Hi!

As some of you might have noticed, I mentioned my NetBattle project in one of the flash programming topics.

Since my exams are over in about 3 weeks, I'll _finally_ have more time on my hands, and will continue on this project.

I'll briefly explain some of the details here. Comments/questions are appreciated!

The game

The game itself is a strategical board game. The whole point is to destroy the units of your opponent, and acquire as many credits from the board as possible. Each unit will have its specific set of weapons, which can have abilities like speeding up/slowing down a unit, doing damage to a selected unit, removing or adding squares on the map, etc.

Gameplay

The game is turn-based. Each turn, you move the units one by one to attack, or use one of the other unit's abilities. Each time you move a unit, its tail is extended by one square (you can see it on the screen I attached). The tail of the unit represents its health. So the longer the tail, the more damage the unit can resist against, and the more space the unit eats up. The fun is to use each of the unit's abilities in such a way that you can outsmart your opponent.

My aim is to attach a "virtual brain" to this opponent (a neural network), and have the bot learn from your actions, while it is attempting to kill you.

I also thought about including credits to the map. I haven't figured out yet what you could do with them, but they will provide points of interest on the map, drawing units to that direction. Any suggesitons?

Moddability

Since you guys seem so interested in this

The game uses XML files to define its maps and units.

XML is really easy, so it shouldn't be too much work to change quite some aspects of the game.

I am not sure about how to implement this in terms of content packages (perhaps I'll go for a .zip file, but I don't know if there are libraries around for that), but that is of no concern yet.

I added an example file of a map and a unit. The results of these files are visible on the screenie.

Platforms

The game is coded in AcitonScript, and uses the Adobe AIR runtime. As far as I know, the AIR runtime runs on windows, mac and linux, which means it should work on all major platforms.

License

I am not going to release the game as open source.

Since I am also going to use this project as a research project to investigate tactical decisions of neural networks (for a research competition here), and might be using the code later on for a project at the university, I think it is the best to keep the source closed.

I hope for your understanding

But naturally it is freely redistributable and moddable.

I'll post some more information about the map and unit file specifications later on (after the maths paper 1 and 2, which are this wednesday and thursday respectively).