Nearing Completion

Hey everyone,

Instead of announcing the new additions, I’m going to talk about what is left to do since the majority of the game has been completed since my last post.

Left To Do 

_____________

17 more Abilities
4 more Spells
all Items 
2 more Upgrades 

______________

Once I get the item framework working correctly, they should all be done fast, as they are all relatively simple.

I’d like to thank all of the alpha testers for their hard work finding all those bugs.  We’ve had over 200 people test the game so far.  If it’s been a while since you’ve tried it yourself, check out the many new features at :
http://www.dragonwars.net/alpha.html

Of course, along with new features comes new bugs, so remember to submit any you may find to:
http://dragonwars.net/forum/ 

I’ll be working on weekly updates, each one hacking off some of the stuff I listed above.  Beta is on the horizon!

Cheers,
Jason 

Super Massive Update

Sorry that there’s not been an update for a while, everyone. But now that there is one, it’s positively giant. We’ve been working furiously adding the following:

• Bug Fixes
• Transportation
• Insubstantial
• Flight
• Various Random Abilities
• Dragon

And, the game is well on its way to being ready for Beta testing in early December. Hope this comes as good news to all. If you want to help us, here is what you do.

When you’re bored, if the server is on, play with your friends. If you are SURE you experienced a glitch, post it on the forums, along with your OS, Java console and all of that.

Tell people about the game – don’t post on forums and stuff, just invite friends to play with you once in a while.

BE ACTIVE. A healthy community is what gets people logging in. Post on the forums, login to the game, whatever you can do.

Appreciate your support, DW is almost ready for beta!

Unit Movement

I’m happy to announce that unit selection, placement, and movement are all complete.  Team-play should also be working for up to 25 players.  Next, I will be working on unit attacks.  If you are having trouble with the applet not working, I have added a link to the JAR file which is located under the applet.  (A JAR file is like an exe file except it should run on any operating system.)  As promised, here are some screenshots.

 

Pretty soon you all will be able to play complete games of DragonWars, albeit with only a subset of all the final features.   Remember, the link to try it out yourself is:  http://www.dragonwars.net/alpha.html

Cheers,
Jason

Placing Units

Hey,

I’ve updated the game to the point where players select an element from their hand to play onto the board, then the available squares are highlighted in green where players take turns placing their units.  If you have a friend that will try it out with you, you can find the applet at:  http://www.dragonwars.net/alpha.html

There are a bunch of known issues with the game.  If you run into any, please follow the directions for submitting a bug at:  http://dragonwars.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=51

Properly submitting a bug helps get the game moving along at a strong pace.

If you don’t get a chance to check out the latest stuff, I’ll have some screenshots up here in the next update.

Try it out! 
~Jason (Nether)

Tutorial

I just worked on a Tutorial. What do you think?

THE BASICS

So you want to learn to play Dragon Wars?

Don’t worry. Dragon Wars is quite an easy game to pick up and play. Mastering it takes much longer, though. The first thing you should know is that Dragon Wars is a turn-based multiplayer strategy game, for 2-25 players, where the object is to kill every enemy Captain on the board. You summon creatures, and have them do your bidding until you have achieved this. The game is split into rounds.

Get in the game

After working most of yesterday and all of today, tons of progress has been made.  The game protocol has been established which maintains the gamestate across all computers.  All the data is ready to be used now that the backbone of the code is complete.  So, the past couple days has been mainly work under the hood of the program, but within the last hour or so, I added rendering of the gamestate, which you can see below.

 

 

What to look forward to in the near future:

• Placing Units
• Moving Units
• Attacking other Units

Cheers,
Jason

Graphics

Sprite Submission is racing, and we have nearly completed all of the unit graphics. Hurrah! It’s worth checking the graphics forum daily. We’re very grateful if you can comment on individual sprites in the forum with feedback, and here is a list containing most graphics made so far from the game. After we have finished creating units, our artists will begin work on a GUI for the game, which will make the lobby look much better!

http://dragonwars.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=29

DragonWars is in the making

Hi All,

Good progress has been made on dragonwars over the past couple days.  The data has mostly been formatted, and the code for reading in all the unit/spell/item stats is done.

If you were to play the game, here is what is finished:
The captains are placed in the correct locations depending on the number of players.
Items are spawned randomly throughout the board.
Players hands are randomly generated.

More progress soon!

~Jason

Platform Up and running on the website

Hey guys– I’ve been sick for a while, but now I’m feeling better so I’m getting some more work done.  I made some improvements and fixed some bugs.  The main thing that you’ll notice is that its easier to access.  To test it, just go to

http://www.dragonwars.net/dragonwars-alpha2.html

If it doesn’t work, then you don’t have the latest version of java, or the server is down.

Try to gather as many people as you can to chat away, in order to flush out any bugs.

Hopefully this weekend, we’ll see progress with the DragonWars itself.

Regards,
Jason

Dragon Wars forum!

Hey guys, just a quick plug to let you all know that the Dragon Wars forum has been put up: http://dragonwars.net/forum

Lance will add the appropriate forum categories, but feel free to register in the mean while and start discussion in the lounge. The theme is default for now. I shall integrate it hopefully with the main website once that gets designed. Cheers,

-Karan