Hello, my name is Michael

General Introduce Yourself
#1

Hello, my name is Michael.
I spend quite some time on making and playing PBBGs, so I was drawn to take a closer look when I found this site via the PBBG reddit.

Freewar and Tribal Wars are games I spend a lot of time on playing. At the same time, these games are also an inspiration for the game designs I work on.
My current game project DRTS Game is not a PBBG, as it is not persistent, but it looks like one of my games is going to be remade with a persistent game world next year.

Besides working on my own games, I also help people learn to make software, including video games. My impression is that there is a lot of guidance out there for making singleplayer games, but developers have more difficulties when it comes to implementing persistent multiplayer. That is why I am working on improving this. If you face a challenge in this area, let me know :wave:

I am looking forward to learning about the experiences of other developers and players here, see you soon!

#2

I think you’re really onto something with DRTS. The concept and interface feels very nice, I can see this working extremely well as a persistent multiplayer game.

Also, I really enjoyed this for some reason:

It has a different color than yours, which means it is one of the bad guys.
Move your unit onto that node to liberate it.

Anyway, it’s good to have you here, welcome aboard!

1 Like
#3

Thank you for taking the time to test the game.

This surprises me. I have not yet explored ways to make a persistent version of this game. It sounds like you have an idea I should add to my list of designs to experiment with. :thinking: Did you have some concrete mechanics in mind? Do you know a similar game with a persistent design?

#4

No specific games come to mind, but I think your concept would work well if applied to a larger game world.

Imagine, for instance, a giant map where what you already have can exist in small pockets across the game world, and no game is ever really “won” but rather different players/clans constantly take and retake territory. Instead of just a single territorial dispute, you could have several going on simultaneously with any number of interested players jumping in and out of the action, on top of a larger battle for dominance of the entire map.

I can see something like that drawing a lot of attention especially from players who enjoy role-playing.

1 Like
#5

Sounds awesome. When I read your earlier reply I was thinking too close to the current DRTS design. But now that I read this description, I get it. This is a concept I want to explore further.

When comparing this persistent kind of game to DRTS, I think a big difference to account for with the design is that most players will be offline at any given point in time. The main adjustments which I can think of right now are:

  • Longer travel times per edge.
  • Diversification in units and army state, so that the player can adapt his setup in advance to the times he expects to not be online.

This is just from the top of my head, so maybe I need to refine this to make it eligible.

I find this interesting, especially because I did not think about role-playing up to here. The role-playing aspect reminds me of another game I started implementing this year. The main reason I started that project was I wanted to make a game with a denser atmosphere then the other games I worked on so far. I think this direction might be a good fit for a mix with role-playing elements.

I realize I don’t know enough about this role-playing stuff. So this part, the role-playing is what I do not understand yet, I mean how it would work in conjunction with the description of a game in the upper part of your post.