Darkwind: Welcome to the 22nd Century

Darkwind: War on Wheels, the MMO I launched in 2007, has now reached the year 2100 in game. It’s 75 years after the solar apocalypse (see also this), and 65 years after the game itself started with our first racing/deathracing leagues.

In Darkwind, one week of real-world time is one month in-game. So every 12 weeks, a new year starts.. a new season in the deathracing and combat leagues, a new season in the squad combat leagues, another year in which road warriors in heavily armed 1970s musclecars continue to dominate the world.

We still have active players who have been there from the start, but the in-game heroes of that time are long gone: characters in Darkwind age and die – if they are lucky enough to survive to old age despite the harsh post-apocalyptic world. Darkwind was described by Rock Paper Shotgun as a ’boutique’ MMO: a small online game with a fiercely loyal player-base who stick around for years. If you’re looking for some uncompromising turn-based vehicular combat with a persistent world and perma-death, there really isn’t anything else.

Why Coding is an Important Skill for Children

I was interviewed for a blog on the teaching resources portal Twinkl. Anyone who know me knows I’m always happy to talk about programming and games. This time I’m wearing both my gamedev hat and my university lecturer hat.

[ Twinkl Blog ]

How to kill your friends and alienate people: The Necromancer’s Tale development update

The Necromancer’s Tale is a dark, narrative driven game which follows the descent of an (initially) upstanding minor noble in 1733 – as he/she taps into powerful forces in a quest for power and revenge. What starts out as a simple investigation into your father’s suspicious death spirals into a web of secrecy, black magic, killing the innocent, and raising them again to do your bidding.

  Steam page now open for wishlists!

Since my last update, we’ve been making good progress on a number of fronts. From a narrative point of view, the text for the game’s prologue is fairly complete – in which we use an interactive-fiction/’choose your own adventure’ style process for player character customisation. The prologue covers the events from a few years before the player’s birth, through to their 19th birthday. This material is presented in an animated book, with pencil sketches scattered throughout. The player chooses from three main career paths, and makes numerous other choices which affect their physical, mental, and social stats.

We have also almost completed a first draft of two chapters of the main game itself, in which the player discovers and tries out the first spell from a mysterious book. We’re generally keeping it tight and not putting in pointless time-filler side-quests, with the aim being that players can actually expect to finish the game in a reasonable number of hours, and enjoy the art, narrative, investigation and tactical-combat joys that it has to offer (rather than getting bored and giving up while hunting for 10 wolf hides to help a local farmer).

As well as putting a lot of effort into level editing (putting a full medieval town together is quite some effort!) I’ve been busying myself with programming all of the core systems needed by an RPG.. inventory, combat, AI behaviours, save+load, crafting. Integrating the code with the structured narrative information exported by Articy was a bit of fun, which basically involved having a 4MB massively-nested JSON file land on my hard drive and figuring out what it meant. I have also put together a cutscene-editing system similar to what I did in Goblins & Grottos.

The image below shows some of the data for a cutscene in which the player meets up for beers with their childhood friend Diedrik. This system gives me low-level control of character movements and animations, as well as control of the camera and other objects in the world (e.g. here beer tankards are appearing more and more on the table as the evening progresses). These cutscenes are also synchronised with the narrative ‘flow’ coming from the Articy data – so, for example, the cutscene can pause until a certain point has been reached in the Articy narrative, and similarly the narrative can be paused until activities in the 3D game which are under control of the cutscene system have reached a required point.

Combat will be turn-based, with movement working on a hex-grid:

We also have some really good artists working part-time with us, working on character portraits, sketches for the prologue, and in-world character art and animations.

There’s more details here:
http://www.psychicsoftware.com/thenecromancer/

  Steam page now open for wishlists!

Darkwind: Camp Wars

Over the last few months, I have been working on a whole new meta-game layer for Darkwind. An upturn in player numbers in Darkwind which started last year and continued to build into 2020, together with some careful prodding by my son Harry, convinced me to do this.

The new Camp Wars system operates on a hexgrid map, whereby competing player-run camps take control and fight over each hex. The hexes themselves offer valuable resources to the camps (water, food, scrap metal, etc.) and we’re also planning to add a bunch of themed ‘specials’ which will only appear in one place – e.g. controlling a hex with a mutant village in it will boost a camp’s chances of attracting mutant recruits.

The design behind this was instigated by Harry (who has played a lot of strategy and wargames over the years). He even put together an initial design proposal, and has helped in running meetings with the players and teasing out balancing issues.

Here’s the interactive map running (you can drag it around with the mouse, and use the wheel to zoom in and out).

We’ve started to see some big PvP battles happening, which is exciting (PvP is something which players have always avoided, to a large extent, perhaps because the game has perma-death). It hasn’t all been plain sailing, of course – raise the stakes in a multiplayer game and there are bound to be fireworks. The players are a mature bunch though, so we’re ironing things out well (fingers crossed). We’ve put a bunch of risk mitigation systems in, as well as ratcheting up the possible profits to the right level that it’s hard to ignore them.

Camp Wars runs on a two-week cycle. In the first week, camps secretly deploy their forces to hexes under their control (for defence) or bordering on hexes they control (for attack). At the start of the second week, battles for contested hexes are scheduled, to be played within that week.

The best reason to fight is for resources. This system aims to add the motivation for PvP that Darkwind has lacked in the past.

Another key thing which this system aims to introduce is a proper route for newer players to get involved in camps. At first, they can assist the logistics and supply, and can use their vehicles and characters to assist a camp in battle. Later, they can become full members of camps, and finally can own their own camp – probably under the protection of a larger camp at first. We have designed a maximum cap on how much hardware any individual player can bring to a battle: this is specifically to promote cooperation and to make newer players valuable.