Called Neighbor, a real-time strategy (RTS) game like Starcraft but for the web and much smaller in scope. A screenshot in its very nascent stage:
Won't You Be My Neighbor (So I Can Blow You Up)?
The game area is on the left, with vertical and horizontal scroll bars around it; the controls area is on the right, with currently only a slider control for zooming the game area.
What do I envision for the game? A web-based RTS written in Silverlight that takes its inspiration from a particular Warcraft II “pud” (or game map) called Neighbor. In that game, you started with a small area for your base, surrounded by trees, with your opponents just on the other side of the trees. The game progressed by you and your neighbor both building up your armies within sight of each other, while your lumberjacks chopped through the trees, eventually opening up a pathway through which your armies battled; there were up to 8 players on such a map, and different strategies were employed to win: Some players wouldn’t chop through their trees at all in order to use projectile attacks from archers and towers to shoot the enemies over the trees; others would try to bring their ground army to bear immediately.
This game is more difficult than the tower defense one, which took me long enough to finish as it was, so I am not 100% committed to completing this game. However, I am going to start on it and see how much progress I can make with my idea as-is; then if it is too big in scope I can revise downward.
One goal I am making for this game is for its screen size to be 480 x 320. Silverlight is being ported to work on mobile platforms that run on cell phones, so my hope is that if I finish this game one day I could not only have it on the web but also it would be runnable on a mobile device. I would love to see it on the iPhone but Apple is not a fan of having other companies’ technologies running on their proprietary system, so as far as I know they would rather drop dead before seeing Silverlight run on the iPhone. There are specific challenges to making that work, but proof of concepts have actually been done to run Silverlight games on it–whether it would ever be sanctioned (and say, purchasable through the app store) is a different story.
Nonetheless, there are many other phones that will run Silverlight, so it would be cool to get the game on it.
Unfortunately, having such a small area for the game constrains how much I can do with it, especially for an RTS, which typically have sprawling maps. But, with Silverlight, in just a few hours I used it render features to make the game area zoomable, such that, when zoomed out fully, yes the game is too small to manipulate individual creatures, but you can zoom in to a region of the map and then scroll around at that zoomed in level to see the whole thing; this feature allows me to put a critical mass of “stuff” (trees, lumberjacks, bases, rock minerals, etc.) on the screen which will make the game interesting.
