1) Each narrator likes to add his/her own unique features. Designing a platform that allows that kind of flexibility will be a nightmare.
True. I suppose you could design a Phalla-style game that's a little simpler than on the forum. Keep the concept of voting as the primary player interaction, have turns progress automatically (which would keep games going even if players drop out), have victory conditions for different player groups.
I too like the SimCity-State idea from before, though I'm thinking along the lines of having one city that players compete to control (like Roman senators, or something). This would make it somewhat easier to keep track of, and could almost become a board game itself.
2) We'll need to implement a public discussion forum and a PM system. Which is silly, since we already have a public discussion forum and a PM system right here.
Also true. Of cousre, nothing says that the game design has to be exactly like Phalla.
But I'm also open to creating board games, if someone has an idea to start from. In that second case, however, we should create a general game server that can support several different board games, so we can expand by adding new games in the future.
Someone mentioned possibly doing a JRPG tactics-style game, and that would be very cool. But I'd simply love to help on any game, whatever it may be.
I'd gladly help in any non-programming way, ideas, sound-effects, what have you. But I'd -love- to be involved somehow with this. I'd be happying being the guy who does menial work for hours on end if needed.
With games like that, the logic is very simple ... the bigger issues will be putting together the netcode (though this can be handled in a largely plug-and-play fashion, or at least bastardized thoroughly), and the more dicey one of coming up with a platform that will be able to play the games.
Do we want to have it set up as something truly modular, or just a back-end into which the games are hard-coded?
I'm a senior software engineer, but my main skill set probably wouldn't be too helpful. If possible, I'd like to assist the development, but not be a main programmer due to time constraints. Getting familiar with some new languages by doing code review/testing might be up my alley.
Nerissa, I'll fire you a PM with more details, though it's pretty difficult to rate my own skills.
I think that the internet has been for years on the path to creating what is essentially an electronic Necronomicon: A collection of blasphemous unrealities so perverse that to even glimpse at its contents, if but for a moment, is to irrevocably forfeit a portion of your sanity.
Xbox - PearlBlueS0ul, Steam
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
How about we make a mediawiki extension that allows for extra rules/scripts to be run on template variables?
You can already do amazing stuff with mediawiki templates, like display chess diagrams. If you could extend that through scripts to not let you edit the page if you weren't the player in the competition, or if the move you made was illegal, you'd have a board game framework with user profiles right there.
This might sound a bit silly, but think about it. Mediawiki is the wiki implementation out there. If PA was responsible for an extension that enabled it to be a simple game development/playing platform that would be majorly awesome.
Templates are a relatively easy, powerful and safe way formatting pages inside wikimedia. This means people can easily collaborate on designing templates. We'd have to think of how the scripts the template hooks into are made up though, which might be the hardest part. Mediawiki is based on PHP, so it also depends on how many people we have with PHP experience.
Think about what you get for 'free' if we base our game on a wiki system:
A user profile system
Game history logging
Safe and easy text formatting system many people already know
Runs in your web browser
Easy to collaborate and extend from (you can use the wiki system itself as your design and collaboration tool)
Reliable basis to build from
I haven't really looked around yet if there already are extensions that enable templates to be used this way, but I will do that soon.
If anyone has any questions how I see this work, feel free to ask.
If we ultimately do this as a wikimedia extension, put me up as a programmer. I don't have much PHP or webscripting experience, but I am a 3rd year CS student.
Other types of games
I'm not sure what a "BBS Door Game" is, so someone's going to have to give me a bit of an overview... I suspect it's like the old text adventure games?
Sort of, in that they were ANSI text based. There's some web versions, like this adaptation of Legend of the Red Dragon (the definitive Door game):
Essentially, text-based multiplayer games, turn based but players could take their turns (limited per day) when they wanted, so player interaction did not require the other player to be on at that moment.
However, we could implement some Phalla tools that the person running the game could use in their games if they wished. For example, we could implement a vote counter, where people would log in to the server to make their votes rather than voting in the thread, so they could be automatically tallied, voting could be automatically opened / closed for the day, etc. The narrator could choose when they set up the game whether to make votes public or not, and some other features to be determined later.
This kind of app would be very simple to implement, one or two people could do this with no trouble. Maybe this could get done in addition to another major project.
Proto on
and her knees up on the glove compartment
took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like rootbeer
If so, then I think a more multiplayer friendly kind of Wesnoth. And it's open source so there should not be any disputes about ripping the idea. Basically if we figure out a way that you don't need to wait for everyone elses turn, then you should be able to play 12 people on a larger map, now obviously some kind of turn keeping mechanism will be required, but as long as you are not near each other then one person going before another really don't matter too much. Maybe it will be really hard to implement? Well I only know a small bit of java so I dunno.
If they don't have to be Board games I would like a working multiplayer mixed up version of "Puyo Puyo"
Should be easy to program, so it's a good starting point, and it's alot of fun, so it's actually worth while. Add some power-ups, +2 player capability and some other stuff
And another idea I've never seen (though that might just be because I havn't looked hard enough) would be, and not sure how demanding this would be on the servers, but I fear more, multi(4 or 6) and (maybe) 3D pong. So basically a cube, with maybe more than one ball, 6 players (or if not 3D; obviously 4, but then it works just as well having one wall 'closed'). Keeping the game play more continuous than most Pong copies would also help in making it less boring due to long wait times. But that too should be fairly easily done.
