Posted by carlthuringer on September 1, 2009 at 9:16pm
A friend of mine recently proposed his idea for a muck/php/mysql game. I got to thinking about it and realized, "Ah, I can do it with Drupal."
But I was disappointed to find the apparently dismal state of games on Drupal. What's going on? Is there any development in making a tabletop game construction framework?
Comments
There have been a lot of
There have been a lot of development with regards to making games in drupal. Unfortunately game development is not an easy business therefore we are where we are now.
I urge everyone to give in to their enthusiasm and desire to make games. Hopefuly some one will overcome the complexities and bring one game to completion.
Cheers.
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Sometimes interesting things appears on http://litwol.com
Do you have any specific
Do you have any specific examples of games built with Drupal?
I have said this elsewhere,
I have said this elsewhere, and I feel it must be said from time to time: game programming is hard enough without worrying about online mechanics. A text-based game with no player interaction doesn't seem very interesting to me, so that's one reason I don't even try to make such a game for Drupal. I like graphical games, games with animation and music.
All that said, I think the best way to go about designing a Drupal game would be to not design for Drupal but rather design around it. For example, you could make a module that sets up the pages and does specific math when it needs to, but then, you have to worry about admin tools and visual output for the game. You also have to worry about path aliases and integration with profiles. (Otherwise, what's the point?) My point is that we don't make a "Drupal Game CCK" or game creation tool, we focus on making an example game, a very simple one, where we battle the same rat over and over. Then, we expand on that by adding player inventory and item drops. This means more integration code to use the stats in profiles, though.
Visit my under-construction site. Let me know what you think. Thanks.
I feel that games can be
I feel that games can be broken down into elementary particles. Tokens, rules, goals, rolls, etc.
I would use a Node (or a set of slightly varied ones) to contain all the information about an object or a room or a character. The more I think about what this sort of 'uber-object' or 'rpg-entity-node' might be, the less reasons I can think of to have say, a node type for characters and another node type for rooms and another node type for monsters and another node type for objects. There are too many shared fields and very few that are actually unique.
One which I worry about is chat logs. Say that a room is a node and you give it a field that will contain a chat log of everything said in the room. At what point does that become a database bog? Maybe chat logs (or lengthy text databases) should be nodereferenced instead?
I would a node only when the
I would a node only when the node object provides facilities that could be used during the game. Otherwise the overloading of a node management for simple elements could be quite complex.. up to now, for what I've seen, nodes are good storage for "unique" elements in game, for example a town, a room, a special RPG weapon, but for the rest I would say no.
In drtsg the nodes are used as "base units", where the whole stuff is put into.. For example, the "base town" is a node type that holds 4 fields for each one of the resources it produces (iron, wood.. whatever). Other 'pluggable' modules may add new 'unit/element" types (as new fields) to that basic unit (e.g. attaching combat or spy units). As units are not unique in this type of game (I'm talking about pm.drtsg.net) there's no need to give them a "unique" attribute using a node. In fact, there could be millions of one unit type in the game.. it should be imposible to manage.
Following this schema, any 'element' could be attached to be module on node loading process, therefore to attach units in drtsg you have to attach moduels providing them (each module would be responsible of the unit properties).
The problem is how atomic is the "uber-object".. iIMO, if it doesn't have at least a unique attribute it doesn't worth the pain.
By the way, have you described the http://drupal.org/project/rpg module?
By the way, have you
Nearly so!
You make a good point about managing the amount of nodes created by avoiding creating unique nodes for each object.
I had thought of a model of using nodes as the 'original template' version of a type of object, then creating an 'instance' that inherits all the stats of the original, except where they vary. So instances would need to contain less data than the original...
At any rate, this all needs to be carefully written down and considered rather than juggled about in my head. :D
The only one I know is currently working
is OC (AKA Outer-Core), http://www.outer-core.com | Fearlessly embracing the unknown, a space based game (similar to ogame and xwars) built on D5 by Feijo. By the way, liwol.. Your granary is full at "Litwol's town".. do you remember that?
Litwol's Town? Should I be
Litwol's Town? Should I be checking that out?
Well, I would rather not use Drupal for text-based single player games, anyhow. The only way it's worth the effort is if it has player interaction or profile integration and scoreboards. In the case of scoreboards, I could see myself using a similar system for an arcade.
Visit my under-construction site. Let me know what you think. Thanks.
