In this post I’ll go a little over some thoughts on the Swarm system and post some screen captures from the login/registration system built so far.

Swarm System

The Swarm system will basically be a way for people to compete as teams/groups and provide advantages to those who belong to a Swarm.

Swarms will cost a set amount of gold (and/or crystals) to create and will have a member limit of between 10-20 to prevent Swarms from becoming too large and to level the playing field slightly.

An advantage of being in a Swarm is to have a percentage of your gold protected from theft when you lose a battle. My idea at it’s current point is to have no form of banking in the game so any gold amassed is subject to theft if you lose battles. My initial thought on this is to have, let’s say, 10% maximum of your gold subject to theft from each lost battle, then from being in a Swarm, of that 10%, an extra 10% is protected.

Then have the option of being able to upgrade certain aspects of your Swarm (one being gold protection) up to a maximum of 60-70%. This would mean that being in a Swarm could potentially leave you with only 3-4% of your gold vulnerable as opposed to the full 10%.

Other advantages may consist of more quests available to members of Swarms depending on the number of members in the Swarm. A Swarm with 5 members may have an additional 10 quests available to each member, whereas one with 15 members could have up to 50 extra quests available to any given member.

Login/Registration

The login and registration pages have been made as simple and easy to use as possible.

Below is an example of an attempt to login to the game with a non-existent user name, as you can see the user is greeted with a red message just above the input area for the user name. They never have to leave the same page to attempt login, any errors that can be picked up before submitting for further validation will be displayed promptly (such as user name/password too short or too long), and the others will be displayed in a few seconds at most on a slow connection.

The login and registration pages also have a Dragon Struggle header added to them and links to both the Login and Register pages just underneath it to make navigation easier.

All errors encountered during registration will act the same as the login page, showing errors directly above the input area they relate to. You can see a couple of examples below:

In my previous post, I also talked about limiting the number of accounts on any one IP address to 2. In the image below, you will see what a user will see if they are about to run into this problem:

The reason for limiting the number of accounts on any one IP is due to cheating. Many people will make tens, sometimes even hundreds, of accounts to send currency/items/other things to their main account or to even collect referral rewards on their main account. Limiting account creation on IPs will not stop this, but it will slow them down as they will need to make 2 accounts, switch proxy, make 2 accounts, switch proxy, etc.

Next Post

That’s all for this post, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this series of posts so far.

Today’s post is just a short one with a quick status update on the game.

I’ve just been doing work on it in spare time as it’s only a small side project to show as an example, but so far I’ve made the Register and Login functional using Ajax to keep people on the same page and to minimise load times.

Later tonight I might try knock out some basic functionality of the game that doesn’t require any design/planning work. This would include the Private Message system, forgot/lost password function, and limiting the number of accounts on any one IP address to a maximum of two.

Also please note that all of this work is being done on a local version so if you visit the domain it will only show the basic HTML mock-up.

Tomorrow I will try to post a few screenshots with some descriptions and such, otherwise I’ll just write up some more in-depth details on how the Swarm system will work.

Thanks for reading!

Continuing on from the refined game ideas, I have now made up a quick and simple HTML mock-up for most of the pages.

Register Page

If you take a look at the first page I started out on (the register page):
Register Page

The form provided is easy and straightforward to use and you will notice that the HTML mock-up is mostly similar to the quick design I came up with in my last post.

Home Screen

Taking a look at the inside of the game (can also get to this page by clicking on the Register button on it’s page), first thing you will notice is that the currency placement has been moved from underneath the stats columns to the top right.

I decided upon this so it’s easily viewable on every single page rather than having to navigate back to the home page constantly to check how much gold you have left.

Battle Screen

To make the battles happen quickly and often I’ve whipped up a quick mock-up of what the final product is likely to look like:
PvP Battle

This battle screen will show the user the battle in approximately 4 lines of text so they don’t have to scour through an essay to find out the essential information- did they win or not?

Top Navigation

If you remember the quick layout design I did in my last post you’ll notice that I filled that blank space next to the logo with a few vital links- the ‘Your Account,’ ‘Referrals,’ and ‘Logout’ links.

In my opinion, of these linked pages, the referral page is the most vital as it will provide incentive for players to try and get as many of their friends to play the game as they can.

Simplicity

Overall you’ll notice how simple the game is so far. There is not much to each page and this means that most people who come to play should be able to figure it all out on their own without much effort.

For those who aren’t able to figure it out after they’ve registered, I will also be doing a post on making a help section for the game and what you should include in it.

Next Post

Between this post and the next post I will be making the basic user system to allow you to register / login and will begin on more precise design of select pages within the game.

This post is a continuation of my previous post where I showed my brainstorming process for a simple game.

Character Mock-up

First I just wanted to come up with a quick idea of roughly how I wanted the Dragons to look for the game. I want the character images to be displayed on user profiles, in PMs, and on your home screen, so I quickly sketched up something so I could use for placement in my other design/concept pictures.

To the left is what I came up with. This is a step that anyone can do without having to outsource it at this point, I find that a quick (however horribly done) sketch to use for placement makes it a lot easier in future steps as opposed to a blank box.

Register Page

Next in line was a quick mock-up of a register page. As this page will be one of the very first your users will be seeing when they visit the game, I wanted it to be simple and straight forward.

If there’s less information required for people to sign up to the game, they’re more likely to take the leap.

As you can see below, the register page consists of the Species select area, the email field, the login name field, and the password field (note that I will also be including a password confirmation field below this). Creating an account for the game should only take 20 seconds of the user’s time, once signed up, I’m going to make it log them straight into the game so they can start playing instantly.