But outside of these idea's I can write a bit of Java.
fjafjan on
Yepp, THE Fjafjan (who's THE fjafjan?)
- "Proving once again the deadliest animal of all ... is the Zoo Keeper" - Philip J Fry
So in the spirit of keeping things simple I'm proposing D&Dopoly. Posters and threads could take the place of properties and chance/community chest cards, game pieces could be particularly nerdy items/characters, etc. It seems to me like something that coule be relatively (I'm assuming) simple to program while allowing for some creativity on the artists' part.
ok, I've updated the skill sets for everyone who has e-mailed or PM-ed me so far. If you have, please check to make sure I didn't make any mistakes. (I translated ranges to averages, so 8-9 became 8.5, mostly because I couldn't be bothered to go back and tell it not to format as a date)
I'm going to add a link to that sheet in the OP so it's easier to find.
I'm slightly concerned about Scrabble, and to a lesser extent Monopoly (or any -opoly), because of legal issues. Hasboro already has a suit out against Scrabulous (although my understanding is that is at least in part because they're profiting from the ad revenues, which we wouldn't be doing). We would have to come up with something at least slightly different.
Have we got anyone versed in the legalities of this stuff to find out exactly how different it would have to be to be safe? Changing the pattern of single / double letter / word squares? Making them random? Changing the number of each letter available? All of the above? Next time I talk to my lawyer friend (who at least for a while was interested in IP law, I don't know how far he ever got though) I'll see what he can tell me.
I also think a trivia game of some sort would be cool, but someone(s) would be stuck researching and typing in all of the questions & answers, and I'm not sure if anyone would be up for such a tedious job. Maybe we could make that a forum-wide challenge? Provide a form and require anyone who uses the server to provide at least 5 (or some other reasonable number) trivia questions & answers when they register, with the option of providing more at any time. Then all we would just need someone to check them over for typos, maybe clean up the grammar / wording, make sure they're in the correct category, and authorize them to be included.
The mediawiki is definitely worth looking into, some links to more information would be helpful if you think it might actually work out.
I also think a trivia game of some sort would be cool, but someone(s) would be stuck researching and typing in all of the questions & answers, and I'm not sure if anyone would be up for such a tedious job. Maybe we could make that a forum-wide challenge? Provide a form and require anyone who uses the server to provide at least 5 (or some other reasonable number) trivia questions & answers when they register, with the option of providing more at any time. Then all we would just need someone to check them over for typos, maybe clean up the grammar / wording, make sure they're in the correct category, and authorize them to be included.
The elegant way to do it would be to make inputting questions fun and part of the game. A bit like the way the 20 questions things online improve themselves the more they are played.
I also think a trivia game of some sort would be cool, but someone(s) would be stuck researching and typing in all of the questions & answers, and I'm not sure if anyone would be up for such a tedious job. Maybe we could make that a forum-wide challenge? Provide a form and require anyone who uses the server to provide at least 5 (or some other reasonable number) trivia questions & answers when they register, with the option of providing more at any time. Then all we would just need someone to check them over for typos, maybe clean up the grammar / wording, make sure they're in the correct category, and authorize them to be included.
The elegant way to do it would be to make inputting questions fun and part of the game. A bit like the way the 20 questions things online improve themselves the more they are played.
Hmm.... you mean something like this?
I set up a game vs 2 other people. On my turn, I pick a category and type in a question and the correct answer, and the first of them to answer gets a point. If nobody gets it right, I get 2 points (since I'm playing against 2 people). Turns could pass in one of two ways... it could either be strictly round-robin, or the person who answered correctly could get to ask the next question (if nobody gets it right, the same person asks another).
All questions typed in would go into the database, with some sort of a rating of how many times they were asked and how many times they were answered correctly, so questions that have been around a while should have a pretty accurate difficulty level, although a manual difficulty level could be assigned as well. Maybe all players could rate the difficulty of each question, and a weighted average could be assigned as a starting point.
Once the database is big enough, we could include solo play or the option for all players to compete to answer the same questions Jeopardy!-style.
Of course, some method of reviewing / editing / deleting questions would have to be provided.
No go on the mediawiki extension. We would have to hack up some server side scripting support before we would be able to write the game itself. It's better if we use something that is actually suited to program games in.
We could use a CMS with scripting support like Zope. Most web browser games are written from the ground up in PHP however, and use their own non-generic user/content management system. It seems so wasteful to do it from scratch.
Start with things we KNOW aren't going to get us into legal trouble: chess, backgammon, trivia, poker (which should be ok as long as no real money changes hands), gin rummy, cribbage, etc.
Meanwhile, we can work on (a) ensuring legality and/or obtaining permission for things like Scrabble, PA-opoly, etc. and (b) designing our own really cool game
I also think a trivia game of some sort would be cool, but someone(s) would be stuck researching and typing in all of the questions & answers, and I'm not sure if anyone would be up for such a tedious job. Maybe we could make that a forum-wide challenge? Provide a form and require anyone who uses the server to provide at least 5 (or some other reasonable number) trivia questions & answers when they register, with the option of providing more at any time. Then all we would just need someone to check them over for typos, maybe clean up the grammar / wording, make sure they're in the correct category, and authorize them to be included.
