Bear with me, I'm a horrible writer, a beginning programmer(self taught till last year), & a pompous ass sometimes (though not intentionally) - for all of this I beg your forgiveness & patience. I sat down from six today until eleven writing this piece (yes I'm also slow sometimes too).

I have seen a huge growth of games that resemble Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance, minus the map feature.

Mainly PHP & some AJAX pages right off the website. They really are not much too look at & there is no use of boundaries, travel time, etc.

Still they point out that we could potentially remake the Gorgon's Alliance. Of course to avoid trade marks the game name would have to change. Same with all the intellectual property (Yes it HAS to change, the only way to support these sites cost is to advertise down the right side of the page & I lost one site to blizzard legal dept. already).

If we approached it with the expectations of a year & a half development time to flesh out a real system, we could reach the level of play held in Birthright to some degree.

Phase 1: Form the basic system to build the game

Identify the technical DM(s), the reference gophers, the story/plot/NPC writers, the website manager, programmers, the meeting times, how much we delegate versus debate in the meetings, some sort of voting system in regards to issues, the communication medium, the final arbitrator of all issues. I would also love to see artists recruits, maybe off deviant art or some place & offered free advertising if they allow us usage(they decide the link that will show in bottom corner of art, nothing more - lookup War3: DoTA to see examples of this arrangement).

Phase 2: Decide the scope

This is our project goal - Deciding if this game is going to be targeted to everyone in the way that Gorgon's Alliance was or towards the forum goers here.

As I would put it a game operating at the domain level using core rules for 3 nations each with 5 provinces. Also, what unit types, holding types, domain actions, magical items, realm spells, types of checks, npcs to be used in here. One player per realm or multiple players one for each holding type possible? Lieutenants as npcs only or capable of being played? Language to program the game. Will the game be website based or program that is ran on the computer at home. Will it be mac or pc. Does this program include network features to allow players to connect over the internet etc. etc.

Phase 3: Setup the logical structure

We are writing the engine of the beast here. Decide if turns will have a week, day, hour, minute limit on their length or be real time. Find how we want lieutenant actions to go. How spies will work. Visibility of armies. How much information trade guilds can pass/find/hold. Anything to do with the mechanics of the game has to be written here. It all happens before we begin to code the game. Setup of trade routes etc. I figure we have most of this information here - its a matter of you guys deciding if optional rules are better to use in a computer game than board game style. We need to pay close attention to army movement & spells here.

Phase 4: The coding of said structure into a working game engine

This phase turns all the rules from collection of excel files into a set of inheritable files we can apply to this game or any other birthright games we create. The realm spells, army movements, creations of holdings need to be translated from rules into actions the program can use when needed.

Phase 5: Then using fake dice rolls we check to make sure all the elements communicate together, none of the turns are out of order, all the players get their prompts to do their things. At this point if all goes well, we can even have someone create a visual side to the game as in menus etc. All of these tests are done with a file of values that never changes.

Phase 6: More stubbing (phase 4)

At this point we need to have a few test realms setup with their respective holdings. The game is ran just to see if there are holes in our logic when bringing the realm values together with the engine. Basically testing high & low values, what happens if a player disconnects if we do this over the net sort of thing.

Phase 6: Generation system for data

We know the game runs at this point we just have to flesh out the realms/domains/npc/player traits etc. Instead of having a programmer sit down with a writer, we have the programmers write a program which allows as many writers as have to all create realms, npc, items, magic spells within certain limits, new domains, random lists of names & stats. Finally we include an agreed upon format to store all of this & program a method of reading the information so the others of the community can point out weakness. For the first run we just need some core rules & small test zone.

Phase 7: Connecting the engine to the data

Once final proofs & decisions on the game data is finished. We look over the data & figure out checks the program has to make before accepting data as valid. A method to load only certain parts of the realms needs to be in place. We need some way of making sure any visual elements line up with the data provided (one of the hardest parts of making it work with expansions). Then load this information the engine.

Phase 8: Play testing

[Obviously we play the game we made] Two months of testing(debate this in phase 1 or 2).

Phase 9: System verification

If we have one version made, we need to ensure our campaign creation or 'expansion maker' is well oiled. So future writers can create new territories. We also brainstorm everything possible for future problems based on the non-core rules you guys are writing on the wiki.

Phase 10: By the stroke of luck it takes to reach this place & this phase we will have to fly out to International Falls, MN to savor some of the best home brew ever made (not mine of course) in celebration of our child.


Any thoughts or feelings on this? My main concern is the length of the project losing people & trying to accomplish too much on the first time. I kind of see an hour session or so a week to work out anything questionable for each of the groups we setup. Then every third week or fourth week for everyone to just make sure we are all on task. Probably later in the night - but any schedule can be made to work.