With the last update already more than two months old I thought it was time to tell the outside world about the progress on “Phase 2” of Projekt “W”. And although I’m still not able to put as much time into “Phase 2” as I’d like to (and not nearly as much as I was able to do back when working on “Phase 1”) it’s still progressing. Almost all time I could put into working on “Phase 2” since the last update went into the espionage rework and this part of the game is shaping up very well. Over the last few days and weeks I implemented functionality for a new spy type, called the mobile spy. Before that I added a lot of stuff to the stationary spies (the only spy type from “Phase 1”), so those spies now can be assigned to a player’s region too in order to do counter espionage stuff like faking building or division data when an enemy spy tries to track those information. And the new type, the mobile spy, is kinda like the next step. Once you’ve infiltrated a region with a stationary spy and that spy got information on a division in that region, you can attach a mobile spy to this division. That spy will now travel with this division whenever it’s moved (until it’s destroyed or disbanded) and the spy will keep track of those movements. But there’s much more, cause this spy is able to get much more valuable information on the division than a stationary spy. While the later can only track the unit types in a division, the mobile one can track information on an assigned general (including a summary of it’s skill) as well as experience and health of the units of this division. Combined with those additional information bits the mobile spy also has advanced (but very very risky) sabotage options, like assasinating the general, damaging units or even taking out that whole division for one turn. And if this division is involved in a battle with the spy’s owner, that spy will be able to do sabtoage during that battle.
So in addition to the new data spy (which I’m also working on) that new mobile spy will add a lot to the espionage (and sabotage) part of the game, making that part almost a game of it’s own and making spies a lot more important to the whole gameplay than they were in “Phase 1”.
And there will be even more of Projekt “W” (and “Phase 2” of course) around the net, as Will of Pascal Game Developement has asked me to do an interview for the next issue of the PGD mag that’ll also include some questions about the game and it’s next installment, together with a lot of other questions about making games. The interview will also include some new screenshots not shown here (yet) as well as a curent picure of the person behind all this. As of now there is no final date for the release of the next issue of the PGD mag, but it’s sheduled for end of may/beginning of june. But as soon as it’s out in the wild, I’ll post links to it over here.