The elegant way to do it would be to make inputting questions fun and part of the game. A bit like the way the 20 questions things online improve themselves the more they are played.
Hmm.... you mean something like this?
I set up a game vs 2 other people. On my turn, I pick a category and type in a question and the correct answer, and the first of them to answer gets a point. If nobody gets it right, I get 2 points (since I'm playing against 2 people). Turns could pass in one of two ways... it could either be strictly round-robin, or the person who answered correctly could get to ask the next question (if nobody gets it right, the same person asks another).
I'd say it would make more sense if it was something like the asker only gets a point if a proportion of the others get the question right (eg. half of them/at least one). Then if your question is too hard you don't score points, but if its too easy you give away lots of points to the other players. Then you are rewarded for coming up with hard but not impossible questions. Other than that it sounds like a fun system though.
I also think a trivia game of some sort would be cool, but someone(s) would be stuck researching and typing in all of the questions & answers, and I'm not sure if anyone would be up for such a tedious job. Maybe we could make that a forum-wide challenge? Provide a form and require anyone who uses the server to provide at least 5 (or some other reasonable number) trivia questions & answers when they register, with the option of providing more at any time. Then all we would just need someone to check them over for typos, maybe clean up the grammar / wording, make sure they're in the correct category, and authorize them to be included.
The elegant way to do it would be to make inputting questions fun and part of the game. A bit like the way the 20 questions things online improve themselves the more they are played.
Hmm.... you mean something like this?
I set up a game vs 2 other people. On my turn, I pick a category and type in a question and the correct answer, and the first of them to answer gets a point. If nobody gets it right, I get 2 points (since I'm playing against 2 people). Turns could pass in one of two ways... it could either be strictly round-robin, or the person who answered correctly could get to ask the next question (if nobody gets it right, the same person asks another).
I'd say it would make more sense if it was something like the asker only gets a point if a proportion of the others get the question right (eg. half of them/at least one). Then if your question is too hard you don't score points, but if its too easy you give away lots of points to the other players. Then you are rewarded for coming up with hard but not impossible questions. Other than that it sounds like a fun system though.
That sounds good... I was thinking of more of a "buzz in" type of thing, but there's no reason to not let everyone have a chance at every question, it's not like hearing someone else answer is going to give it away to everyone else. Maybe after a set amount of time, everyone's answer (plus the correct one) gets revealed and then points are awarded.
Your way kinda changes the strategy for a 2-player game, though, because the asker would never get points. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, it just means that play style would be different in a 2-player game than a 3+ player game.
One thing to consider, though, is spelling / typos... it really sucks to know the answer and get it wrong due to a typo, or because you can't spell for shit. On the other hand, solely multiple-guess trivia games are sorta lame. Would it be reasonable for the asker to have the ability to say "close enough" in case of a misspelled answer? Or maybe let all players vote on which answers get points?
One thing to consider, though, is spelling / typos... it really sucks to know the answer and get it wrong due to a typo, or because you can't spell for shit. On the other hand, solely multiple-guess trivia games are sorta lame. Would it be reasonable for the asker to have the ability to say "close enough" in case of a misspelled answer? Or maybe let all players vote on which answers get points?
That would mean that the asker receives and reviews all the answers, rather than writes the Q/A ahead of time and stores it in the DB (which is what I thought your game would be).
Another option would be to have multiple answers for a question, so the question writer would try to anticipate all possible variations of the answer. Say it's a question about JFK, the answers would include JFK, Kennedy, Kenedy, John F Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, etc.
One thing to consider, though, is spelling / typos... it really sucks to know the answer and get it wrong due to a typo, or because you can't spell for shit. On the other hand, solely multiple-guess trivia games are sorta lame. Would it be reasonable for the asker to have the ability to say "close enough" in case of a misspelled answer? Or maybe let all players vote on which answers get points?
That would mean that the asker receives and reviews all the answers, rather than writes the Q/A ahead of time and stores it in the DB (which is what I thought your game would be).
Another option would be to have multiple answers for a question, so the question writer would try to anticipate all possible variations of the answer. Say it's a question about JFK, the answers would include JFK, Kennedy, Kenedy, John F Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, etc.
The one thing I have learned in my programming career... you will never anticipate all of the different ways a user can mangle even the shortest words. Not that your idea isn't good, and I think that we do need to have some provision for that, I just wonder if there isn't some way to make it even more spelling-tolerant. Unfortunately, that's one of those judgment things that computers aren't really good at. Of course, these days there's no excuse to be running a browser w/o a spell checker, so maybe it's less of an issue than I'm making it out to be.
You can use a bubble sort to check for misspellings!
:rotten fruit thrown at stage:
EDIT: But really, I can envision an algorithm that could generate a "splash" of answers from the one correctly-spelled answer. Mangling the spelling of a word may make it tiresome to grok for a human, but very rarely will it transform it into a different word. So, because of this, it's linguistically safe to use a very broad scatter of transformations of the answer. You can have the routine run as part of the answer-check, so that we don't need to use database space to store all of the permutations.
