So I thought I'd start again, back to the drawing board. I attempted Nintendo Magazine forums, but the kids were more interested in the storyline or being a beta tester than with actually suggesting any real ideas.

This is the specification for the game. I'm open to any ideas, but this is the criteria:

This game is browser based.
This game is massively multiplayer. NPCs may not be created for battle.
This game is not real time. Actions occur every hour (tick) although you may be able to do a lot of things in real time such as scan areas, etc.
Your character may always online. Safe zones may be created for long periods of time. Travel takes time (ticks).
You can customise your character (ships, weapons, etc) by way of construction and research.
Your actions are performed over time (building takes x hours, etc)

More to be confirmed later, lets get ideas down.

Genre? Such as space, medievil, modern earth, future earth, evolution, etc..

I've had a suggestion for a pirates game. Basically you sail the seas destroying ships.

You can place bounties on enemies heads, upgrade your ships and weapons, and you can build new ships by mining for ores and building at a port. You can trade with other players to build ships for you whilst you mine, or just steal the whole lot in your battleship. The person or people who destroy the pirates get the bounty. If a pirate causes enough trouble it could have a pretty rewarding bounty on it.

You can also capture ships I guess.

I think it's a pretty good idea, and certainly unique afaik.

Sounds cool, and it's not cliched as, for example, space bounty hunters or that kind of thing which I'm sure has been done. I imagine it'd be quite awesome if you could have huge battles between entire fleets of co-operative pirates. That'd be awesome if the game could handle it.

If I had any skills in programming or graphics I'd offer to help, but I don't.

Pirates does sound interesting. Maybe it can be something from modern or future times with a post apocalyptic theme. You steel to survive and you can create your own camp and attack other camps as you please

YARRRGHHH!!!!!

That does sound more appealing to me than a space game. And you're right, space games are a bit cliche for this type of game now, a pirate game would be perfect if it's done right.

How would you limit the sea though? Surely you would sail forever away from the islands, or would it scroll to the top of the ocean map forever?

Oh yeah - you need to include rum. Maybe it heals you or can be traded or something. But it has to be in the game.

eamonn wrote:

QUOTE:
Oh yeah - you need to include rum. Maybe it heals you or can be traded or something. But it has to be in the game.

Lots of rum. Perhaps even mining for rum?

I kid I kid.

I think either a pirate theme or even a medieval theme would work. The building part may seem to work better in something like in medieval times. Maybe like having a bunch of players group together to build a large castle/fort to protect the land that lies beyond it or something.

You're assuming that people want to help eachother and that the land created would be large enough to be played by the number of people in the game. The good thing about space and see is that it is pretty much infinite in that I can expand it all I want and a player can't venture out of it without being placed on the other side of the map. If I expand space or sea, it's not noticable unless someone finds a new island or planet.

SO how is it going to play. I think it should play like starcraft where you get to build a ship or two and hire pirates to attack other ships.

What language are you planning on building this on?

Browser based, so PHP as the background using XHTML, Javascript, AJAX as the front of the game. It's mostly strategy so 3D realtime stuff isn't necessary, although I hope it does have pretty graphics all round.

On ONM the idea of pirate game has exploded pretty far now, I think it's the one we'll stick with.

Basically I've designed a big portion of the database already, I'll be creating a navigation system tomorrow hopefully and then I'll start beta.

Beta will be about 10 mins per tick.

What I want to do is get an island system going, but I need to think of a method of plotting the islands outline coordinates, that way everyone can start at the island, build whatever ship they want (infinite resources during beta) and float around looking for bugs in the navigation system. I can already think of one, but it kind of goes in-hand with the island problem I'm facing.

XML would be a good way to draw up the whole of the map, or even CSV since I can declare a density field to determine if a tile is solid or not to prevent ships from going through it.

My only issue is that this would make the map loading really intense, so for that reason I want to plot only the outline of the island, and have the rest as sea.

Today be suitable for pirate game, argh...... Progress be slow?

Progress be slow, but big and great like 30 wenches with treasure!

Alpha test be comin' soon!

This be good news. I await the plunderin and a gut's a spillin of said alpha test!

How long do you think until alpha starts? For that matter, what will the game have in it? Nobody seems to have taken much interest in helping out with this.