What Grid?

I just read my last post and then flicked through my earlier ones and I noticed that I haven't actually said anything about what Mod Wars actually is and how it will work so I thought I'd drop in a little interlude...

I may not have actually done any design or implementation yet, but one thing I have done - and done lots of, is write down ideas for how I want the game to play. So far, I have 18 pages of documentation describing all aspects of the game that I can think of! I like to plan ahead ;-)

This is taken from the section 'Basic Premise':

"In Mod Wars players take control of a module that resides within a global computer system known only as “The Grid”. The grid is visually represented on screen and players “run” the grid by controlling their avatar along the grid lines with the keyboard.

Mod Wars could be considered as a kind of RPG as modules can grow in power over time and can diversify with different play styles. A module occupies a certain amount of storage within the computer system and the power of the module is related to the amount of storage that it occupies. The storage occupied by the module can be loaded with programs which are then used in combat against other modules. As the storage capacity of the module increases, so does the relative power of the programs that can be loaded."

Visually, imagine a dark background with blue gridlines all over it and then imagine little coloured blobs running along those lines - thats my players 'running the grid'! Of course this is all still in my head as I haven't even drawn any graphics yet.

From a gameplay perspective, Mod Wars is basically an RPG (Role-Playing Game). Player modules have stats which define how strong they are and what they can do. The programs that are loaded into the modules can be thought of as a kind of spell system that you might find in a fantasy game. Being a multi-player game, I'll allow players to get together in short-term groups called LAN's and more permanent arrangements (like a Guild/Clan) called a WAN. Yup this game is chock full of silly, geeky computer words. That's the benefit of being a computer geek that likes games and also happens to be a software engineer :-D

Phase 1 Plan

Over the last couple of months or so I've done virtually nothing on Mod Wars and although a large part of the reason for this was lack of time, in reality I was just putting off getting started.

I put together a little 'activity list' for things that I could be getting on with such as learning some more about Linux, working through some tutorials for a GUI package wxWidgets that I want to try out, drawing some simple graphics for the game etc. These are all things that will need to be done, but they are all 'non-core' activities. None of them actually move me forwards in my design or implementation in any way so they're still just another delay tactic and yet, I still didn't manage to do any of them!

Today I had a day off work and decided to try and do something positive to just get me going! I sat and thought about what I would like to implement as a very minimum for the first phase of development and it's quite simple: Just allow a player to connect to the server and nagivate around the grid. That's it! Still, because it's the first iteration there are a bunch of things that have to be done before anything else such as writing some basic networking code to allow the server to accept connections, and decide upon a message-passing mechanism for data between client and server. I'll want some logging functionality, configuration etc. These could be added later I suppose but because I absolutely know that I want them I'd rather just get them done first.

I knocked up a list of items and it came to 19 in all which was quite surprising considering how little there will be to show for it. Here's a snapshot of my little plan. As you can see I haven't bothered to put any timescales on it as they are meaningless when all I have is the odd hour here and there.