General Doom

That's a very good article, a good read! - Added to my post.

Slight necro here but does anybody want me to add more to this?

Hello, I have a customer I am currently doing some work for and he needs some design work doing, this would be a full site re-design and a few other small bits here and there, all the work is paid but have to be completed within deadlines. The website he currently wants re-designing is http://www.sellbike.co.uk , he also wants a new logo creating and there will be a lot of future work (he has around 130 website currently). I am not posting a budget as we will pay whoever we decide to go with whatever they are asking. Please post up a few examples of your work, timeframes and prices. Regards, Tom Mclean

Why ask people for their hourly rate when you specified you arnt paying per hour? :s make a list with a couple of mods you want doing and get people to say how much they would charge for each.

Post the files you have already done and if I get some time tomorrow or the day after I will put up the rest of it for you.

Nevermind, have it working now. So, how do I get the data from the database and put it into the JS? Im using PHP and mySQL for the rest of the script if that changes / help?

Sorry for highly noobish questions! using the first version and have downloaded and included jquery into it, still no countdown.

Okay, so i havn't looked at or used jQuery before, so how do I get that to take the input from the database as a timestamp? Also, can't seem to get it to countdown =S

Hey all, I am trying to get time to count down dynamically (no need to refresh page) instead of statically, but just can't figure it out for the life of me. Basically when somone adds something to the construction que it calculates the time to build it in seconds (lets say 3600 seconds) and put's it into the database: time()+3600 etc, then, when I use a function to turn this into hours mins seconds etc and display it on the construction page and it "counts down" but only when the user refreshes the page. Is there a way using JS or jQuery to make this dynamic? Just the displaying of the time? Hope I explained this well enough!

Aye, that's what I intend to do, give them a "first steps" play through that get's them to set up their first base correctly and is played through, again, something that will be in the beta. Any comments on the 2 layouts? Good, bad?

Noted, thanks for feedback, I will write up a small tutorial later this week once I have finished a few more things I am working on in the game to make it easier to understand.

Aye, alot of buildings take a long tiem but will drop dramatically when you build up other ones like metal mines and robotics factories. Yeah no tutorial yet (is alpha), and yeah is confusing if you havn't played this type of game before ^.^ will make more sense once I finish the basic features, enter beta and produce a tutorial. Thanks for reply =]

Hey all, just posting up my project to try and get some feedback. It is a space style RTS where you build up your empire, produce fleets and go to war etc. Is very similar to alot of games in this genre at this time as I am building the base of it before I start making it unique, is currently only in alpha: http://www.inspired-logic.info/imperium User: Demo Pass: Demo Let me know what you think and if you find and bugs! Will be needing help on a few things in the near future involving getting times to automatically count down instead of statically (construction que's) if anybody has any idea how to do this (java / ajax?) please lemme know!

My accountant costs me about £1500 a tax year and saves me about £7000 a tax year, expensive but way more than pays for himself =p

scorpiic venom - I don't mean this in the wrong way but you don't know what you are doing, I run my own company and know the level of work that is involved. For starters you have to register the company with companies house if you are in England or whom ever it is if you are in the USA, next, you will be employing people, you have to work out their salleries and even if things are going bad you still have to pay them that sallery. Also, you will be a national company and accepting payments world-wide, you need a specific type of bank account to do this and believe me, they charge a fortune for that service. Next, you have to abide by the laws of the country the person working for you resides in, for example if you hired somone from England you would have to pay their National Insurance (comes out at source). You also need to be able to calculate all your overheads and tax for the year and then pay an accountant to go over them, again, thats about £600 ($850), and then you have to pay your tax ontop of all that. You have posted here stating you are starting a company, have you registered it, chosen a name, secured a bank account, tax number, certificates of registration, stocks and shares certifications and market valuation, have you even decided whether to go limited or not? If not do you have assets to ofset against the company? Do you have a business plan, do you have the relevant skills to assess each coder you hire for each section to determine their skill level? Do you have the relevant skill to create a secure website like this? Do you understand the costs and complications of accepting over-seas payments and paying over-seas workers? Go down to your local lawyers firm and have a consultation with the accountant there, seriosly, if you do not know 100% what you are doing before you start you are going to enter a world of...poo. Starting a company is not something that should be done just on a whim, it has REAL consequences, go self employed for 6 months first, see if the website actually generates anything before you land yourself in thousands of pounds worth of debt and black listed from having a bank account due to bankrupcy.

Cheers for the feedback, will add some more sections later on this evening.

If anybody reads this and finds it useful please post a reply and I will add more to it, in the mean time i'm off to bed!

