Die2Nite - a cool zombie game with a twist

I've been playing quite a few games lately since I don't have a lot of activity. And I'm also waiting for the Christmas holidays and I have very little productivity.

So I've been playing DinoRPG for quite a while now, I guess about a year or so, on and off. This week a new announcement came up from the developers saying that they've launched a new game: a zombie game. I guess they planned to launch it before Halloween, but didn't make it. The game is made by MotionTwin, the guys that also have great and popular web games like MyBrute (La Brute in French), Dinoparc and AlphaBounce.

The game is called Die2Nite (pretty cool considering it's zombie game) and here's how it works. You are a simple citizen stuck in a town with a lot of other Die2Nite citizens and each night a large number of zombies will attack your town. You need to gather the required materials to upgrade your town and survive the night.

The thing is there are a lot of items that you can find walking around the Die2Nite map and many of these can be used in different ways by either combining them with something else or transforming them in something else, more useful. The number of items is impressive and so is the number of combination that can be achieved. The Wiki's really come in handy here (Die2NiteWiki.com and on Wikia).

Each day you get 6AP (Action Points) to use for your daily activities like exploring, building at the Construction Site or carrying out the dead bodies of your dead comrades (citizens that died in town because of the previous zombie attack).

Of course other things can be done with your AP, but once they're consumed you can have a refill by drinking water from the town's well, eating something, taking drugs or drinking some alcohol (the last two have some funny side effects).

The twist in the game is that the whole town needs to work together to survive the night. If people don't communicate and collaborate the town will be overrun and everyone will be dead.

Death is something relative in Die2Nite, because once you die you can start all over again in a new town with new citizens. And the fun starts all over again. You gain points to your soul (the only thing you can't lose) from these experiences in various towns. I guess there's a ranking someone, but I couldn't find it.

If you want to give Die2Nite a try, go right ahead. And let me know if you like it or not. It looks really fun so far and I see it as a game I'll keep playing for a while.

KingsAge - fully upgraded city

Today I had some more spare time. I tend to have a lot of that lately. So I decided to find something to do. Being at work, I couldn't exactly play Starcraft, so I began browsing the web in search for a nice little browser game. I came across KingsAge so I gave it a try.

The first thing that stood out was the fact that the map overview resembles the one from TribalWars so I thought that this one is made by the guys at InnoGames. But it's actually made by Gameforge Productions GmbH, the creators of Ikariam.

Now here's the funny part: Grepolis (from InnoGames) looks like Ikariam (from Gameforge) and KingsAge (from Gameforge) looks like TribalWars (from InnoGames). It's like these guys just copy each other :). I'm kidding of course.

But back to KingsAge. I always find it more exciting if I know what I'm going at. In other words, when it comes to browser based games, I want to know what my village/town/polis or whatever it's called, will look like. I want to know how a fully developed city will look like. And since I already made a few mock-ups with Grepolis in the past, I thought I'll give this one a go too.

And here it is, a KingsAge fully developed or upgraded city. And I must say that it looks pretty nice. I don't know why but it reminds me of Age of Empires. As almost any strategy browser game, most buildings have 3 different images that show their level of development. So there are 3 images below, each showing the buildings in the 3 different stages. Some buildings (like the Memorial or the Hideout) have only one image no matter the level and that's why they look the same in all images. The Residence has two images.

I can't really form an opinion on whether I like the game or not. I'll have to play it for a few days. But so far I'm not really impressed with anything in particular. It looks like it's just one more browser game.

PS: These are mock-ups, manufactured images, don't think I've reached that level and that my city is fully upgraded. I might even quit playing in a day or two. Please don't ask me any questions regarding the game also. I'm a newbie too. Check the Help pages and the Forum. You'll find all the information you need there.

Grepolis - fully upgraded city

Because I had a little spare time on my hands I started playing Grepolis, the latest game from InnoGames. I enjoy this kind of strategy games but they can be very time consuming and you get really frustrated when you lose everything you've worked for over night. That's the reason why I quit playing by the time my city is fully developed. But this time I decided I would have a look at how a fully developed city would look like. And If anyone else is interested, here's a sneak peak.

