Indie-Resource.com

Hi All

It has been awhile since I was last on as I lost my username but have now found it at last.

Firstly how are we all?

I am looking at writing a my first online game and that is similar to the risk game.

Please can somebody advise me on the best way on going about creating the map that the players will be using. I would like to use a colour scheme so that the players know what section they own.

Regards
Andy

Hi All

The kind of games I am in to are games like empire earth. I am looking at writing a game like this but for online players. I have never done anything like this and not sure how to go about it. I guess the first thing is the board (or map)

Please can someone point me in the right direction.

Regards
Andy

Well, the maps could either be made by hand in any graphic editing software such as PhotoShop or the open-source GIMP. Or, you could buy a license for Campaign Cartographer to make some really amazing-looking maps. In particular their Fantasy Overland Symbol Pack could really make something nice. I have used it before and it is pretty easy to use if you follow their tutorials. The only issue with CC, is that when I used it it had a bit of a struggle on Windows 7. It could probably be made to run better by messing with some compatibility settings, but I never went that deep with it. I was still able to make very nice maps with it, though.

Once you have the map images done, probably the easiest way to proceed would be to make the game using PHP with maybe a touch of Javascript, but you could make your map interactive by creating an image map so that there would be clickable regions on your map. They can be a little tough to make by hand due to having to write tons of coordinates, but there are plenty of image map creation programs out there, including some that are browser-based. You may have to use a bit of Javascript to dynamically update the links in the image map based on what the player is doing, or to override the link behavior all-together if you wanted to handle them on the client-side with Javascript

Thanks for the tips. I will have look at your idea's.