Hi!

First time poster, but have been a lurker for some time (getting lot of help of those nice tutorials).

Anywho! I'm currently developing a game. This game is online based and can in many ways look much like the tactical game RISK. You do get one start area, and some units, and then you can expand your area. You will get more units depending on how much area you've got. This is my main idea.

The problem though is what else game dynamics should I implement? How often should one recieve units? The fighting (between opponents) will be entirely turn based. I'm thinking one can stay "inactive" for 12 hours (or something) before other can attack and conquer his land, how does this seem?

Attacking will (as I said turn based), but how should it be implemented? I'm thinking one will get a notification either in game or on phone and have to respond to that within a time interval. The attacking "forces" for now are only assigned by "units". How a battle between X and Y units happen? Only by some luck factor times number of units?

This got kind of messed up, but I hope you got my vague idea. Please respond if you have any toughts on anything, or any ideas. Everything will be considered!

Hey,

If you code your game correctly, you can go about writing this without knowing the answer to the questions

"How a battle between X and Y units happen? Only by some luck factor times number of units?"

If you have an Object called 'Unit' or 'Grunt' or 'Soldier' whatever, then within this give it some fields

int luckFactor;
int armor;
int weaponSkill;

It doesn't really matter, then within this object you could have a fight method so:

Code: Select all

public boolean fight(Soldier opposition){
    boolean win = true;
    if(opposition.getLuckFactor() > this.luckFactor){
     win = false;
   }
   // Here for now you can implement your 'luck'
   // but later on you can change it to any equation armor * weapons etc
   // because it will always return a boolean if they win or lose
   return win;
}


Now you can do the same for a battle of a whole army, obviously you will just have an object 'Army' 'Battalion' 'Legion' with a fight(); method.

So you see you can code them so that the specific's can be changed without the need for mass changing of your code.

It's the same for
"How often should one recieve units"
"inactive" for 12 hours"

If you set these up as global variables

private static final int MAX_TURN_TIME = 12; // this is hours convert to millis if needed
private static final int UNIT_REINFORCMENT_INTERVAL = 5;

You can then continue coding the game and tweek them till you find the right balance.

The bonus about this is you can then have methods that change these (remove fiinal operator). so if you had setReinfTime(int time); you could have 3 level's of difficulty inc/decrementing this each time.

Hope this gives you some idea's and a way forward without knowing the answer

Wow, Blundell, thanks a lot for some good feedback I was mainly thinking of just having "units" and not specify to different kinds of units, but I think you might changed my mind. The game will at least have more depth by making different kinds of units.

blundell wrote:If you have an Object called 'Unit' or 'Grunt' or 'Soldier' whatever, then within this give it some fields

int luckFactor;
int armor;
int weaponSkill;

It doesn't really matter, then within this object you could have a fight method so:

Code: Select all

public boolean fight(Soldier opposition){
    boolean win = true;
    if(opposition.getLuckFactor() > this.luckFactor){
     win = false;
   }
   // Here for now you can implement your 'luck'
   // but later on you can change it to any equation armor * weapons etc
   // because it will always return a boolean if they win or lose
   return win;
}


This seems like a good idea, I could for example implement a interface or extend an abstract class which gives units of different kinds a defend and attack mechanism, very scaleable!

blundell wrote:If you set these up as global variables

private static final int MAX_TURN_TIME = 12; // this is hours convert to millis if needed
private static final int UNIT_REINFORCMENT_INTERVAL = 5;

You can then continue coding the game and tweek them till you find the right balance.

The bonus about this is you can then have methods that change these (remove fiinal operator). so if you had setReinfTime(int time); you could have 3 level's of difficulty inc/decrementing this each time.

I believe this one is a bit more tricky. Since this i a multiplayer game (over the web, kind of MMO) it won't be sufficient to have this on the client side (if that was what you meant). I could implement it on the server side somehow. Does this seem like a decent approach? Some code that update all players "units_recieved" every twelve hours? Roughly this would update every player row based on every area row in my database (if it is based on how many areas one own). And trust me, if I scale this up to the size I want there could be a lot of these areas.

blundell wrote:Hope this gives you some idea's and a way forward without knowing the answer

It sure did! And don't hesitate to give more feedback and tips

Glad you found it insightful

With the units thing, you can start with one class called Unit this can have the variable's armor, weapon, luck. You can then subclass this and have Soldier extends Unit , Warlock extends Unit. Each of these subclasses will have the inherited variables from Unit and you can either override these or add new ones i.e. the Soldier could have a rank variable and the warlock could have a spell's variable. Both could use the superclass's fight() method or again overwrite this. So again you can start with Unit and add to it when you see fit

Hmm no you could have the turn variable's on the client side, with just one master variable on the server side sayin GAME_MODE 1, 2 ,3 (to sync between the two players). I think either way is appropriate.

