So What is this Web Thing Anyway?

Beginner Web Development

So, I've recently decided it's about time to get around to trying my hand at building an MMORTS web game. This has been something I've wanted to do for a while, but never really got started. Seeing as it is the middle of winter I am now leaving the house only on an as-needed basis since anything below 70 degrees is just uncalled for. This leaves me with adequate time to get to work on my latest project.

The Goal

The game concept is as follows: You are the citizen of a city that, like the other cities in the game, is trying to become the greatest city through trade and conquest. Citizens of the city make up the government body which decides how the city will run including citizen tax rate, building improvements, city vs city attacks, city alliances, etc. All major city decisions are put up to vote with the citizens. There are three city types which have strengths and weaknesses: Trade, Attack, and Defense.

• Trade Cities have high trade and low defense.
• Attack cities have high attack and low trade.
• Defense cities have high defence and low attack.

There are also various player classes which class improvements at higher levels.

The game play will focus around working together with the citizens in your city, which is similar to an alliance or guild, to build up your city. The city grows from a tax on in game currency which is automatically collected as you gain money from quests, battles, or trades. Trading will be one of the easier methods of progression, various forms of quests will be available for providing story, and TvT (Town vs Town) actions are available to keep things interesting. Trading will happen at both the player level and the city level. There will be several quest lines including a main quest line, possibly a city quest line, and town and world events. The town military leader may call a TvT action at which point citizens may sign up to join in order to share in the profits on the attack.

There is much more, but this is all for now.

The Development

After quite a bit of researching and from personal experience of using various web-based interfaces, I've decided on the following toolsets at the moment:

Backend:

• LAMP stack
• Phalcon -> Using to create REST API

Frontend:

• HTML / CSS / JavaScript
• jQuery
• All calls to the backend should be via REST API call
• Opting to leverage DOM elements vs a canvas object for performance reasons

I've made simple html pages back in the geocities days, so I figured that pretty much makes me a pro at this! ;) Obviously with much to learn, I've been trying to read up as much as possible on web development to get a clue of what I'm doing.

It Begins

So far I've gotten a little bit going and have even started up a github repository to keep things in order. I've uploaded my initial code I've been working on here and there for the past couple of weeks as well as started a bug tracking list to keep track of things to work on. I'm sure this list will grow a lot in a short period of time.

TechnoChimp-MMORTS