Conflict of Interest alpha

WIP games, tools & toy projects Archived Projects
#1

I am starting an alpha test for my empire building browser game, Conflict of Interest.

http://www.cydstudios.com

The game probably contains some bugs and the graphics are not all finished but its in a playable state. It requires a valid email address to register. I am finding that its a necessary evil with all the spammage lately.

Here are a few screenshots:
http://www.cydstudios.com/screenshots/screen1.PNG
http://www.cydstudios.com/screenshots/screen2.PNG

Please try it out and let me know what you think. Right now the server is wiped clean.

#2

Oh I forgot to mention its all in JSP/Servlets and the server is all java. That is why I am posting it here.

It used to contain some applets as well but I wound up converting everything client-side to javascript and Ajax due to problems some users were having installing and accessing client/server applets.

#3

Your Captcha is too hard. It took me six tries to get one right.

You should open your forums up. It will be detrimental to people who want to post that they have to wait for you to approve the message.

Can’t really comment on the game. I didn’t know how to get to my next turn. Do I just wait> To click a button for next truen? There was no indication of what I needed to do.

#4

Thanks for trying it out. That Captcha is devilish. I will look into making it simpler.

I am not very experienced at running a forum and I keep accidentally turning moderation back on whenever I change something. I will get it sorted out ASAP.

A turn (day) is 15 minutes. I need to make that obvious somehow.

Thanks again.

#5

I took out the requirement for a valid email address to register for now.

Did anyone try to register and have a problem with the Captcha like CaptainJester did?

Thanks

#6

I made the Captcha easier by ignoring case, which I think was the main problem. I also added a turn time progress bar so players can see how long until the next turn.

I posted this game to a couple of game dev boards and I have been pretty disappointed with the response. Only 3 people tried it and of those, only CaptainJester gave any feedback (which was very helpful, thanks again).

If you looked at it and decided not to try it or had trouble signing on, I sure would appreciate a short response. You could just pick from below:

  1. I had technical trouble
  2. I am not going to play anything that requires me to register
  3. Feh, I don’t like these type of games
  4. Bleh, it doesn’t look to be worth my time
  5. Not java-ey enough for this board
  6. Go away, Sanojo, you bother me

Thanks in advance…

#7

all links dead?

#8

Yeah sorry. My host is making me upgrade due to the size of my codebase. Hopefully they will get my stuff transferred by tomorrow. I will post here when its back up.

#9

The upgrade is finished and the site is back up. Sorry to everyone who tried to log in during the last couple of days.

Also, I am getting complaints that it is a little to difficult to figure out what to do so I will be adding a task/reward system over the next couple of weeks as a sort of tutorial mode for new players. Will post here when the system is in place.

#10

Unless I’m missing something, playable is a slight exaggeration, unless you mean combat which is hard since there are no visible fierce neighbors.
Here’s the short list, from the first half hour. Lots of good framework here, but not really playable in my opinion.
intro page - roughly in the order I actually played it.

on login: choose sex / alliance
umm. where’s the button to go forward from there? select? which due to the positioning of the button with the ‘choose your own alliance’
makes one feel unsure of what exactly one is selecting when ready to go with default.

Jobs List is non-alphabetical.

Homebase needs to be marked on minimap.

Sell List, again in seemingly arbitrary order? At least I can make some money off the starting resources.
Ok I see they are in category/alphabetical order. Then they should be treed or colored, maybe.

Logic of having to go to Map to -> Manage is questionable. Found myself clicking all the bottom left tabs
to find the ‘Manage’ area, to try to setup the jobs again. I understand this is town by town basis,
but still. if It was a tab bottom left, it would go to selected town.

Consumed/produced gives no clues as to what the numbers on the graph line correlate to.

The hardest is this problem of not finding my ‘citizens’. Why are they all occupied Hunting?
Manage-> after pressing save changes it seemed to forget everything instead of saving: the Management page’s
percent division of labor went back to 100% hunting, because idle 0 ? if this is because everybody’s busy,
how to change that? I feel I can’t do anything to start off with.
try to put 30% to grow grain, nothing happens. Maybe if I wait 15 minutes it will be ‘set’?
But save changes tab just zeroes it. Not Nice.