You can use a bubble sort to check for misspellings!
:rotten fruit thrown at stage:
EDIT: But really, I can envision an algorithm that could generate a "splash" of answers from the one correctly-spelled answer. Mangling the spelling of a word may make it tiresome to grok for a human, but very rarely will it transform it into a different word. So, because of this, it's linguistically safe to use a very broad scatter of transformations of the answer. You can have the routine run as part of the answer-check, so that we don't need to use database space to store all of the permutations.
Only if you're not missing any letters.
Besides, that would lead to hilarious results:
"Which president had an affair with Marylin Monroe?"
"fkennyjnedho"
"Correct, it's John F Kennedy!"
Thinking about it, an Apples to Apples clone might be a good way to test out databases, client communication, and selection. You'd need to keep a list of both types of cards, and every round stream a card to every player that didn't deal on the last round as well as the card to match. Each client would prompt the player to select from one of his cards, and the client would submit the chosen card back to the host. The host would then send all of the cards to the dealer, who would select one of those and have the client send back the chosen card. The host would then award the winner the round. No complex logic would be required, just a little bit of information passing and chosing from selections.
Normally it'd be trivial to implement, but I'm curious whether we could set it up so that the clients don't have to actually have the game built into them. Instead, at the start of the game the host would notify the clients what UI elements will be necessary and how to fill them, and would tell the client whenever one of those values would need to be changed. It would be up to the client to figure out how to implement the messages sent by the host, which could be done in any number of ways as long as the message protocol remains intact.
You can use a bubble sort to check for misspellings!
:rotten fruit thrown at stage:
EDIT: But really, I can envision an algorithm that could generate a "splash" of answers from the one correctly-spelled answer. Mangling the spelling of a word may make it tiresome to grok for a human, but very rarely will it transform it into a different word. So, because of this, it's linguistically safe to use a very broad scatter of transformations of the answer. You can have the routine run as part of the answer-check, so that we don't need to use database space to store all of the permutations.
Only if you're not missing any letters.
Besides, that would lead to hilarious results:
"Which president had an affair with Marylin Monroe?"
"fkennyjnedho"
"Correct, it's John F Kennedy!"
What does it matter if a letter is missing? You can accommodate for that just as easily as any other permutation, since the seed for generating the splash is the answer in the database and not the user-proposed answer.
Also, although your strawman is indeed hilarious, it's not something we realistically need to fear. :P
The other thing that everyone is glossing over, by the by, is login / lobby area / tying it all together bit.
I suspect one (small) team will be working on that while others are working on the first actual game(s), and while much less fun, it's pretty necessary.
The other thing that everyone is glossing over, by the by, is login / lobby area / tying it all together bit.
I suspect one (small) team will be working on that while others are working on the first actual game(s), and while much less fun, it's pretty necessary.
I've asked a few times now but never saw a response on how we want to actually structure this, and also a lot of other people have proposed ideas or asked the question but gotten a vacuum back. So, you're sort of the de facto leader, so I propose it to you.
What sort of structure did you want to use? Are we hard-coding the entire thing, or specifically designing a modular platform with shared assets? Is it going to be proprietary, or use some form of existing implementation (a la the mediawiki suggestion posted)?
Jothki, I like your idea. A flexible client would be a lot more fun to write and could be easily used for other games.
Nerissa, I think the login/lobby would be a bit more involved that just trivial depending on what we want to do with it. Tying everything together could even be one of the more difficult aspects if the design isn't quite as tight as it could be (or changes drastically as these things tend to do).
I think that the internet has been for years on the path to creating what is essentially an electronic Necronomicon: A collection of blasphemous unrealities so perverse that to even glimpse at its contents, if but for a moment, is to irrevocably forfeit a portion of your sanity.
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If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
Well, I do think that at some point we need to discuss it, and now is as good a time as any. I don't want to just come out and say "this is how I think it should be so this is how we're going to do it"
My ideas, though, are as follows:
(1) Make it as modular as possible... we don't want the overall structure to break when new games are added, and creating shared tools will make future development go faster.
(2) Registration / sign in required, obviously, and signing in will take you to some sort of game menu
(3) Games should be able to be started "open" (will accept anyone who joins) or "invite only" (if you make specific plans to play chess with me, one of us will start the game and invite the other). Open games should show who is currently in that game.
(4) Some sort of leader board should probably be maintained for various games
(5) Eventually, I'd like to see the opportunity to set up a tournament bracket that automatically updates the winners / losers and moves them along appropriately
(6) An IRC-type chat area would be nice but by no means necessary. A quick "shout out" box might be nice.
(7) Turns should be able to be returned real-time, but also should be able to take several days to get back to.
(8) I already have some plans laid out for assigning project IDs, etc. but I think it's too soon for that level of detail.
Anything else anyone would like to suggest on that front?
(6) An IRC-type chat area would be nice but by no means necessary. A quick "shout out" box might be nice.
That'd be easy enough for the individual games to handle, as well as for the server for a waiting room. A shared tool to manage that could be useful.
We need to decide early on how much role a master server would have. Would all clients constantly stay connected to it, or would it just serve as a matchmaker for largely independent game servers that the client ignores when it's connected to a game?
