2
04/24/2006 (7:08 am)
Turn-based vehicle combat racing? Awesome! So is there a grid to restrict movement or do you get to move a set amount of distance in a given turn?
#3
There's also a grey 'ghost' vehicle which shows where you think it will be after 1 second, based on current steering/acceleration setting (it moves as you turn the wheel). The accuracy of the ghost vehicle is affected by the driving skill of your character. This ghost vehicle makes for some quite professional-looking driving actually: we have been powersliding some vipers around the dirt track quite impressively.
04/24/2006 (7:37 am)
Lester: it uses physics calcs to move the vehicles. You set your acceleration and steering and each turn is then simulated as one second: everything rolls forward and then freezes again.There's also a grey 'ghost' vehicle which shows where you think it will be after 1 second, based on current steering/acceleration setting (it moves as you turn the wheel). The accuracy of the ghost vehicle is affected by the driving skill of your character. This ghost vehicle makes for some quite professional-looking driving actually: we have been powersliding some vipers around the dirt track quite impressively.
#4
04/24/2006 (7:38 am)
Actually the cars are realistically simulated with physics calculations, it just happens to be turn based :). Each turn is one second. [Edit: ah just saw that Sam has posted about this already :)] 
#6
If your game is turn based, and each turn is 1 game second - how long does a race usually take to complete?
04/24/2006 (12:02 pm)
Your game looks like a lot of fun, but I have a question for you:If your game is turn based, and each turn is 1 game second - how long does a race usually take to complete?
#7
04/24/2006 (1:14 pm)
This game looks like a lot of fun, great work guys!
#8
Anthony - a 3 lap race on a decent-sized track comes in at around 60 to 90 minutes. Many of the turns take less than 30 seconds, some as little as 10 seconds.
04/24/2006 (1:35 pm)
Jon- yes, i wondered if someone would spot it ;-)Anthony - a 3 lap race on a decent-sized track comes in at around 60 to 90 minutes. Many of the turns take less than 30 seconds, some as little as 10 seconds.
#9
04/24/2006 (1:50 pm)
Way cool. Makes me want to rip the arm off my leather jacket and speak with and Australian accent!
Torque Owner Stephan (viKKing) Bondier