Ideas for Unity and forum service

In terms of where I would like to take my Unity game, I’ve had another idea that I would like to try.  That is, I would like to have an NPC with a variety of options in a chat window – and that these would transport a player to another scene in the game.  The scene would probably be another SFS room, though not necessarily.  Then certain modes I would like to implement:

• “Rocks fall, everyone dies” a game in which the player can be the game-master, or where people can team up and be the hapless adventurers.
• “Double dragon” a game in which the player is the dragon and has to assist an army in crushing another army (AI controlled), or where the player can play as a grunt in one army or another.

For RFED, in game-master mode (vs or against AI) the idea would be to play essentially a 3D game of tetris, wherein blocks would be placed on a 6 x 6 grid, with 10 levels of height.  The AI or players (assisted by AI for empty slots) would then try to dodge the blocks placed by the GM.  The GM would score according to 1. how many players he squishes, and 2. how many complete levels he creates with the blocks (and which thereby eliminate tetris style).

The players & AI meanwhile would be cooperating to activate certain squares in the grid; if a player is crushed the activation would go down by one.  (If a player is crushed they get to respawn in a random location in the grid).  An activation of 4 is necessary to achieve the desired subobjective, which is to effectively raise the height of the board by one, so that the GM has less space in which to deploy 3D tetris blocks.

The game ends when the level has been raised to 10, either by the players or by the GM failing to deploy blocks at height <= 10 (including player level raises).  I would then define victory by assigning and tallying the points in some suitable fashion.

I then thought that the players + AI could have at the GM incorporated in dragon form in phase 2 of the fight, on a flattened version of the 10th level of the tetris grid.  Each player / AI would have control of a “squad” of characters to fight the dragon.  Anyway, just an idea!

In terms of “double dragon”, the idea would be more to have a situation in which there is a massive battle scene AI vs AI and the player’s job is merely to inflict havoc as a dragon.  (I kind of like the idea of using dragon avatars for some reason).

Anyway, these are certainly a couple of goals to aim for in the mid to long term with this project.

————————————

For something of a change of topic, I have been thinking a bit about deploying a forum registration service on GAE.  I’ve decided in particular that an appropriate use of DjangoBB might be the way to go, with the django-registration package to register users – I would then monetise the service using google adwords.  If I became more ambitious along the way, I might introduce a django-admin moderated bannerspace bidding tool; the idea would be for advertisers to bid for “shares” in bannerspace (ie, probability that their ad is displayed), together with specified tags (which would decrease the “share” of bannerspace by restricted the ad to certain sites arranged by tag keyword, but which would allowed the advertising to be more targeted and therefore more beneficial to the advertiser).  Naturally if there was more demand for bannerspace if the bidding tool was set up correctly, so the price would reflect this accordingly.

In terms of the tech I would use for the forum service, I’d probably opt for Django on google app engine, using google cloud SQL.  The cost for a small application seems a bit pricey (~ $1.50 / day for the lowest tier, comparable to what I was spending – $2 / day – on my first RightScale experiment using an Amazon EC2 virtualbox) but there is a free tier usable for one application (0.5GB of storage free), so I might experiment with that.  This, together with the excellent backup options and user-friendliness of the service makes it worth investigating.

Alternatively I was thinking of investigating a service where people could SSH in in an intuitive fashion after setting up an account, and deploy static websites (with ads).  The TokBox experiment I may defer until I am slightly more experienced with these matters.

Regardless, a few things to keep in mind while investigating google app engine as a business tool.

Tags: 3d tetris, dragon, forum service, gae, google app engine, ideas, online business, rocks fall everyone dies, static webpage service, unity