My name is Jake Gostylo and I have been making games as a hobby for about 10 years. I was on a team that completed an RPG for the Mac. I started working on a game that was to be a 3d descendant of Scorched Earth before that game was shelved. I always stuck my nose up at the browser as a platform until I decided I wanted to create a low tech MMO and realized browser was the way to go. So I made TerraTanks (www.terratanks.com). I learned a lot doing that project and it plugged me into the PBBG community which is how I found out about this contest.
I approached this contest with some veteran wisdom. I know that the biggest mistake people make when trying to create a game is they overestimate how much they can get done in a certain amount of time. I knew I needed to keep the scope of my game to a manageable size. I decided to go with a game that I had designed just a week before.
I have not decided on a title, but for the sake of this article I will call it Roshambeaux.
I came up with the design for Roshambeaux as a way to make an RPG style dueling game using a standard 52 card deck. I had to change some of the rules of the game to make the feature set more manageable, but basically the game is still in tact and can be played with a normal deck of cards. The game is played by using the cards to set up a play area similar to a board, as well as drawing cards to use in the match.
One big reason I chose to do this game is that it was technically and conceptually challenging to create a browser game that required players to be playing simultaneously. Because the way this game is played is not really geared towards how a browser normally works I decided I would use a framework instead of doing everything by hand. I am hoping this helps me get it put together faster. I chose Symfony because it looked like the most complete solution using PHP. So my first task was to learn how to use Symfony. I had faith that the time lost learning this framework would pay off in the end.
Currently I feel like I am on schedule to get the game finished by the deadline. Despite the performance penalty of using Symfony on a shared host, I feel that it was definitely worth using. I have a lot of the game interaction coded out and working. Unfortunately it really needs to be almost done to give a demonstration. I still need art desperately and I am hoping that there is a Symfony plugin for a lounge that I can use because it would really help if I did not have to make one myself.
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