The social game

I was wondering about what could I do, and maybe found something. It's a social game, and funny enough, it's just like any other social game. But I hope I can add a little twist to that.


So I realized what I like is to experiment with behavior. You make a product that doesn't limit people and see what they use it to. Like a piece of paper. But connected. I always loved the idea bringing people together by technology and games. So what is it? Well, it's very general. It's a tile based "adventure"-ish game. (What time is it?) You have a 2D tile map, with roads and fields and walls. There are assets and characters as well. That is nothing unexpected. But here comes the plan. Imagine the world is only what is already created. First 1 tile, you're standing at. You have some resources. Brick, soil, metal, maybe a kitten. And you can fill up the empty space with your resources. You can build a road, a wall, a transport unit, a house or a kitten cafe. You can collect these resources by exploring the world, but you better trade them. That's where social features come to the game. You have to look for other players. But that's one aspect of interaction. Why to build a world? For creating stories. I don't know exactly how, but it would be great if players could create logic into the game. Something like a quest, but more elementary. It has to be free enough to let the users decide what kind of challenge they define. So that's the basic, an initial idea I was tinkering today. Starts small and users will build up an endless world.

I thought it should be pure JS and NoSQL. I guess Backbone would be a nice platform. With NodeJS. And MongoDB. Authentication would go through one of the popular open ID services: Google, Facebook or Twitter. So this allows people having friends immediately.

I was checking out quite some JS libraries to help the game/graphics part. On Reddit there is an excellent list of JS libraries. I was shocked how many are old and out of the maintenance cycle. There are also great candidates, however none of them seemed to much of a help. One reason is that the game in plan should be really simple. And I'd like to make the UI part replaceable, so it can be improved in a new iteration. I'm not trying to impress anybody with my game making skills. I don't have them.

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Peter