For those curious about the name, I am not talking about the Green vs Briggs fight that has Australian Boxing in turmoil. Nor am I talking about the Gillard vs Abbot fight that is brewing. The programming, nerd gloves are coming off and I'm getting back into some fairly involved interface programming.

So without further ado... Drumroll please!

So at work all I have access to is notepad and internet explorer (no internet might I add). So I frequently give myself programming challenges of creating, testing and playing little bits and pieces with all I have available. My latest trial has been a tower defense game using no imgaes, just using javascript and html. The catch being is that to give a bit of graphical representation to it I just used Wingdings or Webdings fonts to have an icon system. I have learnt that firefox doesnt like this. There are actually a few CSS things that might not work outside of IE6... i know its a huge step backwards but due to work limitations I never programmed multiple options into the CSS and javascript, besides which as far as I know the dings fonts arent available in firefox so would have to put in image compatability.

Hazaa! the day has finally come where I will post up the first version of Labyrinth! I mean sure it is in .BAT format, which for those unaware is rediculously archaic and outdated. But hey it was fun working within limits. And there were a few things that are really cool for Batch files, one of which is the goto command. Sometiems it would be really cool to have a simple equivalent in modern programming. Of course they do have things you can do, but yes... lets not get off track, the source code!

For those lazy sods who aren't interested in programming or anything of the sort and just want to try out the text based game Labyrinth you can download the latest version here. For those who want to take a look at the source code, which you can copy and paste into notepad and save as a .bat file, it is below

I had been working on the best solutions for managing the players, towns and guilds in the game and after a lot of different approaches and designs, I am now focusing on having them all grouped as entities. I want the relationships to be dynamic and each town, guild and player share most of the methods and variables. Ownership of resources, units, buildings can all be held by the different entities. As well as many beaurocracy control actions.

Ok here is the first official update on the progress of Merchants and Militia*

I will post a list of things I am working on, and if applicable the link to further information. Currently I am going to say that there won't be links for this update.

Ok so the major hitch I have found when programming in DOS (Batch files) is that multidimensional arrays and mapping is a pain in the ass. Seeing as there is no simple array variable format for mapping you cant use a simple nested for loop like you could in java based languages:

for(var i=0;i < limit;i++) {
  for (var j=0;j < limit;j++) {
    var map[i][j] = mapTile
  }
}

The batch language dictactes a much more archaic format, only allowing one changing variable per statement.

Ok so mostly I work in gaming creative fronts and most recently is the work into the in-house authoring of Merchants and Militia. I just thought I would go into a little bit of detail about the main premise of the game, and the strategy that should hopefully will shape some fun dynamic gameplay.

What I see lacks in a lot of multiplayer strategy games, in particular browser based strategy games (BBSG), is the lack of involvement with allies. Most of my experience with BBSGs, in particular some well advertised ones, is that your allies are pretty much people that you maybe communicate with and go on a sort of self elected campaign against another player or players.

There is no economic trade or strategy that goes into building your self sustained town or entity. So in essence this game gets boring and static incredibly quickly.