I'd prefer to have the game servers be completely independent from the matchmaking servers, but that could just be because it would be a hell of a lot easier to design. Games could simply broadcast their status and possibly information about the players to one or more matchmaking servers, and the matchmaking servers would provide an interface allowing waiting clients to see what games the server knows about and what their status is, and inform the client how to connect to the server that they chose. You could also rig it so that clients could send chat into a game from the matchmaker, and the game could broadcast replies back.
The other thing that everyone is glossing over, by the by, is login / lobby area / tying it all together bit.
I suspect one (small) team will be working on that while others are working on the first actual game(s), and while much less fun, it's pretty necessary.
Has it been decided whether we are going software or web-based for this whole thing?
Web adds a bunch more complexity, but makes updates way easier to do.
Proto on
and her knees up on the glove compartment
took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like rootbeer
One thing to consider, though, is spelling / typos... it really sucks to know the answer and get it wrong due to a typo, or because you can't spell for shit. On the other hand, solely multiple-guess trivia games are sorta lame. Would it be reasonable for the asker to have the ability to say "close enough" in case of a misspelled answer? Or maybe let all players vote on which answers get points?
That would mean that the asker receives and reviews all the answers, rather than writes the Q/A ahead of time and stores it in the DB (which is what I thought your game would be).
Sounds like you could do both:
They would write the question and supply a correct answer . . .
Asker: "Q: What is the capital of Nepal? A: Kathmandu"
[question posed to players, question and answer both go into database]
Answerers then make their attempt to answer . . .
Player 1: "Cincinnati"
Player 2: "Catmando"
Player 3: "Boddah"
[all four answers, these three and the correct one, are then revealed]
Asker could then select which ones were correct (and this wouldn't affect the "correct" answer already submitted to the database). I guess the only problem is that the Asker needs to be honest/reasonably forgiving.
The answers could be presented to the Questioner randomly, so the Questioner doesn't know who submitted which answers.
The game could automatically recognise "exact match" answers that match the Answer the Questioner put in when creating the Q/A and then all the others that don't "exact match" can be manually evaluated when presented to the Questioner.
So, I suppose the Questioner could choose to not accept the incorrectly spelled answer... if they were a hard ass. But at least they couldn't screw someone out of an actual right answer.
[Edit]
The answers are presented anonymously so that the Questioner can't play favourites.
Neat topic. I don't have any formal programming experience with mainstream languages, but I do have a bit of experience with MATLAB, which is a computing program that does have a lot of high-level programming elements, and I could probably pick up or read some languages if given some sample code to go off. I guess I lack the drive to go out and explicitly learn a new language though...
I think the Mafia / Phalla idea could be worth looking into some more. I suppose there's a number of different levels we can go with it:
1) Tools for adjucating games. Rounds 'tick' at set periods (such as every 24 hours), and results are automatically relayed to participants after each round has passed. However, regular discussion between players is done outside of the tools, such as is done currently in this forum. Traditional Mafia games may be played by setting the round to tick at five to ten-minute intervals and having all players use a common chat client. Options will be available for common special powers to be set as well as some customizable abilities creatable by combining aspects of classic abilities.
2) Integrate a chat client or forum system to play the game all within the same pages / program.
3) Tools for other Phalla-like or non-Phalla games. The Etrian Odyssey game currently running in this forum may be a good example of something that could be programmed up. Another idea that's close to me is Phalla Royale... I'd love to see it in an online game form.
The other thing that everyone is glossing over, by the by, is login / lobby area / tying it all together bit.
I suspect one (small) team will be working on that while others are working on the first actual game(s), and while much less fun, it's pretty necessary.
Has it been decided whether we are going software or web-based for this whole thing?
Web adds a bunch more complexity, but makes updates way easier to do.
I like web, both because of updates and because that makes it platform-independent, and I don't know how many *nix / Mac people we have around, but I'm sure we don't want to do 3 different versions of everything. I'm actually thinking applets are the way to go, unless someone knows a good reason not to do it that way.
BTW, I actually have 2 reasons for expecting a smaller team on the lobby stuff than the games. First, I suspect that particular team will have to be working even more closely together than a game team, since there are fewer logical divisions of functionality, and second because I suspect fewer people are going to actually WANT to work on that part of the project. Whenever possible, I hope to have people working on projects they actually want to work on.
Personally, I want to work on ALL of them, but that's not really possible. I'm expecting to put myself on the lobby team unless we get a lot of people who actually want to work on that.
(A) Discussing overall platform / lobby area construction
(B) Mostly mapped out desired functionality of a trivia game
(C) Need someone to determine legalities / work on getting permission for a Scrabble clone / knockoff, a D&D-opoly game, and a Settlers of Catan client
(D) It would be really cool to design our own game altogether
(E) Suggestion made that we start off on obviously public-domain games while waiting on (C) and (D) above
(F) Suggestion made to implement tools for Phalla / other forum game narrators to incorporate into their games, leaving the discussion part here in a thread / PMs
Well, as far as I know, Hasbro can claim copyright for the look of the game (i.e. the board layout), but can't actually copyright the rules themselves. I don't know how that impacts things like letter distribution, but as long as you changed the board layout and stayed away from copying exactly the colors/design of bonus spaces you should be okay for that.
