Inselkampf Online Gaming Portal
// December 3rd, 2009 // Portfolio
The Problem: A while back, I started playing an online game called Inselkampf (“Island Wars”), a real-time war strategy game. The interface was extremely simple (see below), but the data behind the game was vast. Early on, many players realized that the key to success was to have the most current information quickly available.
The Solution: To begin with, I created a simple set of PHP scripts that imported the game data (player stats, island counts, etc) and parsed them out. This helped each alliance keep track of their own players islands and know when someone was attacking them. As the site grew, I eventually created a portal that provided a variety of functions and information essential to effective game play.
The site featured:
- Map View – instead of looking at one group of islands at a time, individual islands across a 5×5 grid could be seen. Player stats were overlayed (pic below).
- Attack Monitor – Using AJAX, a notification could be displayed the moment any island became under attack, making manually checking each island one at a time obsolete.
- Player Statistics – View players history to quickly determine activity levels and island captures.
- Daily Reports – after each night’s scrape of the game data, a report was sent to allies detailing the previous days activities.
- One-Click Attacks – Replacing multiple clicks and windows, the portal allowed players to designate a target and fleet size and send the fleets with one click.
- Fleet Visualization – Think of the War Games movie where the missiles are being launched. This replaced the game’s text-based lists.
- Battle Planner – Coordinating attacks with fellow players became a breeze with a tool to track the number of troops sent to a target island and helped coordinate launch times to land them all at the same time.
The Technology: Javascript, PHP, MySQL (the database has 0ver 9.9 MILLION records!)