The first one show the Grepolis city with all the building at the level 1 and with the Oracle and Thermal Baths built. Some of them will change appearance as they level up but some will remain the same. The second image shows the Grepolis building at intermediary levels and the last three show the city with the buildings at their top level. Also the Olympic Games and the Triumph are in full display and all the buildings that have animation have been activated, as if they're working. Sadly, I don't have the patience to make an animated version of the town so you'll have to settle for the static ones.

Because certain building in Grepolis city view share the same spot in town, the last three images show the various buildings in this order:

1. Library and Tower
2. Theater and Trade Office
3. Thermal Baths and Oracle

One thing I didn't manage to display is the Statue. I'm not even sure how it's supposed to look like, but it should occupy the same place as the Oracle, Tower and Trade Office.

And after all the trouble I went through, I found this little app that would have made everything extremely easy. It even shows the Grepolis statues. Bummer! Oh well, that's life. At least my pictures have the Olympic and Triumph in town :-)

Oh, oh, and if you find the pictures helpfull and would like to give the game a go, please use this link: Sign up to Grepolis. Thanks.

Human stupidity in one of it's many moments

This is one of those things that get me stunned every time I read them. And on top of that they get me terribly amused occasionally. This one in particular got me thinking, mostly because I loved that movie when I was a child: "are there people around really that stupid?". Here's how it happened.

I have one of those widgets on my iGoogle homepage that gives you all sort of weird fact. This one is called "Gullible Info" and it's from http://www.gullible.info/. It's an entire collection of weird "did you know?" facts sentences there. I say sentences because I'm not sure all of them are true. But this one really amused me. It went something like this:

Disney's "The Never Ending Story" sparked 28 lawsuits from customers who were furious that the movie had an end.

How much fun that is? I imagine the defense attorney trying to explain to the judge something that everyone else in the courthouse (including the judge) understood: it's just a title, it refers to the action and story of the movie, it wasn't meant to be "never ending". That must have been one hilarious trial.

I don't know how the attorney/s pleaded his/her/their case, but if I would have been there I would have probably blamed it all on Michael Ende, the author of the novel :)

There are not many things that amuse me in this world, but human stupidity never fails me!

Mootools - my brain hurts

I've been pretty busy the last few days trying to create a  website template. A special website, one that would provide users with a pleasant and unique experience. Well, at least unique. I don't know what I was thinking. It was a lot of work, seeing as I don't know very much about JavaScript (besides the basic functions) or the MooTools framework. Now I feel sorry I even tried to do something new.

Here's what my torment was all about. I wanted the user to be greeted by the main menu and that's all. Four big buttons on the front page, beautifully colored, Web 2.0 style. I heard somewhere (everywhere actually) that that's the way to go these days. All websites must be compatible with the Web 2.0 standards. Which is pretty stupid if you ask me, since there are no Web 2.0 standards. Several people have tried to define them, but there is no international organization that implemented them. From what I know at least. But let's carry on. The first page is loaded in an invisible container (div), so it can be indexed by the search engines. From the four big buttons, the user can access the main sections of the website. As soon as he/she clicks one of them the animation for the menu kicks in:

• the buttons get smaller
• they move to the top of the page. at the same time, the header or logo of the website moves to the left to make room for the incoming buttons
• the invisible container loads the page that was requested by the user. If the user requested the first page (Home), the current content stays in place because it was already loaded
• the container appears, but with a height of 0 pixels and gradually increases its size to the required height (this animation takes about 2 seconds)

And then you have a page as you would expect a web page to look. I thought this was great, but I wanted to take it a little bit further. So I added a similar resizing effect to the main container so that each time a user requests a new page, it would shrink to a height of 0px, load the page and then expand to the required height. And all of this was done using the MooTools framework. I could have used Adobe Flash and obtained the same effect, but nooo, I used MooTools. The advantage of this is that the pages are still indexed by search engines. All of them, since all links are in the HTML. "Good!" I said to myself. And then I added "You did a great job!". Had I only knew ...

