Travians be Warned…Rapacious is Rising

I don’t know whether thank or scold my good friend Omar Qadan for introducing me to Travian, a strategy game played online.

It’s amazing how a simple,  web-based, HTML-front game can be so rich and vast entertainment wise! It’s a real strategy game where you build villages, resources, armies, embassies, and conduct trading, diplomacy, wars, and alliances…all through simple images, numbers and text.

On the other hand, I can’t ignore the programming part of the game (being a developer that is), it must be big, fun and tiring; think of all these rules and the simulation algorithms the game is being built upon , the server handling thousands of players, …and scripts (yes! lots of hacks!  ). Even the hacking idea it self is so delicious (programming wise only   ), a true heaven for developers :).
Also the makers of the game are on the right track of providing developers points through which they can access the game and display information on other sites or applications; ok for now it’s only exporting database tables of statistical information about the game status, but still I consider it a cool step toward supplying nice end-point for developers, maybe Web Services in the future  .

Every time a new idea hits the web I say “ok, that’s it…there are no more idea’s!”, and every time I say that I  am proved to be wrong; YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Delicous, Digg, SlideShare, Flickr…and the list goes on.
So this is a message for all of us, don’t limit your imagination, ideas never run out.

The only concern now is that I don’t want to be addicted, so let’s wish for the best…and be warned…because Rapacious is rising 😉