Authority
A free browser-based online multiplayer strategy game. It's also fun and cannot be easily described in one sentence.
- Category:
Games
- Not yet released.
Since I’ve just restarted Authority development after six months I thought I ought to quicken the pace of updates on the blog, so here we go. After some teething problems (i.e. every page taking five seconds to load because I was making over 1000 database queries a hit) the new game code is working very nicely and I’ve got almost all of the old Authority functions re-implemented. I’ve also added a new game management panel to the interface which I’m liking the look of*:
*figuratively speaking. I’m not actually satisfied with the way it looks.
The project has been on hiatus for about six months because past design and programming decisions had forced me into a corner when it came to the final portion of the game. This was a corner forcing the coding to be untidy and complicated. So! I’m overhauling a lot of the code and I’m confident this will make Authority happen and happen better. No timetable will be set at this point.
More evidence of Authority progress, y’all. Authority uses a new, different algorithm to check for connections compared to the method used in Territory (the concept of ‘connected territory’ is present in Authority as well, although it’s completely different to the way it works in Territory). It doesn’t have a name, since I wrote it myself, but I’m sure there is an essentially identical one out there that does have a name; it’s about as simple as you can get (since we’re not trying to find the shortest path to something, the distance travelled is irrelevant) and I imagine it’s prototypical of all the fancier searching algorithms (Dijkstra’s/BFS/A* et al.). Anyway, it’s faster and far less complex than the old one, which is good because in Authority there’s going to be a lot more connection checking going on.
Now, it’s not terribly exciting, but nevertheless you can try it out for yourself (text-based; no pretty graphics here).
The whole interface is more or less totally polished and working—that is, all of the other bits of the site apart from the actual game map part itself. As for that, you can select units/improvements, select actions, queue up moves, etc. So, the only part left to be completed is the actual execution and calculation of turns and moves. A rather critical part, yes, which will take a bit of work to get going, but then that’s it.
Stay tuned (but not too tuned), Authority fans!
… function unitstats($unit) {
/* gets the stats of a particular unit */
$stats = array();
if ($unit == 'l') {
$stats['atk'] = 24;
$stats['def'] = 18;
} elseif ($unit == ‘e’) {
$stats['atk'] = 4;
$stats['def'] = 2;
} elseif ($unit == ’s’) {
$stats['atk'] = 12;
$stats['def'] = 4;
} elseif ($unit == ‘r’) {
$stats['atk'] = 2;
$stats['def'] = 4;
} elseif ($unit == ‘o’) {
$stats['atk'] = 12;
$stats['def'] = 6;
} elseif ($unit == ‘a’) {
$stats['atk'] = 12;
$stats['def'] = 4;
}
return $stats;
} …
… $avb = round($stats1['atk'] / $stats2['def']);
$bva = round($stats2['atk'] / $stats1['def']);
$health1 -= $bva;
$health2 -= $avb; …
Development is going strong.
This time, a proper mockup of the main game page, which makes it more clear what this game is about. Click it for full-size image. 
