Announcing Beta Phase 22

Phase 22 is the biggest release of WarLight since it ported to Flash! First, business:

WarLight will be going down on Wednesday, January 5th at 1am PST (9am GMT) for up to an hour. Please plan accordingly for any fast games that may get interrupted during this 1-hour window.

During this time, WarLight will be upgraded to Beta Phase 22. Once the deployment is complete, you can view all of the changes on the Change History page.

Personalized Game Templates

Once phase 22 is live, whenever you create a customized game, WarLight will ask you if you’d like to save your game settings as a template. You can then use that template to easily create games with the same or similar settings.

Not only will this ease the burden of creating new games, but it will also allow you to share your settings with other players. Each template will have a URL associated with it that you can give out to let other players use your templates.

Phase 22 will also allow you to create new templates/games with the same settings as any existing game, whether they were created with a template or not. This allows you to easily create rematches, or create templates from the games created by other players or games you created before templates were available.

Being able to save your game settings as templates is great, but when combined with custom scenarios, phase 22 really opens up a lot of new doors.

Custom Scenarios

Once phase 22 is live, game creators can elect to forego the built-in map distribution system and enter, territory-by-territory, exactly how they want the map to be distributed.

This gives game creators an incredible amount of power, and opens up all new styles of gameplay. For example, game creators could:

• Give players handicaps, such as starting one player with fewer armies. This is useful for introducing WarLight to a new player, or when veterans just want to give themselves additional challenge.
• Hand-craft a strategic map so that bonuses that start with wastelands in them are worth additional armies per turn, giving incentive to take down the wasteland.
• Finely-tune a 1v1 map by picking which territories are available for players to pick, or making less-desirable bonuses start with fewer neutral armies, or placing wastelands in strategic positions.
• Create a Godzilla scenario where one player starts with 10,000 armies, and 20 other players are teamed up to take them down.
• Many more – the possibilities are endless!

Design your own single-player levels

If you think about custom scenarios and game templates, you’ll realize that they give you the power to do everything the current single player levels do. In fact, the existing six single player levels are being made into templates!

This opens up a wealth of possibilities. Perhaps you’ve always wanted to play level 1 reversed – where the AI is about to get Europe and you start in Australia. Or maybe you want to try the Europe challenge as Russia instead of Britain. These templates can even be used in multi-player, which means you could do the Europe or Insane challenges cooperatively with a friend!

Not only can you customize the existing six single player levels to your heart’s desire, but you could even make your own from scratch, and share them with other players using the templates feature. I may run a single-player level design contest, where the winners can have their levels included into the game.