The problems

I head on over to mootools.net to get the MooTools framework and get started on coding. Once there, I notice the new layout. They probably redecorated. Hit download, skip the text, fetch a full copy of MooTools. Start coding a few things to get in the mood. Five minutes later: "Drag is not defined!" I was like: "What do you mean?!" Head on back to the mootools.net and notice that the Drag class/library (?) needs to be downloaded separately. Apparently there were a few more changes, other than the layout. That's OK, grab all the libraries. Now we're cooking.

Not knowing to work too well with classes (shame on me) and not knowing anything about classes in MooTools, like any other learning eager individual, I went over to Google and started typing all my worries. Google, like a kind and sensible search engine, gave me all the links I needed to solve my problems. Of course, most of them were sending me to the official MooTools forums. Which are not there anymore. Apparently since the release of the 1.2 version of the framework. They were moved to Google Groups for more stability. Noticing that I can't find an example that I can use, I decided not to use classes. I don't really feel like learning anyway. So I did the things the old fashioned way: hard coding every little effect every time I needed it. Not at all nice, but I'll get back to it later.

The main issue with JavaScript is that some people disable it. That's their choise, can't do anything about it. But then I thought: if they have JavaScript disabled, they should still see the content and they should still be able to browse it. Well in theory, it is possible. I mean, MooTools just catches the click event and does something else instead of sending you directly to the page. So having JavaScript disabled should send you to the page, no? Well no. And I have no idea why. I guess it's something related to the way I coded the functions. But I've put that asides for the moment. I'll deal with it later.

After checking that my awesome page was working in both Mozilla Firefox (version 3.0) and the dreaded Internet Explorer 6, I thought about giving it a try from my mobile phone. I have a Nokia N81 8GB and I used the default Nokia Browser. Don't know what version, don't ask. Of course the page didn't work. I've seen the same thing happen as with Firefox with JavaScript disabled: couldn't even get past the front page, the one with the four big buttons. I decided this will be resolved, probably, when I'll fix the previous issue. Which is later.

A few more bugs in the code, both mine and the compressed version of MooTools, fixes, stitches, aches and pulled out hair. I'm now tired. But I got the thing working eventually. The code is not at all optimized, there are the errors I mentioned earlier (and probably a lot more) and by the time I finished, I got bored with the page loading animation. But it was a learning experience. It would have been a lot easier if the MooTools team would have set up a more detailed demo page, like the one from the 1.1 version. By the time I'll try something like this again, they probably will.

Divert Your Course

Probably anyone that uses an Instant Messaging service, like Yahoo! Messenger or MSN Messenger, knows about the fact that people share stuff like funny images or text, nice websites and anything else. You happen to come across something you like and you want to tell people about it so you just mass message everyone in your list. But I'm sure I don't have to explain to you how that works.

Today I received one such link, and here it is: Divert Your Course - moonbuggy. It's from a website called moonbuggy.org (don't ask me why, I haven't gotten that far). The most I can tell you about them is you can find all sort of funny or weird stories there. Stuff like these make your day just a little bit better. Besides the fact that this amused me, it is something that happens everyday. I don't mean ship captains asking buildings to move :). I'm talking about people getting too much power and abusing it. I'm not also referring to a specific nation, because people like that are found all over the world.

I guess it's just something with the mind of weak individuals. I'm not sure, I'm not a psychologist (boy oh boy, thats a tough word to spell). In any case, such situations have been depicted even in cartoons and movies. You could call it a template. All situations have a certain pattern they follow and it goes something like:

• man has no power/respect and is undermined my colleagues/family
• by a twist of faith man gets power (promotion, wins the lottery, receives an inheritance)
• man immediately starts to use the power he gained (authority or money) to prove to the world that he is worthy of respect
• soon man starts to abuse his power
• in the end two things can happen:
  • man realizes the error of his ways, changes himself and helps people, then a stupid unrealistic ending where everyone stands around the fire, eats marshmallows and they laugh and smile at each other like idiots
  • man makes himself look like an idiot in front of the everyone

Of course, we can see in which category this particular case fits in. But no one can help it. If it weren't for such people, we wouldn't have funny things to read every once in a while.

By the way, today was not the way I expected to be either. It was yet another relaxing day. I'm starting to get used to this kind of "work". But I still think it's the silence before the storm.