Call for Collaboration
March 6, 2008 – 2:36 pmA Call for Collaboration
The idea of sharing characters, objects and user information across multiple games and environments has always interested me.
I’ve got a simplistic idea on how this could be done and wanted to share it.
Some assumptions:
Let’s assume we have 3 environments (games) Game A, B and C. They are similar in some concepts and vastly different in others.
Let’s assume we have one user, Joe, who wants to play in all three environments.
Step 1:
Joe signs up for Game A and plays it. All information is stored within Game A as normal.
When Joe logs out of Game A. He is given a url that will contain all his information.
www.GameA.com/userInfo.php?userID=10
Next Step:
Joe now wants to play Game B. He has the option of entering in his url or registering as normal.
Once given a url Game B will request Joe’s information from Game A.
Game A will response with pair values, like so:
UserName=Joe
Email=joe@somewhere.com
Score=1000
Money=500
CharacterName=Killer
CharacterHP=50
CharacterMagic=40
etc…
etc…
Game A will also record the fact that Game B requested information. This will come into play when Joe goes back to playing Game A.
Game B will take the values it can use and create/update Joe’s account within it’s game environment. Such as UserName, Score and Money. (Maybe this game does not have characters)
Next Step:
Joe is done playing Game B. As he logs out he is given the opportunity to get a new URL or he can update Game A.
If Joe decided to update Game A, Game B will send a request to Game A letting it know the url it can find an update at.
www.GameB.com/userInfo.php?userID=99
Game A will go to that url and process all of Joe’s information, updating it’s stats as needed.
Thoughts:
One of the advantages of this system is that if Site A were to disappear or be unavailable, Joe still retains all the information from Game B. It’s even possible for him to save information from Game A, if the site does disappear, if Game B has it saved.
For those who are worried about malicious use of the system, it would be quite easy to code the update process to only allow updates from certain game sites. If you did not want to see updates from Game C, you could exclude that site from your updates by looking at the request url.
Alternatively someone could offer a service where “trusted” games can exchange information.
The user information could be in an XML document, but I have found that the ease with which you can build key pair values is easier to build and search then XML documents. I know the advantages, I personally don’t think the advantages out weigh the disadvantages in this case.
This is a stab in the dark any thoughts and comments are appreciated.
mobeamer
www.BattleForcesOnline.com
blogspot.mobeamer.com
I am no author but I do have somethings to share.
6 Responses to “Call for Collaboration”
I’ve been really interested in this too! My thoughts were to only have money exchanged between games, and have an exchange page where you can change over a given amount of currency from one game to another and have “exchange rates” ‘cuz not all game’s money has the same value. With that kind of system you could even link radically different games together ^-^
A user would have one main account that would act like a passport letting them go from game to game.
Bringing over characters and items would be cool also ^-^ You could have items that you could only get from one game to add rewards from playing all the different games.
By Foxumon on Mar 6, 2008
Sounds like a cool idea. The main problem would be trying to match up character stats in games with completely different structures. Personally, I’d lean toward XML. If you wanted to do multiple objects/records/whatever (such as Foxumon suggests with bringing multiple characters and or items) then XML is going to help keep everything standardized and organized. Parsing and generating XML is pretty trivial with the right library.
By Ranger Sheck on Mar 8, 2008
Well, let’s look at aethora.com and battleforces.com
Both games have a weapons concept. Let’s say the players had an un-used “Iron Sword” within aethora.com
Battleforcesonline could let them attach that weapon to one of the party members within it’s system.
Now the stats for the item may not be the same from game to game, but the item name may be enough to allow battleforcesonline.com to give a comparable weapon to a character.
This would allow players from both games to share resources and materials across games. It would also encourage players of one game to try the other game to enhance thier game play from one.
For example a special item, could only be gotten in aethoria.com, but you could only use it in battleforcesonline.com (or vice versa).
(Sorry Foxumon, I’d have used your game in the example but I haven’t sat down and played it yet. It looks interesting though)
By mobeamer on Mar 12, 2008
Have you ever played the RPG by Palldium Games, Rifts? This idea of yours would be quite interesting for a setup like that.
By juanpaco on Mar 20, 2008
it would be quite hard to make that all games in question have SAME leveling, money making and other sub-systems. if they are not same than player can “exploit” one’s game easier sub-system to make progress, than go back to other game.
By overklokan on Mar 30, 2008
I think Overklokan said what i was thinking best:
Anyone who has made a PBBG knows how hard it is to ballance out the game, even within its own confines… now you would also have to count on the other websites you are teaming up with to ALSO ballance out THEIR game system, and not only that but make the ballance EXACTALLY THE SAME as yours.
Here is another idea:
A single login system for the pbbg community. You log in once in any of the sites, and all the other sites you visit durring the time of the cookie or session will be done too.. and it will share your BASIC information between sites but no site ever gets your password, unless you sign up at that site by yourself.
Here is what would happen:
You sign up for this one “single login pbbg management site” lets call it quikpbbg.com (i just thought of that).
quikpbbg has a 15 minute looping cron job that will update all the sites with new users… and will send them an encrypted http request with the username and userinfo but no password and then the website owner simply has to add something automatically like qpbbg=1 so then whenever THAT username is tried to be accessed it sends a request to the quikpbbg site to verify the password. It would then send back that yes it is or no.. it isn’t.
The website owner could also use a sytsem where “upon failed login, check quikpbbg” and then it will do the same process and they don’t need any additional feilds in their database.
Most good PBBGs run have RSS feeds, and all members of this “guild” of pbbgs who are part of this single login site would have to keep stats in RSS format (part of a pre-requisit) that way when the user logs in at quikpbbg.com, they can see all their stats in all the games, click links and go to the game and update it.
This will make maintaining your PBBG simpler and allows developers like ourselfs to keep them comming back, because we know how hard it is to keep some little kids attention unless its thrown in their face all the time.
This system is secure, because no site would ever get the password (upon thinking further, they could have a redirect system where they send it to something like quikpbbg.com/?yoursite.com and they login there and then it gives a token, if that would be more secure or faster), it makes it fun and easy to manage many roll playing games and other types of games at once, and give good games that meet some “Game Compliance Level” a good light.
Because all “quikpbbg” games would be advertised on the site, and if this is popular, many users would ditch simmerler games for a game that was on this system.
Think of it like an advanced 9rules of PBBG.
There are obviously errors in this idea, and stuff we would have to work on… but tell me what you think so far
By Travis McCrea on May 22, 2008