echelon

The second prototype was updated. It is now a complete game. Well not really, however it is playable but lacks a concept. A new building was added – the command center. It serves as the main base of a player and can not be destroyed. Mechanisms to attack enemies were also added. A rudimentary ticker was added that gives units to each player depending on how many building he owns. Keyboard scrolling is another feature that was added. Players are now able to build bunkers. The more enemies a player kills the more bunkers he may build. Here’s a screenshot of the current version:

I also released the sourcecode under the GPLv3 and uploaded the files (the first and the second version) to the newly created Google Code project. The name of the project is JSGmap which is short for JavaScript Game Map. The project can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/jsgmap/. Unfortunately it is not possible to upload a public demo of the new version. However there’s a private version running on this server with ticks every 10 minutes. If you would like to take a look please leave a comment.

Over one year after the first prototype was released, the second prototype is finished. It’s yet another graphical user interface for a strategy game.

Go ahead and start the prototype.

As a theme I chose again Starcraft – the ingenious realtime strategy game created by Blizzard Entertainment. Specifically I chose the “Bunker Wars” variation of the game where the players only have marines and bunkers available to play. Here’s what it looks like:

The fist prototype was merely a Google-Maps like scrolling script that could display a section of a huge map and provide a convenient interface to navigate and scroll the map. It was all static JavaScript, no database backend, no unit movement or units no nothing. It looked like this:

The new prototype features access management (which is circumvented in the demo), units are available and they can move and enter or leave bunkers. The map can be scrolled – the displayed map is 8×8 tiles – the actual map size is 100×100.

On the front end the prototype uses asynchronous JavaScript to reload the map without reloading the page and to issue unit movement commands to the server. The javascript library Prototype is used.

The backend consists of a MySQL database with 3 tables (users, map, units). A couple of PHP classes output the main page and two API interfaces are provided for the asynchronous JavaScript calls to update the map and to move a unit. It’s rather simple and functional and probably somewhat resource wasting but it works. It’s tested on Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 and should also work with Internet Explorer 6.