However, personally I'd say there's not a lot of point to making an online Scrabble-type game as Scrabulous is pretty huge to fill that niche (at least as long as they don't get taken down legally).
The same concept should apply to Monopoly, so if you make the board different, change the spaces/cards/etc, you should be okay.
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True. I suppose you could design a Phalla-style game that's a little simpler than on the forum. Keep the concept of voting as the primary player interaction, have turns progress automatically (which would keep games going even if players drop out), have victory conditions for different player groups.
I too like the SimCity-State idea from before, though I'm thinking along the lines of having one city that players compete to control (like Roman senators, or something). This would make it somewhat easier to keep track of, and could almost become a board game itself.
Also true. Of cousre, nothing says that the game design has to be exactly like Phalla.
I like this idea.
Another thing we might consider is starting with things like chess or backgammon, and maybe hearts or some other card games.
I'd gladly help in any non-programming way, ideas, sound-effects, what have you. But I'd -love- to be involved somehow with this. I'd be happying being the guy who does menial work for hours on end if needed.
Do we want to have it set up as something truly modular, or just a back-end into which the games are hard-coded?
Nerissa, I'll fire you a PM with more details, though it's pretty difficult to rate my own skills.
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
You can already do amazing stuff with mediawiki templates, like display chess diagrams. If you could extend that through scripts to not let you edit the page if you weren't the player in the competition, or if the move you made was illegal, you'd have a board game framework with user profiles right there.
This might sound a bit silly, but think about it. Mediawiki is the wiki implementation out there. If PA was responsible for an extension that enabled it to be a simple game development/playing platform that would be majorly awesome.
Templates are a relatively easy, powerful and safe way formatting pages inside wikimedia. This means people can easily collaborate on designing templates. We'd have to think of how the scripts the template hooks into are made up though, which might be the hardest part. Mediawiki is based on PHP, so it also depends on how many people we have with PHP experience.
Think about what you get for 'free' if we base our game on a wiki system:
A user profile system
Game history logging
Safe and easy text formatting system many people already know
Runs in your web browser
Easy to collaborate and extend from (you can use the wiki system itself as your design and collaboration tool)
Reliable basis to build from
I haven't really looked around yet if there already are extensions that enable templates to be used this way, but I will do that soon.
If anyone has any questions how I see this work, feel free to ask.
If we ultimately do this as a wikimedia extension, put me up as a programmer. I don't have much PHP or webscripting experience, but I am a 3rd year CS student.
In my version of scrabble, dirty words are extra points.
Sort of, in that they were ANSI text based. There's some web versions, like this adaptation of Legend of the Red Dragon (the definitive Door game):
Legend of the Green Dragon
Also, Duels.com is a similar, but much newer, game of a similar type.
And the Wikipedia link for further research.
Essentially, text-based multiplayer games, turn based but players could take their turns (limited per day) when they wanted, so player interaction did not require the other player to be on at that moment.
This kind of app would be very simple to implement, one or two people could do this with no trouble. Maybe this could get done in addition to another major project.
took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like rootbeer
If so, then I think a more multiplayer friendly kind of Wesnoth. And it's open source so there should not be any disputes about ripping the idea. Basically if we figure out a way that you don't need to wait for everyone elses turn, then you should be able to play 12 people on a larger map, now obviously some kind of turn keeping mechanism will be required, but as long as you are not near each other then one person going before another really don't matter too much. Maybe it will be really hard to implement? Well I only know a small bit of java so I dunno.
If they don't have to be Board games I would like a working multiplayer mixed up version of "Puyo Puyo"
Should be easy to program, so it's a good starting point, and it's alot of fun, so it's actually worth while. Add some power-ups, +2 player capability and some other stuff
And another idea I've never seen (though that might just be because I havn't looked hard enough) would be, and not sure how demanding this would be on the servers, but I fear more, multi(4 or 6) and (maybe) 3D pong. So basically a cube, with maybe more than one ball, 6 players (or if not 3D; obviously 4, but then it works just as well having one wall 'closed'). Keeping the game play more continuous than most Pong copies would also help in making it less boring due to long wait times. But that too should be fairly easily done.
But outside of these idea's I can write a bit of Java.
- "Proving once again the deadliest animal of all ... is the Zoo Keeper" - Philip J Fry
I'm going to add a link to that sheet in the OP so it's easier to find.
I'm slightly concerned about Scrabble, and to a lesser extent Monopoly (or any -opoly), because of legal issues. Hasboro already has a suit out against Scrabulous (although my understanding is that is at least in part because they're profiting from the ad revenues, which we wouldn't be doing). We would have to come up with something at least slightly different.
Have we got anyone versed in the legalities of this stuff to find out exactly how different it would have to be to be safe? Changing the pattern of single / double letter / word squares? Making them random? Changing the number of each letter available? All of the above? Next time I talk to my lawyer friend (who at least for a while was interested in IP law, I don't know how far he ever got though) I'll see what he can tell me.
