My Entry: Iron-Empire

[davidjwest]

Hello

I'm David, a big fan of browser games and amateur (very) web dev.  I'm co-writing this game with Brandon and the game is going to be a war/strategy MMOG.

Feel free to look at the site and the linked forums if you want more information, we're also happy to hear ideas about what to feature in the game:

http://www.iron-empire.com

I doubt we'll get this finished for the deadline as I only heard about this contest a few days ago, the game has been in development for about a week now.  We are aiming to get a prototype in beta for the deadline though, so we're not expecting to win this by a long way, but it may help get us motivated!

Cheers, look forward to seeing some of the other entries, as I say I am a big fan of browser games and have written a site that has reviews of them:

http://www.ogreview.org

Feel free to get anyone who plays your games to go and submit your site and review/rate it.

Thanks.

[trollface666]

Well, try your hardest, and best of luck!

If anything, use this contest as a means of using a deadline to push your work out harder and faster.

[davidjwest]

Thanks, will do and good luck to you too!

I amazed how many people there are writing these games, we must all be mad!

 

[Chris]

I amazed how many people there are writing these games, we must all be mad!
 

That's for sure, we all are mad for sure

[davidjwest]

Here's an update for anyone who is interested.

I've had the idea for this game for a long time, the concept is loosely based on the 1986 PC game called Empire.  I hope this doesn't preclude me from entering the competition, the game will have a lot of original features.

The concept is pretty much designed and documented on the forums and we've written the random map generator script (although it will need improving eventually) and the registration, login, logout and game joining code.

So, the main code is still to be written!

[davidjwest]

Just spent most of the night trying to fix a problem with the map not displaying properly.  I'm using CSS divs to display it but it kept on formatting incorrectly, I'm sure it's the CSS we're using as a background causing some kind of conflict but couldn't find what exactly.  One of the problems with using a template I suppose.  Anyway, fixed it in the end by using a table, not the most elegant solution but it works and we can now work on the more serious stuff!

[davidjwest]

Got a fair bit done since the last update, now ready to start working on movement.

[Tribal]

I amazed how many people there are writing these games, we must all be mad!
 

That's for sure, we all are mad for sure

Mad, or just have no social life

Just spent most of the night trying to fix a problem with the map not displaying properly.  I'm using CSS divs to display it but it kept on formatting incorrectly, I'm sure it's the CSS we're using as a background causing some kind of conflict but couldn't find what exactly.  One of the problems with using a template I suppose.  Anyway, fixed it in the end by using a table, not the most elegant solution but it works and we can now work on the more serious stuff!

I remember trying to make a CSS bar chart. That did not go well. I went with tables in the end as well. It looks like they have us all hooked

[davidjwest]

Yeah, CSS can be a bit mind-numbing at times.

I've got production working now and the first steps towards movement, map looks crummy at the moment but I'll make it nicer once movement and combat are done I think.

We might actually get a prototype version of this done for the deadline, this weekend coming will be crucial though.

[jannesiera]

We might actually get a prototype version of this done for the deadline, this weekend coming will be crucial though.

The weekend coming I will be studying for my exams, unfortunatly  . But I can work on my game in the holidays!! Yeah!! 

[davidjwest]

Movement is now working, the usual tweaks needed and more testing, but this was probably the feature that I was dreading most as I was sure it would be a PITA - turned out fairly simple in the end.

Just need to get combat working and some other minor issues sorted and it will be ready for alpha testing, we should beat the deadline by some margin, can't believe it really.

There is one nagging pain, how to get the maps to show terrain, flags (who owns the terrain) as well as units all on the same image, not worked out a good solution yet for that problem.

[Chris]

There is one nagging pain, how to get the maps to show terrain, flags (who owns the terrain) as well as units all on the same image, not worked out a good solution yet for that problem.

Layered images with alpha channel (GIF). 3 layers total: background (passable terrain, non passable terrain, city), border to indicate ownership (color determine ownership or enemy/neutral/ally/you status), unit icon. I would also add a small bar below the unit but above the border to indicate if the unit has free AP.