Home Screen

I created a quick design for the general layout of the game and the home screen in the next step. The image shows basic placement of items such as the character image, character stats and attributes, menu placement, and a few other things.

The reason I’ve chose to have both quick information for Your Swarm (Swarm is the final name I chose for teams/groups) and Your Quests on the home screen is that I want the information to be shown to the users as soon as they’re logged in. If they can see how long is left on their quest or have a link direct to their next quest, it makes it easier for them to continually login throughout the day, check if it’s complete, start another quest if it is, or log straight back out if it isn’t.

You’ll also notice that I have placed a buy more link next to the ‘crystals’ currency. This is because crystals will be the secondary form of currency used to buy rarer items or perform actions such as allowing you to do more quests in a day. This currency will be a lot harder to come by in-game, but having it as an option to buy with real money gives incentive for some users to buy them instead of working (and waiting) for them in the game.

Ignore any spelling mistakes in the picture as it was only a five minute job

Quests

For the quests I will make up a selection of random titles such as ‘Invade a Village,’ ‘Scrounge for Gold,’ etc. Each of these will have a reward of currency/experience and a time usage attached to them, and that will be the extent of the quests.

If a player isn’t currently in a quest, they will go to their Quests page, select one of a few available quests to do, hit ‘Do Quest,’ and then wait. During the time of a quest players will not be able to battle other players (or be attacked by them). This is to get them on the game, do their actions, then take a break. They’ll then check back later on to see if their Quest is finished or if an event has occurred, then repeat this process.

Paid Upgrades

The game will be offering the following two types of paid upgrades:

• Premium Membership
  We will offer two levels of premium membership. A ‘gold membership’ and a ‘platinum membership.’ The gold membership will offer things such as more quests per day, one-time bonus of game currency, etc. The platinum membership will cater for the players who plan to play a lot more and will offer the same basic things but at a higher quantity.
• One-time Buys
  We will also offer one-time buys for players looking for instant advantages over their competitors. These will be currency packages or novel upgrades such as ‘Custom Dragon Image,’ or ‘Increased Swarm Size.’ One-time buys will make up the majority of a game’s income in the larger/more complex games.

Next Post

In my next post I will be turning these refined ideas and concepts into a HTML mock-up so we can see how it’s starting to turn out.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions or if there’s anything specific you would like me to cover, leave me a comment and I’ll try my best to cater to your needs!

This post is just going through the brainstorming and decision making for the simple game I’ll be building over the next few posts.

Game Theme

First off I started by coming up with a very quick short list of themes that the game can revolve around:
Peasants, Heroes, Warriors, Orcs, Dragons, Space, Aliens, Army, Robots, & Ninjas

From that list, I decided on Dragons. Now why Dragons? I picked them because they’re a fantasy creature which I can come up with different species of dragon and can use other fantasy themed items/ideas.

Play Style

Next I picked what sort of play style I wanted the game to follow, I split them into three main types:
Low time spent per session with many visits in a day
Average time spent per session with a few visits in a day
A long time spent per session with very few visits in a day

Of those I decided I would want the players to only have to spend a small time during each session but I want the players coming back many times each day. Why do I want that? I don’t want them getting bored, so only keeping them for a small time will help to ensure that. I also want them playing a long time overall, so having them come back throughout the day will help with this.

Play Type

Then time to decide what sort of play type I’m after. I want a game with a main focus of battling one another because battles are an excellent form of PvP. PvP battles are an excellent source of competition and provide players with a bigger challenge.

I also want quests thrown in there. Not interactive quests like you’d find in a game like World of Warcraft where you have to go about and do specific things, but quests that are a simple click and give you a reward after a certain amount of time.

One more thing I’m considering is a form of growth/building focus to give users a way to grow their character from continued play.

Brainstorming

Next step was to brainstorm some quick ideas for use in the game.

• Quick + Simple register process
• Initial choice of 3-4 different species of dragon to play as.
• Bonus 1-2 type(s) of dragon you can evolve/mutate into after X amount of levels and/or game currency spent.
• Each species will have different bonuses attached to them, one may regenerate health faster, or be cheaper to maintain.
• Simple quests that take X amount of time to complete. These quests won’t require actions, just a simple ‘Do Quest’ button.
• You may do X amount of quests per day, or use game currency/points to buy more quests to do.
• Offer premium membership at $3-5/month. This gives bonuses such as more daily quests, other things.
• Have items you can buy with game currency to boost your characters stats.
• Penalise player if they don’t log in and perform a certain action at least once/twice a day.
  Now why would you want to penalise your players?
  Believe it or not, but this is actually a form of reward! Players are ‘rewarded’ for performing an action by not being penalised. I’ll go further into this in a post dedicated to this section of the game.
• Offer one-off buys for ingame upgrades, eg. Something like X,XXX game currency for $10.
• Limited base stats: maybe just Health, Attack, Defense, some other dragon stat?
• No forums, but have a simple PM/mail system.
• Have groups to allow players to work together in a team/group. Maybe called: Nests, Wake, Horde, or Swarm?
• Have visible rankings of players by level/stat and rankings of teams/groups.
• Possible bonus for being top ranked?

Game’s Name

So after all of this, what name did I come up with? Dragon Struggle. Why did I choose that name? Well, I wanted a name that had the theme in it (Dragons) and also one that may help convey the battle-focus of the game. Another very strong reason I chose this name was because it had an available .com domain!

Next Post

That’s all for today’s post. Keep an eye out for tomorrow’s post where I’ll further refine the ideas given and show some quick concepts for the game design.