Tossing up my delicious weekend companions

Also my not so delicious companion:

Measly first meal:

Thats a sad looking sausage. I believe George Foreman will be serving me well throughout the duration of this LD.

Perfect title for the game HOMMage.

Alright, bit of a lofty concept for this LD.

Concept

Going with the theme of discovery, I figured I’d base the majority of my mechanics off of the Heroes of Might and Magic series. Players will explore a map covered in fog of war.

I’m sure I can get the hex movement down, troop management and combat. So once those are all ticked off it’s pretty much a “game”.  The twist for this Ludum Dare so it’s not completely derivative is that it will be a browser based game.

Four players will be placed into each game, games will run for a maximum of three hours.  Every five minutes a player will be able to perform actions with their towns (build new buildings) or heroes (explore the map).  Players will be able to collect resources, allies(extra troops) and treasures(items that boost the troops) as they encounter them in the map.

Each player will issue their moves during the five minute turns, their actions will resolve at the end of each turn. Combat will be automatic once heroes encounter each other on a hex.

The goal of each game will be to overcome the NPC troops at the center of the map, and obtain its horde of treasure.

Challenges

This game will be built with AS3 using PHP to make database calls.

• Finding the time to design and develop the DB structure and getting it working properly with AS3.
• Is my little tower enough of a web server to handle multiple games?
• Working with hexes and simple pathfinding.
• Simple AI in place of human players.

Initially the whole game will be single player with AI, I’m hoping thats not as far as it gets but well see how I can manage my time.

Conclusion

Probably not the most original spin on this theme, or for games like this in general. I’m not a big Evony fan, but I imagine there’s already a game out there that’s pretty similar to what I’m describing.

Regardless, I’m pumped. This is going to be a fun little design and tech challenge for the weekend!