I don’t know whether to 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 built upon, the server handling thousands of players, and scripts (yes, lots of hacks! 😄). Even the hacking idea itself 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. 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 endpoints for developers, maybe Web Services in the future.
Every time a new idea hits the web, I say, “Okay, that’s it…there are no more ideas!”, and every time I say that I am proved to be wrong: YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Delicious, 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 😉