Since it’s release on august 14th, “Phase 1″ of Projekt W has been downloaded over 2000 times. Considering that turn-based games are a niche nowadays, with only a few exceptions (like the Civilization series) I’m pretty happy with the number of downloads. But what makes me even happier is the feedback I’ve gotten from those that played the game. With my recent projects, feedback was very rare, with the exception of my regular forums I also posted about my projects, but with Projekt W that changed. I’ve gotten a lot of comments and mails, and all of them were positive, some even like the game more than the current commercial games around. If you create games for free this is the best reward you can get : People that like them and also tell you that they enjoyed them. So hopefully “Phase 2″ will make them like the game even more.

And as for “Phase 2″ : I’ve been working a lot on some of the new features this week so it’s time to post some progress. If you click on the shot to the left you’ll see the game’s main screen at night. Though this is nothing that adds to the gameplay itself it’s a nice effect that greatly adds to immersion. In “Phase 2″ the background (sky and 3D model) will constantly fade from daytime to night and back to daytime. This also makes the game’s background more dynamic. Sadly it’s not possible to show the nice fading effect on a screenshot, so I may post a short video of this effect at some point.

Next on the list is the implementation of the turn-based battles. I’ve been talking about this in more than one posting, but up until now all work on this feature had been done in an external prototype. So the last few days I sat down and implemented them into the game. And contrary to my last posting they’re now full 3D (again) instead of the 2D one I posted recently. Although the 2D ones weren’t looking that bad I somehow felt they would break the line of the game, as everything else (the globe, the regions, building and unit previews) is also presented in 3D so I decided to go for a 3D battlefield too. It can be freely rotated, moved and zoomed so you always full overlook. So when you now attack a region you’ll switch to the battlefield view, then the attacker and defender will place it’s units before the battle will commence. Please note that there will still be the option to have the battle calculated, just in case you don’t want to (or don’t have the time) to battle it out manually. I also added a simple map editor to WeltEdit (my content-creation tool for PjW), so the battlefield won’t be the same every time you attack a region. Though there is still some work to do (mainly AI for hex-based battles) the feature is in the game and working. I also attached some (early) screenshots that’ll give you an idea of how it looks, though things may change in the future.