As I understand it will be Empire in terms of gameplay, right? How do you plan to resolve the balance problems? In the old Empire, the player who starts first simply kill everyone, it  does not seem something easy to implement as a massive multiplayer with different player joining times. Do you plan making very short rounds, like 2 weeks? Or have other tricks upon you sleeve?

[davidjwest]

Now you're talking Chris!

First of all, I think I've got a solution to the graphics, apparently you can use CSS to "layer" graphics and we'll be exploring that option first, although your idea will also be borne in mind, so thanks for that.  The plan is to use larger terrain graphics as the background for each cell of the table and put any units on top of that with the flag to denote ownership in the top right hand corner.

Regards balance, that's a good point.  In the open ended games, new players will be placed at the map edges which should stop them getting squished immediately as the established players will be fighting each other in the centre.  If that's not enough to stop newbies getting pwned, we'll implement a system where you get bonus units for every turn you missed.  So anyone joining on turn 10 might get an additional 1 infantry unit, someone joining turn 100 might get 5 of them, we'll need to tinker with this to see what works out best.

We'll be having alliances as well which will give weaker players the chance to be on the winning side as we may let alliances as a whole win a game.  Then there's the usual protection option to consider, new players cannot lose their capital (you can't attack it) for x number of turns etc.

As well as the open ended games we'll be having short term games that will probably only last a few weeks, so if you don't like the idea of being squished by someone who was in from the start you can just wait for the next game to begin, which wont be a long wait.

These issues will hopefully be address in the fullness of time, with feedback from players and experiencing what effects these rules actually have, hopefully we can keep players interested long enough for them to stick around.

Some good news is that today I got combat coded and working,  albeit with some minor issues I need to fix.  The first alpha tester have now joined and a game is underway too, I'm not confident enough to call them "beta" testers yet though!

[davidjwest]

Apologies if anyone from here is playing my game, I found a serious bug in the map generation which corrupted the existing game so had to delete it.  Priority today is to fix that bug and start a new game.

[davidjwest]

Update:

I've added spies, so you can find out about enemy cities and transports, you can build and move them but not load units onto them as yet.

It seems surprisingly stable (for my coding abilities) and the only known issues shouldn't affect general play.

The problem is when generating new maps, it takes too long and I'll need to get this done overnight with a cron job.

Busily adding more features ready for the deadline, I wont get everything in that I want to but should have quite a feature rich game I hope.

[Chris]

Moved starting infantry on enemy city:

Warning: mysql_result(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/iron-empire.com/httpdocs/includes/game_menu.php on line 253

Warning: mysql_result(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/iron-empire.com/httpdocs/includes/game_menu.php on line 254

Fatal error: Function name must be a string in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/iron-empire.com/httpdocs/includes/game_menu.php on line 258

[davidjwest]

What time was that?  I made some changes earlier today and you may have got errors during that time.  Could you try again please?

[davidjwest]

OK, looks like I made a new bug, just sorting it now, thanks for letting me know.

 

[davidjwest]

Fixed it, another schoolboy error!

 

I'm testing combat at the moment so you may see some strange stuff, but it shouldn't fall over this time.

 

[Chris]

Unit production change not working (probably).
Unit HP loses might not work sometimes (sometimes it work for sure, but I think there were more HP loss notices than HP changes).
You seem to have testing problems on regular basis. I would create some cheat features (put an unit on the map, time fast forward, etc) so you can easily test on your localhost.


The game is 'heavy', it has all cons of complex games while being simple in its core. It should be the opposite Especially the interface is very unfriendly (to join the game I just click several various buttons until I'm in "worlds, games, WorldHQ,MiniGameHQ - no idea what are these..."). It took me a few days to discover how to change unit production in a city. No idea where my units are on the map. A page with list of units & cities would be nice.

Gameplay:
How do you handle battles with several units on each side? Do you always lose in the defence if forces are equal (it seems like that now)? Does defeated units retreat to unoccupied space or are destroyed? Can one tile be occupied with units of more than one player? How do you determine new player base placement (created at a certain range from other players, or maybe a random neutral city is selected as the base)?

[davidjwest]

Unit production is working OK, at least it is for me and the Cron report does show units being created, but I will look into it.