Abandon Town. Since it’s an option, let’s see if I need to do that to send my hunters forth into the world?
Nope. Not allowed to do so. Why give me this button then at this point?

Ok, let’s conscript some of these suckers. Get a hex a screen.
Then a new screen. Hmm, is this where I can allocate my 10 chosen peasants to do work?
Aha, but I can’t just free them up so I could do with percentages? Fair enough.
Yep, I now have 10 peasants on a hex. Not sure if they’re warriors or grain farmers though.
I can march them though. Ok. Now I go back to conscript, and start looking at the numbers closer.
What the hell does it mean? is this the expense of creating the peasant troop? Guess so- nice thing these hunters have amassed such a fortune for me to use freely.
And one unit of anything will buy me one peasant?
For a moment I thought I was making jobs. Hmmm. Okay, move them, then see if I can move the first troop.
Second troop, nope, nothing happens, guess the turn clock isn’t turned yet. Ah, there it is, top right, and it just happened
to tick over now.
Okay, try to click something, map is stuck. Yellow hex on peasant, new clicks update Left Panel but not selection gfx.

How about just laying it right out: what can I really do in this version of the game.
And yes, do make the tutorial, it will be very useful for new players and will also force you to examine the
functionality as you make it.

final piece, the map with this design of radiating spikes is looking very unnatural.
If it has a gameplay design to it, fair enough but then one must still blend it into something that looks more pleasing to the eye.

Still you guys have done a fair bit of work to get this far, if you want alpha players this early you have to give more feeling of control.
Some franks are making Hours of War named strategy game, same concept pretty much just troop movement focus, no management.
Still they struggle with exactly these same problems of how to give a player feedback on slowly updating systems. ( the 15 minute update I think they were also
using, or maybe 5 now. anyway. )

#11

Wow, what great feedback. I’ll try to address all your points.

[quote]playable is a slight exaggeration
[/quote]
Almost everything that needs to be there is in there. From what I am hearing, its just too dang difficult to figure out how to do it. Lots of work needs to be done to make it easier to play.

[quote]on login: choose sex / alliance
umm. where’s the button to go forward from there? select? which due to the positioning of the button with the ‘choose your own alliance’
makes one feel unsure of what exactly one is selecting when ready to go with default.
[/quote]
I blew through this screen so many times in testing I guess I failed to notice that its not obvious what to do. Will revisit this screen soon.

[quote]Jobs List is non-alphabetical.
[/quote]
I tried to list them in a logical order rather than alphabetical. There are so many jobs that it sort of becomes a jumble. I will have to rethink this interface.

[quote]Logic of having to go to Map to -> Manage is questionable. Found myself clicking all the bottom left tabs
to find the ‘Manage’ area, to try to setup the jobs again. I understand this is town by town basis,
but still. if It was a tab bottom left, it would go to selected town.
[/quote]
You can also get to your town(s) from the “Holdings” button, which lists all your towns and armies. The “Map” button jumps to your home town because… well I couldn’t think of a better default.

[quote]Consumed/produced gives no clues as to what the numbers on the graph line correlate to.
[/quote]
Not sure why this is unclear. The numbers are listed under each resource.

[quote]The hardest is this problem of not finding my ‘citizens’. Why are they all occupied Hunting?
Manage-> after pressing save changes it seemed to forget everything instead of saving: the Management page’s
percent division of labor went back to 100% hunting, because idle 0 ? if this is because everybody’s busy,
how to change that? I feel I can’t do anything to start off with.
try to put 30% to grow grain, nothing happens. Maybe if I wait 15 minutes it will be ‘set’?
But save changes tab just zeroes it. Not Nice.
[/quote]
I have never seen this before and I can’t seem to recreate it. You should be able to set your people to do any jobs you like whenever you like. I tried a bunch of ways to recreate your problem but it all seems to work fine. Can you try again?

