I made a lot of progress on the first tutorial in the Dragon’s Claw series today. The tutorial covers creating the project, setting up Less, creating some of the database tables, creating the layout for the game, creating some models, views and a controller, and some jQuery work. There was also some database layer work. 

I’m going to explain a little how the game works. When you first start the game you choose your sector. Your sector has a ruler and a race. The ruler has a class. The race and class have different strengths and weaknesses that affect the game in different ways. Once you have a sector the goal is to expand your empire through exploration or conquest before the end of the era. An era is between 8 and 12 weeks. The game is turn based where a turn occurs every hour. Each turn you gain resources and cool downs are reduced. Your sector can be part of an empire. You cannot do harmful actions on other empire members or allied empires. Each turn you generate terabytes of data. These terabytes are invested into different branches of technology. These branches affect the game in different ways.

The game takes place on a single page. The page is made up of panels with a title bar. The panels are collapsed initially. In the title bar are buttons that expand and collapse the panel. When a panel is expanded an AJAX call is made to the server. The returned data is displayed in the panel.

In addition to military conquest there is also espionage, raiding and psychic energy or psionic abilities. With espionage you gather intel, and run other operations You can raid other players for resources. With psionic abilities you can harm opponents or aid your allies.