Although there are still some minor things to do before I can call it a version that’s ready to getting released, Projekt “W” is now in a shape where you can actually play a whole game without it throwing an exception (so far all show-stoppers have been fixed). So today I made the first two playtesting session with the first one being interrupted with a bug that I quicly fixed followed by a second playtesting session.
And after those sessions I have to admit that I’m very pleased with how the game turned out and I already found it a lot of fun to play, especially as there aren’t a lot of new games out there that can be compared to Projekt “W”. The game’s pace is also roughly at the point where I predicted it to be and there are actually only a few minor things outstanding that need to be done and of course balancing, but that’s what playtesting is for. So I also started an issue list with all annoyances that turn up while playing the game and changes that could improve overall gameplay and hopefully after a lot of hours filled with playtesting I should have a game that other people will also enjoy.
In addition I tried out Projekt “W” on a slower machine with two different graphics card some days ago in order to roughly get a picture of the hardware needed to play it with full details. The CPU was an Athlon XP 2600+ with 1 GByte of memory running Windows XP (which can be considered very low-end by now) and I tested with a Geforce 6800 (vanilla, 256 MBytes VRAM) and a my trusty old Radeon 9700 (128 MBytes VRAM, somewhere from 2002) and both ran the game without any visual differences so I can safely say that it’ll at least look right on ATI hardware. The Radeon though is a very old card with only shader model 2.0 and the game ran very slow on it (around 15 FPS) but that may be connected to some of the shaders used by the game. The 6800 (which also is considered low-end by now) on the other hand ran the game at high frame rates and with the above configuration one should be able to play it with all details in 1024x768 with anti-aliasing enabled.