Monster in a (Dev) Box

For the past 9 months I've been working on creating an online game. No, not a souped-up 3D world full of paladins, wizards and thinly-veiled xenophobic metaphors, but a text-based kingdom builder built on statistics. No I know, why am I not already being hounded by Apple to create a version for the iPhone? I wonder that myself.

Well, two reasons. One, it sounds exceptionally boring. And two, it's nowhere near complete. Turns out it takes a lot work to build even the most basic of complicated games. The funny part is it's not even the complicated stuff that takes time. I wrote the equations for running and balancing a stock market in about three hours.

No, it's the little crap. The little crap that people like me hate to do. Without going into too many specifics, I'll just say error handling. If you don't know what that is, it's what you have to write when you don't have confidence in your abilities as a developer. (I'm not talking about server-side error handling where there could be an actual issue, I'm talking about JavaScript and such)

Try? Catch? No thanks. I prefer to live on the edge.

But anyways, back to the non-technical stuff. Here's the logo:

Yes, it's called "One Eye Filled with night", after a line from a Leonard Cohen song. Maybe that's cheesy, but I think it works alright.

The idea of the game is that here you are with this kingdom to run and, to start out, you have one city and one military unit. You run the show and lead everything. Eventually though you'll want to get governors and generals and more units, more cities, all that good stuff.

Keep in mind this is all displayed in a straightforward, non-mappy way. List of cities with stats, list of units with stats, all that. I mean, it looks pretty enough, I didn't totally slack-ass it, but it is not what you might call "graphics-laden".

Though I am particularly proud of the image I worked up for an inbox message:

Ahhh yeah, would you take a look at that? You can almost see yourself opening it and going, "My what a tiny yet well-rendered message this is."

So once you have your little kingdom up and running you can start interacting with other users: buying and selling items on a stock exchange, exchanging messages, and conducting war. This is the part of the game I really want to get to, but I can't until I do the little crap. And that's what slows me down.

One week I'll put in maybe 15 hours or so on it, the next (ie, this current one) I won't do anything. It's hard to want to sometimes because you see all these other totally rockin' games out there and think, "Well what's the point? Who's going to play this? Even if I did finish it, where would it even go?"

Obviously people still play Trukz, but that game doesn't really require much of a time investment. I'm trying to build that into my game, where you can just come on for a few minutes, re-arrange some stuff, and get on with your day. I think my approach so far kinda does that, which is good.

I don't know, we'll see where it goes. I really just wanted to post this to start myself off on writing about it, to keep track of progress along the way. If anything changes, oh in the next week or so, I'm sure there'll be an update.