This post has been published at Indiegogo campaign on December 8, 2014.
In this post, we want to pour some light on how Screeps will look online and the main difference between Screeps and any other game you have ever seen.
In any strategy game, you as the player need to contol everything. In classic RTS games, you have to closely watch everything happening on the screen and react as quick as possible. There have been many efforts to bring this concept online to make a full-fledged MMO RTS, but all of them were fruitless. Why so? Mostly because in an MMO with big persistent world you cannot:
- always react properly to whatever happens in the game,
- be aware of whatever happens when you are away.
No game can be a real strategy game until these problems are solved. And both of them are solved in Screeps!
In Screeps, your scripts, unlike you, are always online. Hence, having written a relatively smart script you turn out to be actually controlling the game – always and everywhere. But what about the second problem: how can you know what happens in the game while you are away?
In Screeps, we devised two mechanisms to solve this problem. Both of them are now absent in the current Simulation mode, but you will see them on the Early Preview stage.
The first is the Game.notify() method. You will be able to program your script so that the game sends you a notification via e-mail at any moment and with any data you need. An opponent attacked you while you were away? Send yourself a message, and you will be able to instantly come in and check that your scripts defend properly.
The second mechanism is room history snapshots. You will be able to set up live recording of everything in each of your rooms, say, every 10 minutes into these snapshots. Aside from automatic saving, it will be possible to create snapshots manually by using the method Room.makeSnapshot(). Later you can review them in the chronological order and thus restore the whole scene.
It will be like match replays on TV. By the way, the Survival Leaderboard that will soon be implemented will allow you to see replays of every match from the board. It will look roughly like this.
We hope to launch the Survival Leaderboard very soon.