A Ruby/DHTML Turn Based Strategy Game

Introduction

Ben and I have been talking about the possiblity of a DHTML turn based strategy for a while. We're both huge fans of the genre, and honestly, a strategic or tactical game seems like a perfect domain for some of the new web technologies like AJAX. Obviously, some amazing things are possible just with Javascript.

So I began my journey to turn my unpublished novel, written for National Novel Writing Month, "How the United States of the West Was Won (On the Backs of the Dinosaur Army)" into a DHTML TBS. I've been treating this project as an experiment instead of something I intend to ship, but I thought the results were interesting enough to share.

The Slides

I gave a fun little talk this year at FOSCON about my efforts so far. In case you're interested:

Slides

I demoed the app with the help of a quick script called Demoer.

demoer.rb
cowboy.demo

Example usage is: ./demoer.rb cowboy.demo 0

The Demo

Lower your expectations and consider this a very rough prototype. But you can try out the CowboyBattle demo right now. (Well, provided my server can handle the load of more than a few sessions... =)

Try CowboyBattle

The Code

The TBS Gem
The TBS Source
The CowboyBattle Demo Source