I would assume the phone would push to the server that 12 hours had past and it needed an update, not the server keeping track of all phones and announcing when 12 hours have past!

Regarding the suggestions: yeah, that would be the utopia, but how can I trust devices? How do I know that an installed version of my game actually is authentic? If I can do that, your solution is by far the best one, but isn't it trivial to download an app, extract the contents, edit the code and install "an modded" version of the app? (http://code.google.com/p/android-apktool/ and http://jack-mannino.blogspot.com/2010/0 ... s-101.html)

Yes they can reverse engineer the code, but not many people are going to do this.
And if you get to the level that people will want to do it, then you will be rich already

You can protect your app from unauthorised copies using : http://developer.android.com/guide/publ ... nsing.html
You could actually use this code to talk to your server, therefore if someone mod's your code to remove it, then your server will stop talking to them.

You can also encode your server call's and other encryption stuff if you really don't trust people

blundell wrote:Yes they can reverse engineer the code, but not many people are going to do this.
And if you get to the level that people will want to do it, then you will be rich already

Hihi, I wish

blundell wrote:You can protect your app from unauthorised copies using : http://developer.android.com/guide/publ ... nsing.html
You could actually use this code to talk to your server, therefore if someone mod's your code to remove it, then your server will stop talking to them.

Ahh, I haven't seen that one before. So when a user logs in, I check his license (which is only valid if I have packed the file) and then allows him to talk to my server? I have already got a simple log in checker (some nice REST-framework which I stumbled upon).

blundell wrote:You can also encode your server call's and other encryption stuff if you really don't trust people

Hehe, people and electronics can't be trusted!

Seems to me like a great addition would be to integrate various social features for the game.

Obviously you'd have the turn notifications, but what about extended social network capabilities?

Perhaps an achievement system a-la "you captured all of Australia, congratulations, you lost the game because your opponent took ASIA." (you said it was like RISK, so I'm just going out on a limb here)

Perhaps you want an even deeper integration with in-game currency to "buy" access to special units / maps and player challenges using that currency.

Now, I have no idea where you could find such software.

You'd have to look far and wide in various locales. My goodness, if only you had some sort of divine signal...

BenjaminJC: Nice hinting ^^. Well, that could be implemented in the game later on, but it is certainly a good idea. As long as I avoid the whole "POST TO FACEBOOK" thingy

The game is taking shape now. I have gotten some game dynamics up and running (what players attack/defend) and so on. I have also implemented the license-thingy from Google, which seems like a pretty nifty thing (compared to their first try). Since the game also requires internet to be played, the whole "you need to verify with Google' server" is really not that bad. I can return with some screenshots later on (although textures are not my main concern at the moment).

As promised, two screenshots, in a pretty early part of the development:

http://folk.ntnu.no/kjetime/autumn/cc.png
http://folk.ntnu.no/kjetime/autumn/sc.png

Comments on the design is highly appreciated, as I got no artistic skills what so ever. I have several other "activities"/screens, but none that I would show just yet.

aspic wrote:As promised, two screenshots, in a pretty early part of the development:

http://folk.ntnu.no/kjetime/autumn/cc.png
http://folk.ntnu.no/kjetime/autumn/sc.png

Comments on the design is highly appreciated, as I got no artistic skills what so ever. I have several other "activities"/screens, but none that I would show just yet.

Ah, the trusty Lorem Ipsum. : D
I had that as the main text on an entire frame in a powerpoint presentation once and pretended to freak out. No one got it : (

Graphically it looks OK. Still slightly rough, but definitely not a deal-breaker.

Yeah, as you may have guessed the goal is to make a space like RISK game (over the internet). The celestial textures are kind of only placeholders atm, so not much work went into them. :>

Mmmmm, though...Planetary Space-risk.

"I have the Crab Nebula."

"I have Betelgeuse"

"I only have a tiny solar system : ("

Hihi, well I plan to make it season based so that no one "allways" win. I have got a lot done today (both server side and client side). I made a much better remake of my "raid system". Which roughly is when one is dispatching units from one celestial to another, either for attacking or for just regrouping. School gotta wait to another day :<

Give s turn limit on celestial bodies, after which they go supernova or turn into black holes and swallow neighboring ones!

Sorry, my imagination is getting the better of me.