Big Villain

[JohnMunsch]

Big Villain is a game of mad science and trying to take over the world that doesn't take itself too seriously. Build secret lairs, recruit minions and agents, spy on other players, and acquire the parts you need for your world domination scheme.

Design: John Munsch and Darin Clark
Coding: John Munsch (and maybe Darin Clark as well, if I can talk him into it)
Artwork: God only knows
Blog: Any blogging I do will be at http://www.JohnMunsch.com. I'll put up an item there today with more details about the game we designed.

Sadly I have no budget of $1000 or more to spend on this, nor do I have a huge amount of existing game code to draw upon. Hopefully a good design, the fact that I'm committing publicly to participate in this contest, and the many plugins available for Ruby on Rails will carry me through to a good working game by December 11th.

P.S. Anyone planning to do a game who needs any help getting started might benefit from the tutorial work that Luke over at BuildingBrowsergames.com and I have written: http://code.google.com/p/building-browsergames-tutorial/

[Zeggy]

Sounds great! The idea reminds me of a game called Evil Genius

[lewt24]

good luck but damn this competition seems to be getting alot harder and i think im going to have to buck up my ideas about my project

[JohnMunsch]

Yeah, I know it's hideous at the moment, but it's functioning and that's something. It will get prettier later once you can play more of the game.

[xBleuWolfx]

Looks awesome. Also, I'm planning on making a game, in my free time (which is very little), based on the Building Browsergames tutorial.

[JohnMunsch]

It doesn't look much improved from the first one but it is. All five operations actually work no matter what the order or anything, all of them pop up a dialog if necessary to give you a chance to enter in options for the operation (except for Reveal Intelligence, but I'll have that one soon), and you can actually delete the messages that the operations generate.



Here's where I'm beginning on the next big round of operations. All are related to lairs in some fashion. Building them, operations against them by opponents (to find, destroy, or try to steal intelligence from them), etc. But before I could do any of that I have to actually have my set of lairs. So I used Streamlined which quickly gives you an edit interface for model objects without your having to build it. This is the one I'm using to enter in info about the various lairs and the available parts for each lair.

Now, assuming you're not completely bored out of your mind at this point, you might find the attached PDF amusing. It's about a 15 page document that is the design document Darin and I created before I even started the game. It lays out a ton of stuff you will not see in the beta or the first version, probably a lot of stuff that will be six months coming, but you can kind of get a sense for what all the parts are for the game and how I hope to see it come together in the future.

[davidjwest]

Looking good!

[jannesiera]

Nice  , but I have no time to read the PDF though... 

[trollface666]

My god.... Come December 11th, the amount of BBG's I am going to have to try out is going to blow my mind.... But its all good!

[Chris]

I love your design doc I wish I had something like that too...

[JohnMunsch]

Obviously, I did not finish in time, but that's OK, I haven't slowed down much. I spent last night trying to get the look changed to something that wouldn't make your eyes bleed when you looked at it. Hopefully by the time the weekend is over I'll have something I can show.

I seriously underestimated how much work was needed for this game (and how much time I would spend on it) to have thought I could finish it in two months. It has been loads of fun working on it though. There's pretty much nothing that could possibly make me want to stop until it is done now.