Second Prototype

Over one year after the first prototype was released, the second prototype is finished. It’s yet another graphical user interface for a strategy game.

Go ahead and start the prototype.

As a theme I chose again Starcraft – the ingenious realtime strategy game created by Blizzard Entertainment. Specifically I chose the “Bunker Wars” variation of the game where the players only have marines and bunkers available to play. Here’s what it looks like:

The fist prototype was merely a Google-Maps like scrolling script that could display a section of a huge map and provide a convenient interface to navigate and scroll the map. It was all static JavaScript, no database backend, no unit movement or units no nothing. It looked like this:

The new prototype features access management (which is circumvented in the demo), units are available and they can move and enter or leave bunkers. The map can be scrolled – the displayed map is 8×8 tiles – the actual map size is 100×100.

On the front end the prototype uses asynchronous JavaScript to reload the map without reloading the page and to issue unit movement commands to the server. The javascript library Prototype is used.

The backend consists of a MySQL database with 3 tables (users, map, units). A couple of PHP classes output the main page and two API interfaces are provided for the asynchronous JavaScript calls to update the map and to move a unit. It’s rather simple and functional and probably somewhat resource wasting but it works. It’s tested on Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 and should also work with Internet Explorer 6.

1 Comment

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.