I also think a trivia game of some sort would be cool, but someone(s) would be stuck researching and typing in all of the questions & answers, and I'm not sure if anyone would be up for such a tedious job. Maybe we could make that a forum-wide challenge? Provide a form and require anyone who uses the server to provide at least 5 (or some other reasonable number) trivia questions & answers when they register, with the option of providing more at any time. Then all we would just need someone to check them over for typos, maybe clean up the grammar / wording, make sure they're in the correct category, and authorize them to be included.
The mediawiki is definitely worth looking into, some links to more information would be helpful if you think it might actually work out.
The elegant way to do it would be to make inputting questions fun and part of the game. A bit like the way the 20 questions things online improve themselves the more they are played.
Hmm.... you mean something like this?
I set up a game vs 2 other people. On my turn, I pick a category and type in a question and the correct answer, and the first of them to answer gets a point. If nobody gets it right, I get 2 points (since I'm playing against 2 people). Turns could pass in one of two ways... it could either be strictly round-robin, or the person who answered correctly could get to ask the next question (if nobody gets it right, the same person asks another).
All questions typed in would go into the database, with some sort of a rating of how many times they were asked and how many times they were answered correctly, so questions that have been around a while should have a pretty accurate difficulty level, although a manual difficulty level could be assigned as well. Maybe all players could rate the difficulty of each question, and a weighted average could be assigned as a starting point.
Once the database is big enough, we could include solo play or the option for all players to compete to answer the same questions Jeopardy!-style.
Of course, some method of reviewing / editing / deleting questions would have to be provided.
The game interface could have a "Report" button for questions like forum posts.
We could use a CMS with scripting support like Zope. Most web browser games are written from the ground up in PHP however, and use their own non-generic user/content management system. It seems so wasteful to do it from scratch.
Start with things we KNOW aren't going to get us into legal trouble: chess, backgammon, trivia, poker (which should be ok as long as no real money changes hands), gin rummy, cribbage, etc.
Meanwhile, we can work on (a) ensuring legality and/or obtaining permission for things like Scrabble, PA-opoly, etc. and (b) designing our own really cool game
I'd say it would make more sense if it was something like the asker only gets a point if a proportion of the others get the question right (eg. half of them/at least one). Then if your question is too hard you don't score points, but if its too easy you give away lots of points to the other players. Then you are rewarded for coming up with hard but not impossible questions. Other than that it sounds like a fun system though.
That sounds good... I was thinking of more of a "buzz in" type of thing, but there's no reason to not let everyone have a chance at every question, it's not like hearing someone else answer is going to give it away to everyone else. Maybe after a set amount of time, everyone's answer (plus the correct one) gets revealed and then points are awarded.
Your way kinda changes the strategy for a 2-player game, though, because the asker would never get points. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, it just means that play style would be different in a 2-player game than a 3+ player game.
One thing to consider, though, is spelling / typos... it really sucks to know the answer and get it wrong due to a typo, or because you can't spell for shit. On the other hand, solely multiple-guess trivia games are sorta lame. Would it be reasonable for the asker to have the ability to say "close enough" in case of a misspelled answer? Or maybe let all players vote on which answers get points?
Another option would be to have multiple answers for a question, so the question writer would try to anticipate all possible variations of the answer. Say it's a question about JFK, the answers would include JFK, Kennedy, Kenedy, John F Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, etc.
The one thing I have learned in my programming career... you will never anticipate all of the different ways a user can mangle even the shortest words. Not that your idea isn't good, and I think that we do need to have some provision for that, I just wonder if there isn't some way to make it even more spelling-tolerant. Unfortunately, that's one of those judgment things that computers aren't really good at. Of course, these days there's no excuse to be running a browser w/o a spell checker, so maybe it's less of an issue than I'm making it out to be.
:rotten fruit thrown at stage:
EDIT: But really, I can envision an algorithm that could generate a "splash" of answers from the one correctly-spelled answer. Mangling the spelling of a word may make it tiresome to grok for a human, but very rarely will it transform it into a different word. So, because of this, it's linguistically safe to use a very broad scatter of transformations of the answer. You can have the routine run as part of the answer-check, so that we don't need to use database space to store all of the permutations.
Besides, that would lead to hilarious results:
"Which president had an affair with Marylin Monroe?"
"fkennyjnedho"
"Correct, it's John F Kennedy!"
Normally it'd be trivial to implement, but I'm curious whether we could set it up so that the clients don't have to actually have the game built into them. Instead, at the start of the game the host would notify the clients what UI elements will be necessary and how to fill them, and would tell the client whenever one of those values would need to be changed. It would be up to the client to figure out how to implement the messages sent by the host, which could be done in any number of ways as long as the message protocol remains intact.
Also, although your strawman is indeed hilarious, it's not something we realistically need to fear. :P
I suspect one (small) team will be working on that while others are working on the first actual game(s), and while much less fun, it's pretty necessary.
What sort of structure did you want to use? Are we hard-coding the entire thing, or specifically designing a modular platform with shared assets? Is it going to be proprietary, or use some form of existing implementation (a la the mediawiki suggestion posted)?
Nerissa, I think the login/lobby would be a bit more involved that just trivial depending on what we want to do with it. Tying everything together could even be one of the more difficult aspects if the design isn't quite as tight as it could be (or changes drastically as these things tend to do).
