Wednesday 26 January 2011

Warrior Empires

We've now got a domain, www.warriorempires.com but nothing much has been moved over so not a lot to look at.  But with the name comes a banner and things are now moving at quite a pace as pixelpix has written most of the code to get a basic version of the game working.

Hopefully we can get a prototype working in the next week or so, will keep updating this as and when any major news breaks.

Wednesday 5 January 2011

Of Maps

We've got a map viewer ready and working now and if you want to look you can see it here:

http://www.ben-hope.com/map_viewer_v5.php

Don't worry about the domain name, it's just a spare one I had, the game won't be called "Ben Hope"!

As you can see from the URL this is version 5 and I am quite pleased with it as it is a very clean piece of code.  Version 1 used CSS divs to position each piece of terrain and that alone was over 100 divs plus a MySQL call for each "square" - not very efficient.

I then realised you don't need a div for each location so there's only one database call for each "row" and the rows are placed using much simpler CSS and so it's quicker and smoother.

At the moment the graphics are only prototypes but the idea will be to inverse any graphics for terrain you don't own and at the moment just cities are "clickable" - these are actually graphical submit buttons on forms, was quite a pain removing all the extra padding some browsers give these items but I did it in the end.

Now on to the cron for production, should be fairly simple he says!

Saturday 18 December 2010

So, welcome

So, its me, davids partner, pixlepix. I am an avid gamer and computer programer. Some of this game was based off a game I was developing almost a year ago, but that version was horrible, full of bugs, bad layout and in general, horrible.
Anyway, let me show you a scenario to preview the game mechanics and to get you excited:

Player a has over a thousand squares on his empire, and 30 citys. Each is pumping out units, which he sends to his borders to prevent enemy invasion. Suddenly, player B comes in from the north, overwhelms his border defense, and takes 25% of player A's land. However, player A masses his troups and takes back the land, and pushes forward into Player B's empire, with heavy losses. Player C, sensing weak borders from player A massing his troups in the north, launches an invasion from the south, cutting off player A's supply of iron, leading to a decline in troup production....

In The Beginning

I've always been a fan of games, since my childhood and the appetite hasn't diminished as I got older.  I've played numerous browser based games too and a I am fairly proficient at coding I decided to have a go at making my own browser game.

I met someone on a game forum who wanted to team up and so between us we are going to write a game - I'll be blogging about how things progress.

We've got a basic idea sorted out, the game will be a strategy/wargame where the player has to explore a random map gathering resources and using those to build up their city and produce units to conquer other players armies.

I've been working on the code that will display the map and my friend Pixelpix has worked on the random map generator that produces the resources on the map.  We're going for  a medieval feel to the game and so resources are going to include Wheat, Iron, Stone and Wood to begin with.

The game is going to be written using PHP with a MySQL database and we've not even got a name for it yet so suggestions are welcome, "Empire Builder" sounds a bit bland!

Hope to update this every week or so, thanks for reading.