Do You Like This Sort Of Wargame? (Turn Based..)

[kagato]

Another old example was VGA Planets.
Been a long time since I played it, but it was fun.

I was going to suggest a browser front-end too (and there's probably no reason you couldn't add one later), but being able to queue up your orders while offline and send them in one hit once you have net access would be a lot nicer, so yeah, go with the dedicated client.

 

[laurens]

I'd love this type of game - I've been thinking about a very similair type of game for roughly the same period I was actually thinking of doing something similair in python. Is it gonna be a one-man project, or would you like/want help? I'd be mostly interested in working on the game mechanics, not on the UI as much - if you were interested.

 

[skeezix]

kagato -- VGA planets (and related) are specifically what motivated this

laurens -- will see as I go; maybe I'll get the core game together (without 50% of the 'extras' and open it up for beta, to see how it balances etc) and then bring more folks in to help. No point wasting anyones time when 1) may not go anywhere, and 2) I've got a lot of specific ideas right now, don't want to frustrate anyone with 'my way or the highway' just yet

I may well ask for help (dflemstr and yourself so far offering), but give me a couple weeks to get my head on straight and see what areas I need help in.

(ie: I'm really weak on pure js-client side; a native lcinet woudl be piece of cake, but a pure js client would be hard; but of course, if I have time, that'd be a good way to learn it but if I've not the time (what with pandora hopefully shipping soon and all then I may need the help instead. We'll see

It might be best to go for a stable basic game (I'm specifically not putting in a lot of the fancy ideas until after the basic is stable), and then I coudl maintain one client, and others could work on alternate clients even. Why not? As its pure client server RPC driven, wreiting other clients is easy as long as I provide the right APIs...

Once I have the base working, maybe I'll post up the server source or a plugin system so folks could customize all the mechanics; its something I need to think about so I don't architect it in such a way as to make modding impossible

I'm really glad to see theres lots of interest!

jeff

 

[laurens]

kagato -- VGA planets (and related) are specifically what motivated this

laurens -- will see as I go; maybe I'll get the core game together (without 50% of the 'extras' and open it up for beta, to see how it balances etc) and then bring more folks in to help. No point wasting anyones time when 1) may not go anywhere, and 2) I've got a lot of specific ideas right now, don't want to frustrate anyone with 'my way or the highway' just yet

I may well ask for help (dflemstr and yourself so far offering), but give me a couple weeks to get my head on straight and see what areas I need help in.

Cool, we'll see where we go

 

[Gein07]

I love PBEM style games, especially if there is enough depth that you can spend the time waiting for the next turn strategizing, looking at tech trees, and so on and so forth.

Several years ago I used to play a game called Star Chamber, which is one of the finest strategy games I have ever played. It kind of mixed turn based strategy with the card based unit and ability structure of magic the gathering. The game was insidiously addictive and I found myself always trying to scheme up new strategies while at work or laying in bed at night. Something similar to this game for Pandora owners would be nothing short of amazing. Here is a link to Star Chamber if anyone is interested!

http://starchamber.station.sony.com/

Gein07

 

[skeezix]

oh dear, I'm glad I didn't know about that. *hides, canm't afford to get involved in a game like that*

jeff

 

[Gein07]

oh dear, I'm glad I didn't know about that. *hides, canm't afford to get involved in a game like that*

jeff

Are you referring to Star Chamber? Yes, it is quite addictive... and the marriage of turn based strategy (complete with campaign map, diplomacy, queueable ship factories, and fleet combat) and card based abilities, commanders, equipment, and ships made it all the more fun. We certainly don't expect this level of complexity out of the box for your new Pandy game, but something that scratches the surface that may eventually evolve into something this deep would be awesome!

Now, speaking of Star Chamber, I wonder if that client could run on a Pandora... I might just get back into it!

 

[slaanesh]

I played a lot of SSI' Fantasy General - even against other people using the PBeM feature. One of my favourite games. I hardly ever got to complete games as you started winning, the other side lost interest (as they could see their army being destroyed

 

[Timstertoo]

I've done PBM games and PBEM and this sounds fantastic!

I'd play it for sure and I'd love to be part in making it happen, even though my talents will probably sooner slow down the project then anything else. :rolleyes:

 

[kuru]

meh... if it would be possible to get CCP to make EVE possible on the Pandora

edit, sorry to spam the topic. I'm all in for that kind of strategy. There's a danger of them getting addincting and time-consuming... I had a hard time stopping to play world-of-dungeons...

 

[Eolair]

I have to bump this because I love old school, turn based space strategy games, aka Armada 2525, Stars!, Masters of Orion, Space Empires, Imperial Conflict (The last one which is web based is very similar to your idea). If you do this I'll be a huge fan and I'll definately play it

 

[skeezix]

I've kept at it; recently switched my focus on the client from native to web based; (a couple reasons, but also for fun as I've not done much pure-web-app type stuff.) So far doing okay on the client rebuild (can show the known planets map and inspect their statistics, shoudl get reading your incoming messages and some reports going in the next day or two.) The server and processing is doing pretty well -- universe construction and pre-game stuff, the rules are pretty well defined, and the RPC and communication mechanisms are working well. (can talk to it via CGI JSON, or XMLRPC, pretty neat.)

Ugly as sin right now (I'm working on engine and getting it working, not looks, and I suck at making UIs that look good anyway), but once I get to the point where orders can be submitted and sensible results done, I'll see about getting a few people to make up icons (empire icons, planet icons, ship icons, etc.)

Still, the web-app version seems to render okay on my iphone and desktop both, and I'm designing it for the pandora dimensions (though of course can restyle it to other platforms.) The native client works not bad too, and may be needed for offline order processing for tohse without a connection during the day etc. (We'll see how html5 evolves on pandora, etc.)