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
My ideas, though, are as follows:
(1) Make it as modular as possible... we don't want the overall structure to break when new games are added, and creating shared tools will make future development go faster.
(2) Registration / sign in required, obviously, and signing in will take you to some sort of game menu
(3) Games should be able to be started "open" (will accept anyone who joins) or "invite only" (if you make specific plans to play chess with me, one of us will start the game and invite the other). Open games should show who is currently in that game.
(4) Some sort of leader board should probably be maintained for various games
(5) Eventually, I'd like to see the opportunity to set up a tournament bracket that automatically updates the winners / losers and moves them along appropriately
(6) An IRC-type chat area would be nice but by no means necessary. A quick "shout out" box might be nice.
(7) Turns should be able to be returned real-time, but also should be able to take several days to get back to.
(8) I already have some plans laid out for assigning project IDs, etc. but I think it's too soon for that level of detail.
Anything else anyone would like to suggest on that front?
That'd be easy enough for the individual games to handle, as well as for the server for a waiting room. A shared tool to manage that could be useful.
We need to decide early on how much role a master server would have. Would all clients constantly stay connected to it, or would it just serve as a matchmaker for largely independent game servers that the client ignores when it's connected to a game?
I'd prefer to have the game servers be completely independent from the matchmaking servers, but that could just be because it would be a hell of a lot easier to design. Games could simply broadcast their status and possibly information about the players to one or more matchmaking servers, and the matchmaking servers would provide an interface allowing waiting clients to see what games the server knows about and what their status is, and inform the client how to connect to the server that they chose. You could also rig it so that clients could send chat into a game from the matchmaker, and the game could broadcast replies back.
Has it been decided whether we are going software or web-based for this whole thing?
Web adds a bunch more complexity, but makes updates way easier to do.
took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like rootbeer
They would write the question and supply a correct answer . . .
Asker: "Q: What is the capital of Nepal? A: Kathmandu"
[question posed to players, question and answer both go into database]
Answerers then make their attempt to answer . . .
Player 1: "Cincinnati"
Player 2: "Catmando"
Player 3: "Boddah"
[all four answers, these three and the correct one, are then revealed]
Asker could then select which ones were correct (and this wouldn't affect the "correct" answer already submitted to the database). I guess the only problem is that the Asker needs to be honest/reasonably forgiving.
The game could automatically recognise "exact match" answers that match the Answer the Questioner put in when creating the Q/A and then all the others that don't "exact match" can be manually evaluated when presented to the Questioner.
So, I suppose the Questioner could choose to not accept the incorrectly spelled answer... if they were a hard ass. But at least they couldn't screw someone out of an actual right answer.
[Edit]
The answers are presented anonymously so that the Questioner can't play favourites.
I think the Mafia / Phalla idea could be worth looking into some more. I suppose there's a number of different levels we can go with it:
1) Tools for adjucating games. Rounds 'tick' at set periods (such as every 24 hours), and results are automatically relayed to participants after each round has passed. However, regular discussion between players is done outside of the tools, such as is done currently in this forum. Traditional Mafia games may be played by setting the round to tick at five to ten-minute intervals and having all players use a common chat client. Options will be available for common special powers to be set as well as some customizable abilities creatable by combining aspects of classic abilities.
2) Integrate a chat client or forum system to play the game all within the same pages / program.
3) Tools for other Phalla-like or non-Phalla games. The Etrian Odyssey game currently running in this forum may be a good example of something that could be programmed up. Another idea that's close to me is Phalla Royale... I'd love to see it in an online game form.
C++: 10
C#: 7
Java / J++ / J#: 6
PHP: 8
Perl: 9
XML: 10 (It's a mark-up language... it's not exactly rocket science)
SQL: 10
HTML: 10 (See above)
.NET: 4
Python: 10
Javascript: 6
Ruby : 4
I like web, both because of updates and because that makes it platform-independent, and I don't know how many *nix / Mac people we have around, but I'm sure we don't want to do 3 different versions of everything. I'm actually thinking applets are the way to go, unless someone knows a good reason not to do it that way.
BTW, I actually have 2 reasons for expecting a smaller team on the lobby stuff than the games. First, I suspect that particular team will have to be working even more closely together than a game team, since there are fewer logical divisions of functionality, and second because I suspect fewer people are going to actually WANT to work on that part of the project. Whenever possible, I hope to have people working on projects they actually want to work on.
Personally, I want to work on ALL of them, but that's not really possible.
(A) Discussing overall platform / lobby area construction
(B) Mostly mapped out desired functionality of a trivia game
(C) Need someone to determine legalities / work on getting permission for a Scrabble clone / knockoff, a D&D-opoly game, and a Settlers of Catan client
(D) It would be really cool to design our own game altogether
(E) Suggestion made that we start off on obviously public-domain games while waiting on (C) and (D) above
(F) Suggestion made to implement tools for Phalla / other forum game narrators to incorporate into their games, leaving the discussion part here in a thread / PMs
(G) anything else I've missed?
However, personally I'd say there's not a lot of point to making an online Scrabble-type game as Scrabulous is pretty huge to fill that niche (at least as long as they don't get taken down legally).
The same concept should apply to Monopoly, so if you make the board different, change the spaces/cards/etc, you should be okay.