A Week in the life of Wargame Design Studio…

Hi All,

We want to thank you all for what has been a roller coaster week!

With Thanksgiving fast approaching, we always knew we had to make the November 19^th launch date. Despite a few early hiccups with infrastructure, we have managed to emerge relatively unscathed.

For reference, we have seen nearly thirty thousand downloads of new game installers which equates to approximately thirty terabytes of data. A further two terabytes of updates have come off our Amazon Web Services storage. This is just the people that have actioned the installers or upgrades, we believe there is still a sizable pool of people yet to start their upgrade cycle.

We apologize for the messaging some of you are receiving from the various antivirus players regarding our website and executables. The vast majority of the cyber-security world works off reputation and with a new code signing certificate issued in October and brand-new executables we have had little time to ‘build’ our reputation. This has snowballed slightly as our website then got tagged for hosting ‘low reputation’ software and next thing, you are seeing the 'scary' warnings. With the number of downloads and installations in this last week, we expect to see our reputation at a level that the alerts should go away. We did submit every build and executable to Microsoft before November 19^th, and received a clean bill of health, but that did not seem to mitigate the alerts many people received.

Rich has been buried on support and working through the emails received. We ask for your tolerance as the backlog is cleared. We are dealing with titles that are now being sold by the third company in their lifecycle and we have to go through a range of steps to action your entitlements. Please know that we are moving as quickly as humanly possible, and every email is being seen.

There have been a few issues identified in the move to WDS builds. Not all are proven yet, but where we find a problem, we will aim to patch quickly. With that in mind, we are updating both the installer and update patch for the Strategic War titles, The First Blitzkrieg and War on the Southern Front to version 4.01. The changes are as follows:

• Previously, when opening the air display, the first air unit was auto selected for missions. This was causing issues with non-combat missions like recon. Players now have to manually select the air unit(s) they want to use.
• The blinking hot spot no longer stops blinking when labels are turned on.
• The combat display on map now clears when another unit is selected
• 2Dsymbols files have been updated, particularly for port suppression and movement interdiction. The 2DsymbolsSm has been completely revamped.

The screenshot below shows example port suppression and interdiction markers:

The Strategic War updates are here: Link to Strategic War Updates

We will make certain we keep you all aware of when we issue any future upgrades.

The old JTS Menu has warped into the WDS Menu. This now supports the newly released Civil War Battles - Forgotten Campaigns and has a range of new images for backgrounds. Here are a few examples:

Please note we have built the Menu program into an installer rather than the previous zip file. You can select the directory you want to install it into. The WDS Menu can be downloaded from here: Link to WDS Menu

There were eighty-seven blog posts on the old Wargame Design Studio website.

We are bringing them across to this site, as there is a lot on interesting information covering game design and research considerations, planned titles and other news. We think it’s important to preserve the information and make it available here. We are debating whether to bring any of the comments made by the community across. The comment system on Shopify (our current platform) is not as strong as others and doesn’t allow an easy way to import applicable data. That said, there was some really insightful thoughts from the readers at the release of each blog and we will see what we can do to include those. You can read all our blog posts, past and present, right now, here: Link to Blog Posts

We are hoping to interact with you all on regular basis going forward and share more on what we are working on, and both the challenges and opportunities in front of us.

Thank you again for the very warm welcome and we are excited to be enhancing John Tiller’s legacy.

Tell your friends we are here! 😊