Having a brief talk with my brother earlier on in the day, he mentioned an idea which completely slipped my mind earlier on. This idea is to give additional rewards/opportunities to players who refer others, such as an item you can only buy once you have referred 10 players, or a new species of dragon you can get once you have reached 25 referrals. The great thing is that you don’t have to limit it to just those things, it can be integrated in many other areas of the game such as Quests or Swarm eligibility.

This is actually an excellent idea in that, in addition to the standard rewards for referrals, players will have extra incentive to try and get their friends or just anyone to play. A similar concept can be seen in games on Facebook like in Farmville where in order to advance in certain areas you must have at least X amount of your friends also playing the game.

The system on Facebook is a lot easier to entice your friends over as the games are hooked directly to your account so you can post things on your friends walls, in your status update, or on your own walls helping to promote the game. It also helps in that if your friends see that you’re playing a game they will likely assume that it is a decent quality game and might even sign up just to take a look.

For tomorrow’s post I will be uploading the current progress of the game for everyone to see, and I will be going over some brief design ideas for the paid upgrades page.

Thanks for reading!

The basics of the referral system for Dragon Struggle has been created. So far the link (on my local copy only, remember!) for referral will take note of the IP address and who’s link it is and store it in a table, it will then set a cookie on the person who has clicked the link’s computer that will stay for a week. If the user hasn’t clicked anyone else’s link and hasn’t clicked this link before, it will also give the referrer a small amount of gold as a bonus.

If during that week the user signs up for an account, it will recheck the referrer, does some basic error checking, then will link the new account to the referrer’s account. To complete the referral system I need to work on the level system to make it so that when a referred account hits a certain level (which I’ll likely set to 5 or 10) the referrer will get a large bonus.

Making it so the large bonus isn’t instant will help to ensure against people sending the links to their friends, getting them to make an account, then leaving the account inactive. This way if people do get their friends to sign up, the friend will have to play at least long enough to level up a few times, and hopefully this will get some of them interested in the game and becoming a returning player!

As you can see in the above screenshot, I have also included a section called “Your Stats” which will give users a ranking based on how well they’ve been using their referral links. Under this section I will also be making a list of all users you have referred and what level they are up to so that you will be able to see just how close you are to getting your referral bonus from each person who has signed up under you.

That’s all for tonight’s post, now I think it’s time to head out and have a little time to relax ! I hope you’ve enjoyed the series of posts so far.

The Quest system has been completed and is fully functional. As you can see in the below image, the confirmation now displays when you select a quest, pressing “No” will hide the confirmation, pressing “yes” will take you to another page telling you the quest you’ve started and how long it will take to complete:

Quests will only ever be displayed to you six at a time. The same six quests will show to you unless you attempt one of the available quests, this is to prevent people from constantly refreshing the page in hopes of finding the best possible quest every single time. It will keep some variety with what’s available and hopefully I will be able to come up with upwards of a few hundred quests to keep in rotation.

More quests, even if it’s just their name or details varied, will make the player more keen to try and find all available quests to them and will be better than just having the same few quests you can complete. Fewer options will mean less variety and more chance that a user will get bored with it.

In terms of Quest related work, the only thing left is the ability to refill/get more quests for any given day and I will be doing this when I work on the Shop page as it will tie in with crystal use. Another, less important at this stage, thing left to do is basically for me to draw up some more images to use for quests as I’ve only made seven so far, and I’m hoping to have about 20 or so to keep some variety with it. However, these can be done whenever I have a free moment as I draw them at 500×500 but scale them down to 80×80, so the quality and detail in them does not need to be that high.

Just a note though, if I were to be making this game in a less casual way, I would be outsourcing both the code and the artwork and focusing mainly on the game play and game design, but as I know some code and have a tiny bit of creativity I can handle both of these tasks for the purpose of this example!

I hope you’ve been enjoying the posts so far!

The quest system is almost complete. I have refined and built upon the layout of the quest system from what can be seen in the HTML mock-up, now a maximum of six quests will show at any one time to the user and they will be selected and displayed in a random order so long as the user meets each quests’ criteria.

Below is a screenshot of what it looks like in it’s current stage:

As you can see, the simple text list that was in the mock-up has been replaced with individual quest boxes containing an image for the quest, the quest name, and it’s details. Clicking on a quest will display a message above saying “Would you like to embark upon this quest? [YES] [no]”

Quests will only be displayed to users for a certain amount of levels then they will be replaced with different quests as they progress through the levels. To keep it simple, many of these quests will retain the same name and image and will only have their details changed.

Images for quests will also be reused for other quests to keep it easy to add new ones and I’ll be making up anywhere between 10-20 images for use.

Sorry for the short length of these last couple of posts, I’ve been busy with my main projects and I’ve only had a little time to devote to the simple game development and blog writing!

I hope you’ve enjoyed the posts so far, and I’ll try to finish up some more of the game and get it up soon so you can all take a peak at it’s workings thus far.