Dawnfire

This project started with a request from Ben for an "infotainment" section to the Solstation site to add interest by interactive involvement and some form of games. It went through various phases and I prototyped a couple of trading type games and so forth. But I didn't really get traction on any of them.

My present concept, so, is to create a framework that you can hang numerous gamelets upon. I'm very highly influenced by Neopets. They have a really compelling idea that allows for incremental development and design. Their site has been extremely successful at capturing a highly sought after, but hard to grab, demographic: teenage girls.

I've proven quite capable of starting small things, but never wrapping them into something larger. If I have a framework where most of the infrastructure work is done, then I can just concentrate on whatever my flavor of the day is. And, once done, it will have a place to live and be less subject to going off-line.

Feature Areas

• Users You can create an account and maintain lists of friends, messaging, home pages, bulletin boards, and web logs.
• Finance I want a game with a "closed economy". The Earth Company exists in the game to promote the colonization of space. They give players loans out of their own funds which, ultimately, have to be paid back. Players can also make loans to other players at what interest rates they like. Players can even sell off loans they have made to other players!
• Crew Players can hire crew. This are characters in the game universe they can train and develop. Users can also draw and upload uniforms for their crew. These can also be bought and sold for other players to use.
• Exploration Players can explore near-earth stellar space. They can sell survey information back to the Earth Company, stake out land claims, develop claims, or sell claims to one another.

Technologies Used This is designed to run on an Apache Tomcat server running on Linux. A requirement is to be pure J2EE though, so it can in theory run on any J2EE server. It is put together with JSP, Struts and Tiles. I have a strong desire to deploy this on Websphere Portal Server, but I can't presently afford either the hardware or software!