Project "W" - New Video

As promised several times I finally made a new video for Project “W” to showcase the project’s current progress. The video is fresh out of the press and I created it only several hours ago (actually I started two days ago but did several tries). It’s almost 7 minutes long and encoded in windows media format (WMV) so anyone having installed a recent version of the mediaplayer or having installed a codec pack should be able to watch it. [Read More]

Next stop : Localization

Once again I finished some points on my todo-list for the demo release, including all missing icons (for buttons, windows, etc.), adding some rebel units (which you encounter while attacking a region that had separated itself from your government), finishing the regionmap (remaining names, adjusting values, etc.) and much more. But one of the biggest still outstanding points on the list is localization of the game. And this is exactly what I’m gonna do next. [Read More]

Climbing the Todo-ladder

Since the last posting here on my blog I got a big share of the outstanding Todos for the coming demo done (around 50% of the points on the list), so work is still going at my projected speed and the game is looking and feeling better and better each day. And as I already hinted at in my last posting one of the things I did was the customization of the regional 3D view. [Read More]

Even more work on the GUI

Right now I’m working down the points on my todo-list towards the demo release and already got several things done. But one point was usability and look of the GUI for the game and this one took (and still takes) much longer than I initially had planned. I did a lot of work on the main menu, including an options screen and adding functionality to have every UI element slowly fade in and fade out. [Read More]

GUI flow

It’s been a while since the last update on Project “W”, but work is still going on though mostly on things you can’t show via some nice screenshots (and text-only postings aren’t that much fun either). I’m still on-time towards my predicted date for the first demo (early Q2/2007) and right now I think I can actually even finsh it until my self-set deadline. To achieve that I wrote down a list with all the things needed to be finished for a demo relase and that list isn’t very huge and mostly contains smaller things concerning polish of certain game features. [Read More]

More national identity

First a sorry for such a long delay since the last posting but after having problems with my internet connection my modem also decided to die, so I haven’t had the chance to update this since the last posting. But now on to the work I did on Project “W”. Most work last days was spent on creating full 3D-backgrounds to strengthen the players identification with the nation he chooses to play. [Read More]

Working towards the finish

In terms of coding I’m nowadays spending most of the time working on the smaller things within the game that maybe many players won’t notice, but will have a big impact on the final polish of the game.. Things like additional messages and hint when e.g. a nation is terminated and other important ingame events, tweaking the game’s usability (as I wrote in my initial game design I want to have all of the game’s functionality to be accessible with at most 2 clicks) and more newsmessages. [Read More]

More content and a VFS

Once again the past days have been very productive when it comes to Project “W” (although I’ve been a bit distracted by the recent Dawn of War Addon) both in terms of content for the game and in terms of coding. As for the content, I modeled some new buildings so that I currently have 26 of the ~32 buildings finished. I’ve put my priority on creating models for the buildings you can construct right after the start of the game, so the remaining models I have to do will be for some of the more futuristic buildings that you can only build after researching certain technologies. [Read More]

Smaller Steps

As usual when a project has advanced a lot, like Project “W” did, the steps you make get smaller and smaller. At first you implement the big features and see big changes within a few days of coding but that phase is over for some time now. And therefore I’m currently working on a lot of the smaller things that make the game more playable/enjoyable, and that includes a lot of small facets of game design. [Read More]

Translation

Another long outstanding thing that I was “succesfully” getting around the last months was translation of Project “W”. But this is history, as I sat down the last few days and implemented translation features into the game. At first I wanted to use the ITE of BDS2006, but somehow actually didn’t like it. So I implemented the whole translation stuff myself, and you can directly translate strings in the game’s main editor “WeltEdit”, which then are referenced through unique identifiers within the game. [Read More]