[quote]Abandon Town. Since it’s an option, let’s see if I need to do that to send my hunters forth into the world?
Nope. Not allowed to do so. Why give me this button then at this point?
[/quote]
Excellent point. Will remove this button from the home town.

[quote]Ok, let’s conscript some of these suckers.
[/quote]
You pick the size of the army then the type of weapons, armor and mounts (of which you probably have none to start). Then you click a location around your home town for them to start and click “create”. At this point it jumps to the goods transfer screen so you can outfit your army with supplies. Obviously this is not clear from the UI and I need to work on that.

[quote]Okay, move them, then see if I can move the first troop.
Second troop, nope, nothing happens, guess the turn clock isn’t turned yet. Ah, there it is, top right, and it just happened
to tick over now.
[/quote]
Armies have their number of moves listed when you click them. They get one move per turn/day (15 minutes) up to a maximum of 8. Once again, need to make this more obvious.

Speaking of this, have you noticed that the map is hex with weighted pathfinding and terrain highlighting without resorting to flash, applets or anything but good ol’ cross-platform html? <-- (fishing for complements on this dev board)

[quote]the map with this design of radiating spikes is looking very unnatural.
[/quote]
Its randomly generated by my terrain generator. The reason for that is that this game will come to a conclusion after 20 game years with the players defending the island from invasion and then it will restart with a new map. The map does look a little spikey though. Probably needs a revisit.

[quote]Still you guys have done a fair bit of work to get this far
[/quote]
Actually its just me.

Huge thanks for this feedback. Its like gold to me.

#12

Don’t know if this’ll be what you want, but here’s a diamonds+squares method I had lying around that I think made a single landmass surrounded by water. Heights 0 or less are water, and greater than 0 are land.

It requires a square grid with dimensions of a power of 2 +1 (like 33, or 257 or something).

	private double initialMax = 1;
	private double initialMin = -1;

	private void diamondsSquares(double[][] grid){
		int size = grid.length-1;
		int endPos = size;
		
		double variance = initialMax-initialMin;

		for(int i = 0; i < grid.length; i++)
			for(int j = 0; j < grid.length; j++)
				grid[i][j] = Double.MIN_VALUE;
				
		for(int i = 0; i <= endPos; i++) {
			grid[i][0] = 0;
			grid[0][i] = 0;
			grid[endPos][i] = 0;
			grid[i][endPos] = 0;
		}

		//and finally, run the diamonds and squares
		while(size > 1) {
			//do the squares
			for(int i = 0; i < endPos; i+=size) {
				for(int j = 0; j < endPos; j+=size) {
					if(grid[i+size/2][j+size/2] == Double.MIN_VALUE) {
						double mean = grid[i][j];
						int count = 1;
						if(i+size <= endPos) {
							mean += grid[i+size][j];
							count++;
							if(j+size <= endPos) {
								mean += grid[i+size][j+size];
								count++;
							}
						}
						if(j+size <= endPos) {
							mean += grid[i][j+size];
							count++;
						}
						grid[i+size/2][j+size/2] = mean/count + Math.random()*variance - variance/2;
					}
				}
			}
			//do the diamonds by stepping over targets
			for(int i = 0; i <= endPos; i+=size/2) {
				for(int j = 0; j <= endPos; j+=size/2) {
					if(grid[i][j] == Double.MIN_VALUE) {
						double mean = 0;
						int count = 0;
						if(i+size/2 <= endPos) {
							mean += grid[i+size/2][j];
							count++;
						}
						if(j+size/2 <= endPos) {
							mean += grid[i][j+size/2];
							count++;
						}
						if(j-size/2 >=0) {
							mean += grid[i][j-size/2];
							count++;
						}
						if(i-size/2 >=0) {
							mean += grid[i-size/2][j];
							count++;
						}
						grid[i][j] = mean/count + Math.random()*variance - variance/2;
					}
				}
			}
			
			variance /= 2;
			size /= 2;
		}
	}

Hmm… looking at the code you might want to add a line near the beginning setting

grid[size/2][size/2] = initialMax;

to ensure you don’t just get small scattered islands.

