Community Spotlight - Tile Tactics by Owen
This week's Community Spotlight is Tile Tactics, a strategy game made by Owen, an active forum member and alpha tester.
Can you tell us a bit about Tile Tactics?
Tile Tactics was originally a PHP browser-based territorial strategy game I had been creating, which I decided would be a good first project to try and port over to Metaplace. The original game involved claiming and holding ownership of valuable land, which was defined by the value/rarity of the resources held in those tiles.
I've been taking what was essentially a turn/action-point based asynchronous multi-player game and trying to turn it into a Real-Time Strategy game, which was now possible thanks to the Metaplace servers. So at first I had been working on including some essentials for RTS play that were not currently available, such as double-click support for better mouse controls, window unit selection etc. I've also begun working on the basics of unit creation, ordering units & territorial control.
How long did it take you to make this world?
Well the metrics for my world tell me I've been in there almost 70 hours, but I'm convinced it must be much more!
Although the vast majority of that time is probably spent just staring at the screen wondering how I'm going to approach a particular problem, or going back and trying something a different way.
What has been your favorite part about working with Metaplace so far?
It's been said before but the community is great. Just the other day in the alpha chat room we were discussing with the Devs an aspect of the server what was holding me back and I was unsure how I was going to work around it. A few minutes later Dorian came back and said they had made a change to that system so I could continue on as I was going! Needless to say I was very pleased with such rapid feedback.
Where did you obtain the art for Tile Tactics?
The art all came from the assets I created for the original game, which were intended to be a simple as possible.
I could say it was all created on a "pixelated theme" to reflect the blocky nature of the original grid based map... but really, the easier to draw the better.
Did you work alone or collaborate with others?
I've worked alone, but have had the help of other testers when needed. It's great to be able to just go into the chat room and herd the guinea pigs into my world to try and break stuff!
I've also tended to script everything from scratch, in order to try and get to grips with MetaScript/Lua, but I'm sure I'll be making use of the module market to add features to my projects in the future.
If not finished, what else do you have planned your game?
I've had requests from some other testers to export some of the elements I've made as modules, such my mouse-click manager and unit selection scripts, so that they can use them in their own worlds. So I'll be getting rid of some bugs and cleaning them up to be exported at some stage.
As for the game itself, it is currently very much a prototyping world at this point, but I'd like to be able to get it to the stage where it can be a persistent-world territorial game with a close resemblance to the original 'design'.
Do you have any other worlds or games in mind to build on Metaplace, or are you working on anything else right now?
I'm focusing everything on Tile Tactics at the moment, but before I even got into Alpha I said I had wanted to take Uberspace and turn it into a Team Fortress type game. So I think that might be what I'll have a go at next, unless someone beats me to it and makes Uber-Team Space-Fortress before me!
Can you tell us a bit about yourself?
My name is Owen Canavan from Ireland. Originally an engineer, moved over to IT, and I'm now pondering the possibilities of getting into game design, so Metaplace is a great way to explore that and actually make some games.
I've been following MMO development since the pre-release SWG days and began to teach myself programming with PHP running a SWG guild site.
Thank you Owen!