Thanks for mention my game,
Thanks for mention my game, ilo :)
But I did it with d6!
regards
Feijó
There have been..
several attempts, the problem is not about building the code to get a game working, is about having a good game design to play with. Have you also seen drupalrpg.org? this is the best working example of games development in Drupal (apart from OC that seems to be a complete game, but not a "framework" to build games. It's flexible enough to do things, but.. what to do?
Also, without help (people actively playing and testing) there's nothing to do about, because the only goals achieved are the developer's ideas.. not a game at all.
PD: about Litwol's town.. I've working on a realtime (OC is based on ticking events) 1 vs 1, or many vs many stragey games framework, to be able to build games like travian or ogame. Some parts are working, others not. There's a sample at http://pm.drtsg.net once you register you will get your own town, and they will produce some resources (real time based).. You would be able to build units (at no cost) just for testing.. the p2p part needs some work, but a little would do.. Why not to finish it? Because nobody wanted to help in the past? I don't know.. :)
The latest code in
The latest code in http://drupal.org/project/game/ is a fully working example of a battle system, with hooks and documentation.
Why is it in dev if it's
Why is it in dev if it's fully working? There should be a stable release. It looks interesting, though. I'll check it out.
Visit my under-construction site. Let me know what you think. Thanks.
Because it is neither a game
Because it is neither a game nor fun.
But you said it was a battle
But you said it was a battle system... it doesn't support player-vs-player battles? I've seen some rather fun systems for IPB and other forum systems.
Visit my under-construction site. Let me know what you think. Thanks.
It has been written to
It has been written to support them, yes, but currently, you don't "choose" who you're going against - the quickie test code just picks a random opponent from a number of (real) Drupal users that have been marked as "AI" players (i.e., even when you're fighting an AI, you're fighting a real Drupal user; this was done intentionally).
Bizarre way to form a RPG
Bizarre way to form a RPG system. Does it at least show things visually? Does it have equipment subsystems and the like? What does it have as merit?
Visit my under-construction site. Let me know what you think. Thanks.
A real time based web game.. but not in drupal
Hey Ilo i have been doing an Strategic PBBG (persistent browser based game) for quite a time, but in real time instead of the usual ogame game style. Although im not using Drupal, neither im using flash or web plugins. Is based on PHP, Postgres, CSS and javascript (mostly jquery and recently some experiments with the Raphael library). For now the Battle Module is functioning well, you can check it out at xeno.iasoftgroup.com if you want. I have tested it in a 1 VS 1 battle and it can be usable.
For my current point of view, the Core of the game should be done using direct access to your database and php programing, i would think that Drupal might be too cumberstone for all the database calls it will need to make to acomplish a single battle, imagine now a 4 vs 4 battle, that will get some steam on your server. And also the cache system would not be of much use there.
On the other hand, the User Register and Login, the views of your units and locations (planets,regions), sure it could be done with Drupal, the taxonomy of course will be very helpful categorizing units. Im not too much Drupal Savy but i guess there's a chance to make the core (non drupal part of the game) access some Drupal functions like the User Data and make it work.
Of course one should wonder if this will be worth of our time to instead make, lets says, a User System from scratch
Puzzle game built with Drupal
Although most discussion around games is either around either rpg's or 1st person shooters, I have managed to create an app to play my logic puzzle (Trizm Puzzles, a pseudo-sudoku variant). I've had a simple version of it on my drupal 5 site for almost 2 years - (http://www.trizmpuzzle.com) and just launched a Facebook app with a drupal 6 backend using Dave Cohen's Drupal for Facebook for the ui wrapper - http://apps.facebook.com/trizmplaybeta
This looks like a good recent
This looks like a good recent improvement in Drupal & games status. Congrats, nobody has gone so far as you did. I'm also interested in the way Drupal and apps.fb can join, I've a project that would require this kind of link in a short future. I'd love to see some kind of help/doc about the process before having to dig myself into.
Again, congrats :)
TrizmPlay Out of Beta!
The TrizmPlay for Facebook (http://apps.facebook.com/trizmplay) is out of Beta! I will be shutting down the old beta link today ...
Much thanks to Dave Cohen for his work on the Drupal for Facebook module(s), as well as Josh and the gang at fourkitchens for the pressflow/mercury project - I wouldn't even be in Alpha yet if I couldn't build on their work!
Andy
I think the less reasons I
I think the less reasons I would say of to have say, a node type for characters and another node type for rooms and another node type for monsters and another node type for objects. There are too many shared fields and very few that are actually unique.
Great job : games