Although I haven’t had that much time to work on Project “W” since my last entry here I actually did get some more points on my todo-list done. As you can see on the screenshot to your left there is now a nice looking game-ending screen which will show some statistics as well as a top-five of the best players. For the screen itself I needed half-a-dozen attempts until I had gotten something finished that looked the way I imagined and had enough space to present all needed information, and as some kind of gift I also decided to add this small highscore-list so that there now is another additional value in replaying the game.

Having those two done now there are only 3 points left on my todo-list, and depending on how much time I get to work on this project I may be able to start final play-testing (together with balancing and finding bugs/problems/annoyances) by end of next month. Next big point on my list is now the hotseat-mode for multiple players on one PC, which will be the only multiplayer-mode for the demo with additional modes to follow upon release of the final version.

High on 1the heels of my last posting about the cast of the military units for the Project”W” demo, I now also have finished all buildings that will be present in the demo. The number is 39 and even though I didn’t stop the time while creating them I can safely say that it took me far over one hundred hours to design, model and texture them so this was actually the toughest part of the content creation sector for Project “W”.
Although I’m not 100% happy with some of the buildings they all turned out (more or less) the way I imagined them, and since I have set myself a deadline for a demo release I’m gonna leave them the way they are for now but some of them may change for the final version.
But then again this also was the only real big content part left on my todo-list for the demo release so now the only thing to do in terms of content is to add some more technologies to the technology-tree, create icons for those technologies and then also translate the tree. But compared to creating all those buildings this shouldn’t take that long.

And as already said for the units, the number and types of buildings for the final version will change. I have planned at least a dozen more buildings and also buildings that are unique to each nation so that the final version will give you even more buildings to fill your limited building spots with.

I just finished modelling and texturing the last military unit left to have the list of units for the demo finished. If you click on the image to your left you’ll get a picture of all the different units that will be in the demo. You can see 10 military units that can be build by the player (2 infantry units, 5 different tanks, a mechanoid walker, two airplanes) and one special purpose unit, the mobile environment changer. This unit can be used to regain regions that have been lost due to a hazardous pollution level over a long time, but it’s very expensive to build and has high maintenance costs so you better take care of pollution in your regions rather than loosing them to regain them shortly after.
Some of those units though can’t be build from the beginning but the player will first have to research them, e.g. the microwave tank or the mechanoid walker, and the two units in the lower right corner are units from rebel forces that you can’t build too, so you’ll only encounter them when you try to attack a region that has had itself separated from the government. They’re not very strong but depending on their number they can still be a threat to a weak division in order to make it not too easy to regain lost regions.

So for the demo the list of units is finished but for the final version I have some more units I want to implement. First there will be more units to research, including upgraded existing units. Second there will also be units that are special to each nation so e.g. the new european union could have a big battle tank that no other nation can build. Those units won’t be too strong (cause that would be bad for the game balance) but they’ll be an additional way of having the player identify himself with the nations, so that the player won’t just choose a nation based on wether it sounds nice but rather on it’s special abilities.