Posted

Feb 26th 2008

Well you've probably all seen that house I did, well while it's project is now on hold (or canceled), it's on hold because it gave me a great idea which is not too unrelated to it.

It's going to take me a little while to work out rules to make it fair but the idea is as follows:

It's going to be an online semi turn-based strategy game created using javascript (possibly ajax), php and mysql.

Basically you create an empire (your user account), and then every week a new era/war/whatever you want to call it starts and goes for a month (may change) or until only one side remains. Each battle will only allow 5 (may change) users (to prevent overkill of units, buildings, etc on the map) and it may also be limited to how many units you can have on the field (as one can imagine what would happen if someone filled up all the grid with units, no one would be able to move ). General playing of the game is realtime and you'd have a certain amount of action points each day, but battles would be turn based (you could imagine trying to attack a grid location where the user has since moved before it's updated on your screen). Also to prevent users going afk for extreme lengths of time, a 3 or 5 day activity requirement would be needed otherwise you're removed from the battle and possibly lose some points (may change as it may be unfair)

At the end of each "war" you gain points for your actions, this means that you don't necessarily have to fight each other to gain points/win you can trade, etc to gain points. So essentially war or economy (or both?)

Now later on i'd have to think of what the points could be used for other than saying you're better then someone, maybe unlockable items or skills.

It could be quite a big project and a lot of planning will need to be done to prevent cheating such as blocking multiple accounts from the same ip in the one battle, client side data editting, etc.

So yes hopefully it all works out as i've always wanted to create some form of game and this would be light on pixel art and generally a simple idea (just advanced when it comes to cheat prevention).

Any ideas you guys have would be much appreciated, especially in regards to cheating that could occur.

Site is at:
http://www.pixelkingdom.net/

Speaking of this game, it's being hosted on DreamHost (thought i'd try them), so far they've been pretty good but we'll see as development gets further with the game. They do have very generous limits though which makes me a little suspicious (500gb size, 5tb bandwidth). But we'll see.