Dev Blog: Ideas For The Future

Afterwind has finally been officially released, but that in no way means that we're done with it. A lot of exciting things are waiting for their time - many smaller ones you will see online very soon, other bigger ideas will have to wait for the next version of the game. Here are a few things that we'll definitely be working on:

Missions will be a way to make some extra money, or get additional units (perhaps rare ones?) or speed up your research. They will involve, for example, capturing and holding a country or a city, or arriving first to a certain point. After fulfilling the conditions you will get some reward. Missions should make playing the game more interesting, with additional goals and clashes for important territories.

More victory conditions will be coming probably much sooner than the other things - they are an easy way to add variety to the gameplay. Right now most of them involve beating the crap out of your opponents - we want to introduce capturing a neutral country (f.e., Russia), holding a city for a certain period, escorting an artefact/person and so on.

Projects will provide in-game research for superior technologies - like nuclear and hydrogen bombs, spy satellites, deepwater scanners and so on. As more and more players develop superweapons, the game should accellerate towards someones's victory - this will make sure the games are not dragging forever. Projects will likely have to share funding with your war efforts, so you'll have to balance them carefully.

Rare units will be rewarded for comleting missions or projects, or perhaps even 'found' randomly on the map. Most of them will be rather more powerful than regular units, and we'll do our best to give them unique properties as well. A fun thing to do would be to give some countries their own unique rare units - Ski Infantry for Scandinavian countries, Ninja squad for Japan, Suicide bombers for... well, you get the idea.

Private games and saving games are a must for a group of friends that want to play together, perhaps a very long game that goes on for days. Locking a game with a password will make sure only people you give it can get in, and saving the game will allow all of you to continue it later - tomorrow or in one week.

At the moment, our priority is fixing bugs and adding smaller things that can easily fit into a regular update. However, we have a grand vision for the future of Afterwind, so stay tuned!