Thieves Tavern – Where all the cool kids play
Post by: Snarky on June 28th, 2008 | Filed Under Games, Interests, Programming, Three Planets SoftwareFor about two weeks now I've been working on a PHP version of the game Mafia. If you don't know it, mayhaps you know the name Werewolf, or Assassin (not Assassin's Creed, like I had some people guess.... there's no way I could port that to PHP). If you're still in the dark, check the Wikipedia page, or MafiaScum, one of the best forums for it. Harkins and I wrote it into Simud a year or two back, and I've wanted to see an automated version on the Internet for a while now (read: Not needing forum software, or a human moderator). The closest I could find is an email list, which of course I can't find now that I want a link, and frankly doesn't fit my description of 'browser based'.
So what I'm creating is a PHP/AJAX based version of the game, where players can create games of (so far) between 5 and 8 players. Upon creating the game, a random set of roles (random in terms of which roleset, NOT in terms of a hodge podge of random roles that could be very unfair) is doled out, and it goes immediately into the night phase. Each phase will last 24 hours, if everyone does their actions sooner, it'll end, but if you don't ready yourself before the time is up you'll forfeit your action. Game ends based on the roleset... typically once there's only town, or bad guys left, but in terms of Silent Killers it gets more interesting, but will be checked for after every kill, and after every lynching. Chat will allow for anyone to read it, and once the game is over all messages become public.
Unfortunately work has slowed down a bit since buying my motorcycle a week ago, but I'm still hoping to have a closed beta up in a short(ish) amount of time. I actually could put one up already, but am hoping to have a much higher degree of a product before the beta than I usually do.
The site will go live at Thieves Tavern, a site I got a long time ago for a gaming clan that is appropriately named, I think. Once it goes up, I'll put out a call for about 10-16 closed beta players, and then probably a week later another open invitation for open beta players. once it seems both stable, and a good recreation of the game, based on the opinion of all players, it'll become a public game.
You can follow the development either through Twitter, or in the #thievestavern room on irc.freenode.net, thanks to GitHub.
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