Hey all, I’ve decided to write up a few things that I feel are important, but generally over-looked within game play. This is sort of a way for me to get some ideas down for myself, but hopefully you guys will be able to pull some ideas from it to improve your own games or even give you ideas for new ones. Little note; I'm not saying what I’m writing here is a must do, or is vital etc and please, if you disagree or think you can improve on any points I have made post below and I will change this thread, after all a collective is better than a singularity. I’m going to talk about a broad range of games, from FPS to RPG so just try to adapt it to your own game or idea. Things I’m going to cover (to begin with): 1. Rewards; why and when. 2. Choice, true choice. 3. Internal conflict.   Rewards; why and when. So, we all know how reward schemes work, you kill this monster it drops 5 gold, yeah, great, 100 monsters later and I’m bored. This frustrates me within games so much, it destroys vital parts of game play and even later game play, time your rewards! Every time you defeat a monster in an RPG or defeat a player it does not need to give a reward. Making players work for that gold, coin, money, dollar, wonga gives them a sense of achievement rather than no-life grinding. It also encourages your players to advance to other sections of your game rather than grinding one particular section because each monster you kill drops something that will make it easier for you to progress. My argument isn’t particularly holding much weight at this moment and is really just me having a ramble, so, let’s back this up a little: Skinners box, don’t know it? Google and youtube are your friend. The basic concept behind skinner was that you could condition humans to do a particular action if it generated a reward that they wanted, for example lets use skinners actual experiment done with a pigeon; There is a red button within a box, each time the pigeon presses this button a pellet of food is dropped into the box, very quickly the pigeon associated the button with a positive reward, something it wanted and began consistently pressing it, however, after a time it stopped. This was due to over indulgence, too much off what it wanted spoilt what it wanted so it had no desire for it anymore. Now then, in skinners experiments he found that if he dropped the food at random intervals the pigeon would repeat the task for a much longer time. How does this relate to game play? Well, perfectly if you think about it. Take an RPG for example, constantly rewarding a player with money will cause them to become bored, randomly rewarding them will encourage them to continue playing, as your parents probably said to you: If you work for it, you will appreciate it.   So, when you may ask, should I reward players? Well, there is no easy answer to this, look at your game, balance it, new players need to have these consistent rewards so that they feel they are accomplishing a lot in a short amount of time, however this needs to depreciate without the player realizing, think of an RPG, WoW is a great example with its leveling system. The first handful of levels take about 3-4 hours, tops, the player feels great, they are getting quick, consistent rewards, fuelling them to carry on for that moment, then look at later levels, it can take a good 2-3 months to get to level 80(?? I don’t play WoW!), there’s timing your rewards perfectly, you have captivated new players instantly by allowing them to get to level 10 within a few hours, with them knowing the max level is 80, they feel great, as if they are gaining on the top players, but then it slows, un-noticeably, this is skinners box executed in a very good manner, get the idea?   Choice, true choice: Choice is something that is thrown around a lot by games recently, some games pull it off fantastically (for example, EVE online) in EVE, every choice you make really can have an impact on the entire universe and there is little to no structure for you to follow, however, other games promote choice but don’t actually give it, (for example WoW). Let’s look at WoW for a moment, this is an example of how designers may feel they are offering choice, when really they are offering players to make calculations and decisions based upon these calculations. Want an example? Go google “WoW talent trees”, big aint it? Lots of choices there…yeah. Now google something like “WoW best talent tree fits”, all of a sudden it isn’t choice, there are defined paths to take that gives you the best dps, health, healing, casting etc. This is not choice. Now then, let’s look at something that does choice fantastically: Fallout. Yeah, everybody has played it. Now, just for a moment think about the perk screen each time you level up, real choice, have you ever spent 20+ mins trying to decide which perk to get? Do you want to do more damage or do you want things to explode into more pieces? Choice, real choice, a question like that comes down to what YOU want, it personalizes the game to you just that little bit more, makes you learn a little about yourself, that’s what captivates you, that’s what makes you say, at 2 AM in the morning say “Hmmm, just one more level”. Written by Tom Mclean [email protected]   --------------------------- Other interesting articles: Behavioral Game Design - Thanks Octarine!

Sorry was java!   Hmm damn! Is there any other possible way of doing it?   I know many other sites have avatars that automatically save to the users profile, could you recommend a lnaguage or way of doing this and i'll start reading up/looking for a programmer?   Thankyou for the reply!

Hey all,   I've very little knowledge about flash and have bought an avatar creator for a website I am devoloping, however, I need it to automatically save the image the user creates into a local folder and update a mySQL field with the path of the image.   If there any way of doing this? If anybody could point me in the direction of a helpful thread it would be very appreciated, also if somebody is confident they could do this I would be willing to pay around $150.00 for the script so long as the person explains how they have done it.

I see the bug now, thanks for that.

There is alot of work still to do on it yes, thankyou very much for the feedback. The jumping straight to logged in on registration is a good idea, i'll change that when I get chance. Stacking construction is coming soon, was getting all the basic functions down and working before I started adding in extra "features" so to speak. The galaxy map is very confusing, will be clearer once I actually create a decent map. Planning on doing a tutorial when I get chance. Great feedback, cheers! EDIT: Just checked, that's not a bug, you can not do a construction and a defense upgrade at the same time.

Okay, so had this idea for a game for awhile but not really had time to sit down and do it, so had 2 days off work about a week or so back and got somthing playable and to the point where I can just add bits every now and then to keep it going. Presenting: The Imperium Wars (IWars). http://www.inspired-logic.info/imperium This is a custom engine and in the VERY early stages of open BETA. So far there is: Map, production, construction, research, ranks, alliances, profiles and a few other bits and bobs that go with it. Have a look and tell me what you think! (I know it looks aweful, don't pretend to be a graphics designer).

Yeach cheers, wasn't confusing as such, just seemed more efficient to do it the other way.

Thanks for the reply's everyone, in the end I used zeggys simple script and it worked a treat for all my members! Thanks for the help.