After months of work, restarts, and hours upon hours of learning, I have finally produced the very first version of my online game, Guild Tycoon. Typically software is built in stages, beginning with an alpha, moving into a closed-beta, then an open-beta, and scaling up to release. What I have deployed thus far I wouldn’t even consider a full alpha version of my idea, so I’m going to call it a pre-alpha.

What is Guild Tycoon?

First and foremost Guild Tycoon is a game where a player controls a set of characters, provides them with equipment, and sends them off to fight in dungeons awaiting their hopefully successful return with wonderful loot. Players over decades have seen this type of system in many different iterations from Diablo, to World of Warcraft, to, well…, Guild Tycoon! Personally, I adore games like Diablo and World of Warcraft where players can fight through battles and improve their characters to access forever expanding content within the game. However, I found that I grew somewhat wearisome of the the required investment of active time to progress. My thought, and basis for the game, is that players can get similar levels of enjoyment out of an experience that automates some of the tasks that would otherwise need to be controlled directly. I wanted to build a game where players set actions for their characters, game administrators set actions for enemies in dungeons, and a server runs a fight based on a set of rules, and returns the result.

pre-alpha

pre-alpha Guild managment page

The core of the current functionality is above, the Guild page. This page allows the player to see teams, actions, equipment, characters, and character cards for thier guild. Everything begins with a character card.

Scrolling down Guild page

Players first click “Pull New Character” in order to receive a card. Cards will eventually be tradeable and sellable. They are templates for characters that disappear when redeemed. Characters are not tradeable or sellable. Clicking Redeem will exchange the card for a character.

Adding characters to a team

Returning to the top of the page, a player can select one of five teams and click on the slot to assign a character to the team via a dropdown menu that lists all available characters. With all five characters set (or less than five if the player chooses), it is time to run a dungeon and get some sweet loot!

Selecting a dungeon

Currently running a dungeon is very basic. With a guild selected, and teams populated with characters, clicking on Map, and then one of the available areas will show available dungeons. If “Send Team #” doesn’t appear, make sure your guild has a team set with characters, and that you’ve selected the guild by clicking the name of the guild directly above the dungeon list. Clicking “Send Team #” cause the button to disappear, as it will set the team as actively running a dungeon (I’ll add current team status to this page in the future).

Returning to the Guild page you should now see that the team you sent has “### seconds remaining” in its status. This means your trusty minions are fighting some bad dudes for some lootz (w00t!). What’s happening on the back end is that when a character was created, it was given a basic action which tells the system to “Target enemy with HP greater than 0 using a normal attack”. You can actually view this action, and add more (although there aren’t too many options yet) at the bottom of the character page. As actions are added, they are pulled off the top each time the character is set to move. The first time an action condition is met, the action is performed. In this way a player could, for example, set their character to “Target ally with HP lower than 70% using Heal skill”. If no ally has lost 30% of their HP, the next action will run.

Players, right now, can win any dungeon with 5 characters due to the way it is balanced, so when the action timer has reached zero a new item will be added to the player’s inventory. The system creates a fight log, and the next step will be to assign the fight log to the player such that they can review what happened during the fight.

Select “Click to Complete” and look for a new item in the inventory section. It doesn’t do anything at the moment in terms of a fight, but in the Character page equipment can be assigned to the character.

If you’re interested in being an alpha tester, please send me a message via twitter @BlueCloudDev. The game uses Facebook authentication (which means I don’t ever see or store your passwords), and I can approve individual applicants for access.

The front end and back end are completey open source too!