In
1994 I wrote Tartarus, which has been running ever since, and which was played
at it's hieght by over 300 people. It's a strategy war game which still has
regular players and has been great fun to run and play.This is a small diary on the evolution of Ripspace.
Back in the days of Amstraad and mallard basic I wrote a game called 'The Horete Vendetta'. This was about guilds fighting in the debris field of a solar system after being smashed by a great alliance. It was pretty good fun and was played for about a year by friends. The main feature of the combat was that you had to triangulate on targets and you could see homing missiles coming to destroy you.
The turn reports were print outs and the orders were hand written, only the server was computer based, such was the technology available to me in 1989.
In
1994 I wrote Tartarus, which has been running ever since, and which was played
at it's hieght by over 300 people. It's a strategy war game which still has
regular players and has been great fun to run and play.
I also tried writing Kalevala, an RPG. But it was never going to have a large community - just look at the quality of world of warcraft and you can see how immersive 3D worlds have come on.
In about 2001 I reworked The Horete Vendetta into a new rule set and showed it to some people. They had some ideas about economy and ship design. This initial version of Ripspace was far less elegant and focused. I resurrected some ancient C++ solar system code from about 1992, ported it to java and did a solar system displayer. Then I gave up, because I was busy with family and the rules were simply wrong.
I got side tracked into a different game design, based on learning the .net tech stack, and broadly about fantasy combat. But I got busy again and this project was never finished.
In late 2004 I had a go at rewritting the rules for Ripspace, and got alot more interested again. The rules were far better and I did about 3 months coding, deciding at the end that the ship designs were still wrong. A year later I had another go, throwing away much of the ship design (and alot of semi-complete code, which was annoying) and the remaining economy rules, and coming up with the very elegant ship components that are now in the game.
Four months of coding on the train and sometimes at weekends (while moving house and having our 3rd child!) delivers the beta for Ripspace. I think it's now a fine strategy space combat game. Fine enough to have a place on the web even in these days of massive multi-million pound games, which make my little effort less than a blip.
The game was play tested by some fabulous people (the kind that exploit every rule weakness ruthlessly) for about 3 months. This resulted in the addition of colonies, a change in drone design and the addition of LockDown's, Repair and Colonisation drones (special thanks to Lord Nova, Chrome, Mappie, Devaad and the rest!).
This beta 2 phase saw Mortis and the beta 1 testers continue to suggest improvements. This culminated with RipCurrents and space constructs, mimic drones and finally open systems and instance galactic movement. After huge effort over Christmas the Tartarus code base merged to a common MySQL platform, then a new payment page was rolled out, and finally, at last, live date was declared for Feb 3rd 2007. The galaxy was burnt and recreated in a night and the game is open.
I think the game mechanics create varied and interesting game play, and I have more thoughts on game design next.
Jonathan