#13

Hey thanks, Jono. I’ll experiment with that when I get back to the terrain generator.

#14

Manage-> allocating work
ok, i was a bit slow. I thought it would automatically subtract from the 100% Hunters,
but of course I have to set Hunting down to another number first myself… silly me…
Modern games usually handle this sort of thing for you, so lazyness was a factor here,
just expected it to know what I want to do or something :stuck_out_tongue: Still the reflex for may players
of similar limited intelligence to mine may well be confused by this, and could use a hint like “cannot allocate over 100%, decrease something first”
Duh I is dim :slight_smile:

The graph at the bottom has red and green boxes, but what the numbers in the boxes represent is not shown anywhere.
Consumed 3, Produced 14. of what? I can’t select products, so it isn’t an individual product?

#15

[quote]and could use a hint like "cannot allocate over 100%, decrease something first
[/quote]
Good point. I should do that.

[quote]The graph at the bottom has red and green boxes, but what the numbers in the boxes represent is not shown anywhere.
Consumed 3, Produced 14. of what? I can’t select products, so it isn’t an individual product?
[/quote]
There are pictures of each resource (with popup text) at the top of each column. Now that you mention it there is a gap between the storage and consumed/produced that might be making it confusing.

#16

I published a new alpha version (0.0.4 a) which contains bug fixes and UI changes that have been suggested here and other places.

I also added a new task/reward system as a sort of tutorial for players to learn the game. Please try it out and let me know if you have any issues or problems.

www.cydstudios.com

ps. Graphics are still pretty rough. I am shopping around for an artist to replace my less-than-stellar attempts. If anyone has any suggestions for good/inexpensive artists I would sure appreciate it.

#17

Good game. Everything seems working.
There are some bugs (e.g. possibility to make unlimited resources) and problems, but in general I would say that it is good work.

I don’t like idea of JSP and could suggest Freemarker for output. Also think about iframes instead of frames.
Tasks are good, understandable.

Queue or routing for armies will be great.

#18

Thanks for the feedback.

[quote]possibility to make unlimited resources
[/quote]
Actually it is limited by the terrain your town is on. Check out the worker bars on the right side of the town management screen. The popup text will tell you the maximum for your town.

[quote]I don’t like idea of JSP and could suggest Freemarker
[/quote]
I am not sure what the advantage is. Can you fill me in? I am already using MVC with servlet/JSP. I was originally using just JSP but it got way to complicated to follow my own code.

[quote]Queue or routing for armies will be great
[/quote]
Yes I am working on this but don’t have a good design for it yet. It is definitely coming.

#19

possibility to make unlimited resources:

  1. create an army of 10
  2. resource transfer screen, enter 999 for army resource
  3. press <- button, so it will reduce resource from army and add to town
    With a simple macro I get 1000+ resources in a 5 min.

Captured my first town… 2500gold is quite cheap if you have 100K+ gold :E

Here is good comparation to JSP:
http://freemarker.org/docs/app_faq.html#faq_jsp_vs_freemarker
Anyway, the way you do, already bring playable game, I doubt to change tools in the middle.

PS: server respond seems a bit slow. Sometimes it took minutes to load page. Also clicking unit will result in left frame change after half minute…
And you really should design all actions keeping cheaters in mind. Otherwise they will ruin game every time.

#20

Woops. Nice exploit. I had a TODO in my code to check for that, honest. I was wondering how you got to be so big so fast.

Anyway, for loyally reporting the exploit I will reward you with 25 shiny gold pieces to add your… umm… 100,000.

[quote]server respond seems a bit slow
[/quote]
The server is slow at times. I just fixed a DB connection leak so I am hoping that was causing it. Otherwise its my host, which will not make me thrilled.