March was a great month for Dark Horizons Mechanized Corps, not only did we add a lot of great players but we began to finalize and implement one of our persistent online multiplayer features of the game which we are calling “Faction Wars”. We were also able to make some progress toward cross platform play. Because Faction Wars is such a huge addition to the game we are going to post a 2 part DEV DIARY for April leading up to the 0.0.8.0 release which will have the next big phase of Faction Wars. For part 1, we are going to discuss some of the systems we are adding that will tie both Faction Wars and single player aspects of the game, this focuses around earning and spending Credits as part of the game experience. Credits and how you earn them. Credits are a currency that you can only earn by playing the game, you cannot buy them with real money, via the persistent multiplayer portion of the game (Faction Wars), online play, or through playing offline (single player) missions. Players will earn credits based on both their performance and their team’s performance in-game. This includes factors such as number of kills or assists the player gets, whether the player’s team was successful, credits for salvage for the winning team (a credit bounty for each enemy mech destroyed by your team) and amount of damage inflicted. (Mockup of new results screen below).
(note: this is purely a mockup, though its close to the final in-game layout) Will there be other ways to earn credits? The answer to this is yes there will be a couple other ways. All players will begin with enough credits to build out a couple of custom mech configurations which will help them get started. Players will also earn credits each day that they log into game (as a stipend from the merc guild or your selected faction that you fight for in Faction Wars). There were also be other additional method for earning credits in future releases (beyond release 0.1.0.0) which include, but are not limited to:

• Player market (the ability to sell parts and builds)
• More complex salvage system

Spending Credits As we previously mentioned one of the uses for the player to use Credits on will be building mechs! Currently in-game you can build as many chassis as possible with no limits. As a planned feature, with the implementation of Faction Wars, players will now earn credits and then spend those building out their mechs. The following item categories will cost credits:

• mech chassis
• weapons
• equipment (targeting laser, ammo deployer, jumpjet, etc…)
• engines
• extra armor
• additional ammo (future feature)

So essentially every component used in building your mech out. Future updates:

• Squad upgrades
• Custom mech builds
• Additional mech slots
• and more...

Can you try out a config before purchasing? This feature will come in a future release, but until then we will allow players to sell back the build at full price for an unspecified time period while we pull in analytic data to ensure that your credits earned is balanced with your credits spend. With that said you also can sell just the base chassis of a build and strip the weapons and put them into your inventory (for use later on a future mech config that the player will want to create). A mockup of this functionality is as follows: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=431133920 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=431133566 Once an items is in the player’s inventory it can be used in future builds without any additional costs, or the player can choose to sell the item on their own. In Closing So that is the credits and inventory systems at a high level. Please feel free to post questions or make suggestions in the forums . http://steamcommunity.com/app/266470/discussions/0/618460171315113977/ Tune in next week, we will be posting details on the rest of the upcoming 0.0.8.0 patch including:

• Faction Wars, Balance of Power map
• Faction bonuses for territory control (XP and Credits bonuses)
• New in-game lobby layout
• New AI and default config layouts
• Status on some other items
• New battlefields
• Linux update
• New team member introductions

Upcoming events May Faction War Fridays! We will be hosting Friday events again focused on the start of the 2nd Machine Wars. We will also be looking to host more events on Sundays also. To be kept up to date on scheduled events we encourage you to join the OFFICIAL GROUP at http://steamcommunity.com/games/dhmc .