Pretty fun project for me, as I'm mostly backend or low level frontend, doing high level javascript stuff is goofy and entertaining, and its good to try somethin you suck at once in awhile

jeff

I'm tempted to start writing up the rules/manual/ref-guide, as a way to help nail it down for me, but to give you guys a preview; but it might be too intimidating to see a big manual and no game to play it in

 

[Timstertoo]

How's this project going?

Seeing as I'm probably in the last 50 to get a Pandora I'm certainly not rushing you!

I was talking to a friend about maybe designing a turn based game which people with busy lifes and jobs and kids could do with each other like an old fashioned PB(E)M game and remembered this thread, so I had to go find it and see how it's going.

 

[skeezix]

The server side is in good shape; ie: given direct feeding of orders into the DB via command line, a game is playable. It needs a lot more security added and a tonne of cleanup, as I hacked it together quickly, but it works quite well.

The client I've restarted a few times, and then got derailed by shipping the Pandora - the last what 3 weeks or so have been forum-ridden andswering questions and doing patches and all that Right now I've got a 3-4 week period where I'm mostly not near a computer (full time babysitting mode!), so I'm using that to settle down and get my energy back, and then in 3-4 weeks it'll be full speed back on the client side.

I had meditates back and forth a lot on how best to approach the client; ie: this sort of thing could be done heavy fancy opengl 3d graphics (show a star map, let it rotate around as you look around and zoom in towrds star systems...) -- but thats a _huge_ amount of work and graphics to pull off; I think for 'first cut' I'll go with a really laid back old school "vga planets" style boring average Windows app look and feel - regular old UI buttons and a 2d graph-paper looking map. ie: Go for somethign rudimentary - as in fast to code and playable - and then get the game out to be played and start working out the kinks. ie: work out design kinks, find out what client parts the players need improved (better messanging? new orders to support certain strategies? more convenience/shortcuts to make tedious actions easier?)

Then down the road, once the game is playable and ugly, switch gears towards a fancy client?

I'm not sure if this is the approach I'll move in, but it seems reasonable given my time constraints.

Still, server is working pretty well -- I can start up a few games, put players in them, thery can build ships and attack each other and burn eqach others worlds to the ground, and it all works I guess therws lots of tweaking yet -- you can't just make a random starmap and have it be fair or fun, so I've started some balancing code, and need to think it over; ie: given the sorts of play I can expect -- zergers, techers, etc, can figure out the first few moves on average for each scenario; in those moves, you don't want to accidentally steam roller players, so you have a certain minimum distance between players; likewise, you don't want the distance too great (yawn! and too large when they do collide, you want friction early) .. likewise, the types of planets in the atrea must be more or less fairly distributed so one guy doesn't get a massive resource bonus (unless perhaps he's a new player....)

Stuff like that is not really codified in the game play, its the game _Setup_, which is a separate topic; anyway, the game is moving, but it is lartger than I had anticipated

jeff

And we're only taling '1.0 features'; I've got a whole set of plans for down the road improvements; very simplified combat rules and such for 1.0

 

[Timstertoo]

Well I'm enthousiastic already!

If you need a tester (assuming its playable through browser too, and otherwise you'll just need to pull some strings to get me my Pandora a bit quicker then deserved ) I'll be happy to oblige.

 

[skeezix]

I'm thinking that version 2.0 might be browser based; even now, browsers still suck to build games for -- html5 is spotty across browsers, and performance is pretty terrible in a lot of ways; SVG support is spotty, so need a pure canvas; its pretty asy to do, but rather a PITA to do well I can do a basic 1.0 crap-client pretty quick as a cross platform GTK gui perhaps (ie: windows, linux, OSX native). We'll see

jeff

 

[skeezix]

If anyone happens to be tracking .. this project is still (slowly) moving

The client is still mostly dialogbox-only, but I'm working on a 'entity renderer', so it can show suns, planets, moons, asteroids etc with something a little more interesting; its all 'generated' from a couple dozen paramters (so you can specify 'earth like', or 'mutant looking with clouds of purple and green oceans and lots of mountains'); See this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri73-onfl_4

I need to make a module to load up Blender models or something, and get people drafting up some 'ship models' to various loose specs for me, maybe; ie: its a slow paced turn based wargame, but I like the old school idea of showing info on the right, with a rotating picture on the left.. just to keep it a little interesting looking Anyone game whose pretty good at modelling with very few polys?

For a UI, I'm thinking ..
- on Pandora, full screen 'star map' (just black, with coloured circles+system-name that can be zoomed in/out and panned with the touchscreen/nubs, and tap on a object (such as a system) to get the sort of pic in the video above; maybe I'll do an opengl pan/zoomable starmap as well with rotating worlds on it, but it might be 'too much info' to generate and render; we'll see. (ie: right now the rotating world about is about 4000polys .. if you zoom all the way out and see 100+ worlds, thats 4000*100=400,000 polys, which is quite a bit I coudl scale down the resolution a lot mind you, but still lots of work..
- on a PC, not sure yet

I'm wondering how many folks will play on-Pandora versus on-PC (linux, windows, osx, all good.)

jeff

 

[MarkoeZ]

Good to hear things are still progressing, looking forward to this

About the models, your post made me remember this thread. Maybe some of those models there are of use to you, or otherwise you might want to contact the person that made them.

Hope this helps a bit.

Cheers!

MarkoeZ

 

[danielliu88888]

Looking great so far, definitely interested

 

[Klepto]

This is exactly how Dominions 3 works, most games are play-by-email, you submit your turn file then once every day or two the game server emails you the next turn. It works very well but I imagine some thought must be put in at design time to make it all work properly. For the record I think it's a great multiplayer model and I'm surprised it's not more widespread.