To be honest normally I wouldn't have even considered opening the game even for alpha (or pre-beta) testing as it's still being heavily developed, but due to the impending deadline for the competition I though it was a good idea to open it so we could get sme kind of volume testing to iron out the worst bugs.  Time will tell if that was a good idea or not, you learn from your mistakes though!

Combat is a known problem, I just need time to to some testing, it does seem to work in essence but the defender's stats aren't being calculated properly and therefore they always lose, need to isolate what exactly is going wrong there.

I'm going to remove the "World HQ" and "Mini Game HQ" options for now as you're right, it's overly complex, you just need to login you can see the games on the homepage, the idea of these extra screens was to give more details but we've not had time to code that yet.

The list of units/cities report is on my to-do list

The game is simple at the moment but the idea long term is to make it more complex, without detracting from the game-play, but we do need to rearrange things to make it more user friendly, I agree.

Combat with several units, when finished, will be something like this:

The attacker initiates the attack by trying to move onto an enemy location.  Both sides then face off against each other, the defender getting a modifier for defensive terrain and also for having other friendly units adjacent to them.  Once artillery are available they will also give supporting fire.  If a unit has been involved in combat, they fight with a penalty, so several relatively weak units will stand a chance against a stronger unit if they can outflank them etc.

I've gone for this system rather than working out combat at the end of the turn as it's easier to code and more gratifying for the person online, although the defender will probably need a better idea of what happend than just the news item they get currently.

There's still a long way to go and coding part-time when you've got a day job and young family is tough, but enjoyable, I hope the game has at least enough redeeming features for you to see some potential in there somewhere!

 

[Chris]

Unit production is working OK, at least it is for me and the Cron report does show units being created, but I will look into it.

Production yes, but you can not change the production type.

To be honest normally I wouldn't have even considered opening the game even for alpha (or pre-beta) testing as it's still being heavily developed, but due to the impending deadline for the competition I though it was a good idea to open it so we could get sme kind of volume testing to iron out the worst bugs.  Time will tell if that was a good idea or not, you learn from your mistakes though!

Of course it was a good idea! Year from now no one will remember that it was half broken upon "unofficial alpha release before deadline" while the feedback and testing you got now will last forever

I hope the game has at least enough redeeming features for you to see some potential in there somewhere!

It does not matter what I see, I have a bad eyesight, it is important what players will see

[davidjwest]

Thanks, I'll test the production again, the map has been giving me nightmares for the past few days but I think I've almost cracked it now.

 

[davidjwest]

We just started a new game going for the competition, but I really need a few more people playing to give it a good test!

There are no known bugs at the moment, so please sign up and change that!

Turns have been increased to one per hour to make the pace a bit quicker, feedback has been that it's too slow to get going so this should help.

Feedback and suggestions on the forum linked to the game, or here is fine, I really appreciate any feedback, even if it's just to say the game sucks big time!

Thanks!

[Chris]

Feedback and suggestions on the forum linked to the game, or here is fine, I really appreciate any feedback, even if it's just to say the game sucks big time!

The game sucks big time. Joking

First, the whole "lobby" part is much more clear now. I knew from the start where to click to join Flags are nice. The "Choose Avatar" button is not visible enough.
OK joined... now looking where to click next And looking... OK, logged out and logged in. Now it is visble. Yeah, it took me almost 2 minutes to figure out. I'm proud of myself that I found it

I'm in the game. Don't like the gfx, but seen worse, can live with it. I do not like that I see an enemy and a big red enemy army icon. Too near to me. Oh well, I will need to gamble then. The unit production is OK, movement is much more clear than before. I was able to moved only 1 square, unacceptable, I'm not going to login every hour to move my army... So, with 3 clicks I finished my "playing"

Conclusion. The changes are good, interface much, much better (except for enter the game after join, this one sux even more than before). Gameplay is worse than before. Only one unit and very slow at top of it. How can I conquer territory and defend my city at the some time? The survival depends if the enemy will log in after 4 hours first (range of my city) or if it will be me. Or maybe the units will be produced on my city before? Well, we will see. Anyway, not much of strategy at the first glance (2 infantry + 1 armor at the start would be so much better and better range of units).