Making Mercantilism Fun

A friend and I are going to be starting a project that’s basically a browsergame with a competition built into it.

Users would gain points for performing specific actions, like turning in 6 severed deer heads, or crafting 9 special cogs.

There are two classes within the game: Merchants and Fighters. Fighters do all of the combat/heavy-work, and collect all of the items. Merchants provide the backbone for the game economy, and run the shops. But what makes playing a merchant fun?

So far we’ve figured out that merchants would be varied from Fighters in terms of starting setup and bonuses. A fighter might gain more item drops from enemies, while a Merchant might have more gold to start off with, and their own shop(which Fighters could only buy later for a lot of gold).

Fighters would be able to go out and kill enemies and explore. But all merchants can do is…sell stuff. Where’s the fun in that? Basically all they do is buy/sell items, in the hopes of making a profit. But what makes their gameplay interesting enough for a player to create a merchant and enjoy it?

Merchant-operated shops, I’m hoping, would be the Fighter’s only way to buy things(and maybe sell them too). So it’s important that we have at least some small population playing the game as merchants. But in order for that to happen, we need something to attract and keep them. But I don’t think just buying/selling items is going to keep them; there needs to be more.

I just can’t figure out what.

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Aligning Google Adsense Boxes

I’ve been building the template for a new project lately, and it will have Adsense built into the sidebar for users who aren’t logged in. However, having the Adsense box aligned to the left side of the sidebar just looked…ugly. I wanted the Adsense box centered within the sidebar.

After googling, I was told to use absolute positioning to align my Adsense box. The only problem is, I couldn’t seem to actually center the box using absolute positioning.

Then I tried floating the box. That didn’t work either; how do you float something and center it?

Then I stumbled upon the ever-so-handy text-align attribute. I put my Adsense code inside a div:

And then put this inside my CSS:

div#ads {text-align:center}

And…voila! A centered google adsense box, with minimal extra markup.

Posted in adsense, css, design, monetizing | No Comments »

Puzzling Elements

What makes up a puzzle?

I’m about to come up on my two months of summer vacation, and I’ve been considering my options in terms of making money, building sweet stuff, and keeping life non-cluttered. One of the things that I’ve decided to add to my ever-growing list of goals for this summer is making some sort of commercial-quality game; something that I can sell and distribute for $5/copy or something if I chose to.

Based on what I’ve been reading recently, the casual games market is the way to go for an aspiring game programmer; there are thousands of casual games out there to play, and websites like PopCap Games seem to be practically printing their own money! I’m not too worried about making money off of a game(although I won’t lie and say it wouldn’t be sweet), because this is more of a learning project than anything.

What makes a game casual, though? I had to define this before I tried to figure out what I would be building. I define a casual game as:

• fun to play
• easy to start - no 15-minute opening cutscenes
• little to no time investment required
• little to no storyline

That’s my list. A casual game, in my opinion, will be fun to play, and for the most part require almost no time to get going on. The idea is that you just start it up, play for 10 minutes while you’re waiting for something, and then go on with your day. The non story-based aspect of the casual game is listed because, as far as I can tell, there is little to no storyline behind a casual game. Generally there are just puzzles.

With that in mind, I decided that my best bet for making a game that would be easy enough to make and at the same time something people would play would be a puzzle game. But what makes something particularly puzzling?

I tossed around a few game ideas, but they all seemed to come down to being more action-based than puzzle-based. I realized that I needed to define the different elements of a puzzle, so that I could incorporate puzzling elements into my game. This is what I came up with:

• timers
• combinations
• automatic movement

I didn’t spend too long on the list, but that’s what I came up with. Virtually every puzzle in a game or otherwise that I’ve spent time on has incorporated one or more of those elements.

I’ve got a few ideas, now - I’ll be sketching them out some more over the next couple of weeks. For now though, I’ve at least got a basic framework of what a puzzle game needs to be.

Posted in Project, design, life, programming, puzzles | No Comments »

Nerfing Militarism

In the 2 days since my last post, Militarism’s user base has swelled from a meagre 13 to a surprising 33. That’s without any extra effort on my part, past e-mailing a single link out to a couple friends.

That’s 33 people banging on Militarism and how it’s balanced out. That’s 32 more people banging on Militarism than when I’m working on it alone. It’s quickly helped me realize that there are some…glaring balance issues.

For example, if a player has a “Phalanx” unit, they’re virtually unkillable until a player has built about twice as many phalanxes as the player they’re about to attack has. I needed to tweak that.

Earlier, Militarism players were ranked based on their army sizes; this was a good indicator of who a player might be safe attacking, but felt like a bad way to rank users. What if a user just built a whole pile of the cheapest unit? They would skyrocket to the top of the standings list, even if a user had sat and waited and built tons of the very best unit available. So I implemented a different rankings system, based on a players ’score’; their score is made up of their current gold, available recruits, new recruits that they haven’t heard about yet, and their army. It’s a much better way of ranking users as a whole; and for players who still need to see how many units an enemy has, I’ve left that on the standings page. I’m not sure if it will be there indefinitely.

I needed to nerf all of the units in Militarism because, originally, some were very overpowered, and some were very underpowered. Now, I believe, I’ve achieved some semblance of balance between all of them. I’ll find out soon if I haven’t.

Posted in Militarism, design, nerf | No Comments »