Thursday, August 8, 2013

SE M1 Design/Feature Document Summer 2000

Solar Empire

Milestone One Feature Set and Design Document

Solar Empire is in pretty poor shape.   To fix it and make the game truly enjoyable for everyone I’ve created this list of features that when implemented will create a complete game that could be considered a finished product.  Even it it’s a simplified one.  We must have a solid base to work from before we can implement the many new features ideas.  Also when this milestone is reached the game can be fully promoted and new game creation will be opened up.

The goal of the game shall be to become the player with the leading score at the end of the game.  The winner of each game shall be recorded and posted on the login page as a past winner.  Winning Clans will be posted as well.  The admins may be able to adjust their games to create a last man standing type of end game.

After this milestone is reached a period of playtesting will happen in which various parts of the economy and battle formulas are adjusted for optimal fairness.  After playtesting a second milestone with additional features that add value to the game will decided upon, no new features will be decided upon until then.


Game Areas

Game
Universe
User
Ship
Planet
Ports
Clans
Shops
News
Messages
Admin


Game
Automated Game Cycle
                New Signups
                                Review?
                Game Start
                Sudden Death
                Game Reset
                Last Man Standing
                                Spectators
                Status Shown
New game creation form
                Hosting Info Page Cleanup Integrate w/ form
                Include Game Description
Front page cleanup
                Game Logo Design
                Game Listing Cleanup
                Related Links Section
                News format
                Introduction Verbage

Credits Page

                Should include Bryan, Rob, Moriarty, Patrick, Eric, West and the Artist (No, not prince).

Advertisement Fix

Due to the nature of the game, the advertising banners had and average show time of about 1 second, which causes a very low click-thru rate and is not acceptable to the advertisers.  Right now there is a hack that puts up blank banners on half the page views, but that needs to be fixed.  Fixing this will probably require a redesign of all pages to use frames.  Or I may be able to get the caching working correctly for some of my advertising networks that would allow me to set the banners to be the same one across multiple pages.  Perhaps something could be done with layers and IFrames.

Remove Refresh Frame - Done

Login Page Additions
                Should include News, Leading Scores, Last Winners.
                Other sites login page support?
                Better Looking Login Form
                Game Description
                Game Stats (# of players, Etc.)
                Game Status Page?
Make CD backup
grep for db_query

Universe

Multiple Ports in same star system
Map Images
                Optimization
                Admin vars active
Check Unlinked Stars

Database Creation Cleanups

                Remove all unused fields from new game SQL file.

Star System Names

Need to program a random name picker for the universe builder.   Need a text file with a thousand or so good names of stars to pick from.
Space Resource Regeneration
There should be a random chance (percentage should be an admin var) once per day that a random star system will gain new resources of a random amount (set by admin).  Do this for both fuel and metal each night.


User
Player Info Score Pages
                Player Info Page – Done
                Extra Options on Player Info Page
                Options to view all (not just alive)
                Score Formula
                Track Fighters Killed
New User Signup Cleanups
                Better Introduction
                Cleaner ship creation
                Remove demographics info from signup form
                Add PMD to signup form
                Login directly from signup
                Email use admin email address

User Change Password

                Give all users the ability to change their passwords.  Future Feature?

Time Out Clean handling

                User Credit Transfer


Ship
                Calculate empty bays once only
                Cosmetic formatting on location.php3?
                Multi Ship Mining Tool (Mine All)
Attack message cleanups
Switch Ship Bug after eject – wrong star system
Escape Pod Relocate
Reorganize do_damage Function
Steal Admin Ship Bug

Planet
Planet Page Reconfigure
Location.php3 land change to attack when not owned

Ports
                Port Prices

                These should be changed every night and be based upon total resources in the universe

(price/demand curve).  Either total all resources left in space or all that is owned by players.  Include # of players in game and size of universe?  Base electronics on 2.2 times average.

                                Also each port has a price modifier that is currently being generated and not being used.

Port Database usage

                Query the database and use the prices and info there.

Multi Ship Harvesting Tools

When landing on ports there should be an option to sell all the materials off of the ships you are currently towing.

Clans
Planet Formatting on Clan Page (Scale off if none) – Done
Clan Rankings Table Formatting – Done
Clan Messaging
Assign new leader
Low contrast clan symbol colors

Shops

                New ship name left blank – Done

                Better Names for shops

                Ship Buying Cleanup
                Earth Planet Check

News

News History Links

print_name added to News posts.

Messages

Forum History Links

                Quoteing – Future Feature?


Admin

Forum Message Delete For Admin

Admin ability to join any clan w/o password – Done
Address Logging
Admin Page Cleanup – Done
All Vars Used
Admin no-damage in attacks
Admin land on planets w/o attacks
Admin never loose cash
Better Admin Forum
Email for big events

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