Forums » Help » Turn based strategy game with character levelling - recommend plugins?

Hey guys, after buying ImpactJS I had a bit of a crisis about what I actually want to do with it, and I've decided to make a turn-based strategy game very similar to XCOM.

I'm not incredibly proficient with the code, and as what I want to do isn't exactly unique I wondered if there were some plugins that would help me, so I don't have to reinvent the wheel. A turn based strategy shares a lot with a simple game of chess, so hopefully there's some plugins that I can use.

I'm hoping to use Node and a database to keep track of members, so again if there's any plugins you can recommend that'd help with that, it'd be great to hear about them.

As you can tell I'm a bit of a lazy programmer :-) But why reinvent the wheel, right?

Laziness as a programmer is not such a bad thing, but if this is your first, or one of your first Impact projects I would strongly suggest you to try doing something simpler. Creating a game that requires Node.js usually means it's a pretty big undertaking, and you would have to break a lot of new ground, even if it is a turn based game.

There are a lot of simple and fun concepts out there that are easily doable with Impact and can teach you a lot in the process. Ideally your first project should teach you something valuable, and still be a fun concept in it's own right. Like a turn-based version of Pong for example. The first version could be local multiplayer, and you could later extend it using Node.js to incorporate multiplayer. Then you would have experience doing both turn-based gameplay within the framework and multiplayer before starting a big project such as this.

On to your question about plugins: There is an incredibly naive Node.js implementation here: https://github.com/cdreier/impactConnect
It isn't too hard to get working, and works. It has no sanity checks or anything though, meaning it's incredibly easy for any client to cheat, so I imagine you would have to write an authorative server in Node.js for it to be of any real use.

There are quite a few impact games now, and I've seen many who has some sort of turnbased system implemented, so I would recommend just finding one you like, press "view source" in your browser and use jsbeautifier.org to get some pointers from their code. Just don't copy paste and you'll be fine :)

Good luck!

Turn-based games aren't exactly a strength of ImpactJS. It's tailored towards top-down games and platformers. You can certainly build turn-based games with it. But something that requires modifying the Impact-engine itself isn't quite ideal for your first game with Impact.
I would recommend doing the most simple thing you can come up with - like a straight up Pong clone or something - just to get a feel for the engine.

EDIT:
It just realized my post sounds a bit too negative. I don't want to discourage you :)
One of my favorite Impact features is it's crazy customizability. The code is well written, easy to read and the module system allows you to simply inject or extend things as you see fit.

Thanks Krisjet, you're right I might be trying to run before I can walk. I just get a bit over-excited sometimes! I have a friend who understands the server-side and node parts, so I'm hoping he can do the complicated bits. But you're right, I should start with something much smaller in scope before doing anything too big.

Thanks netmute, don't worry I wasn't dissuaded, I know that it's always best to use the right tool for the right job! I certainly don't want to start monkeying around with Impact's game engine, that sounds like a bad idea - what if I want to upgrade to the latest release for example. That's really why I was hoping someone had already made some open-source turn-based classes.