App Engine Is Going To Become A Better PBBG Host

I use Ruby on Rails for all my web development work. I think it's greatly preferable to the PHP in which so many games are developed but I don't think that Rails is the only good choice out there. Another excellent alternative is Python and Django, something which Google's App Engine supports. One of the problems with App Engine though has been that it lacked certain features that are very helpful for building a PBBG. Often you want to be able to run a task on a regular basis or handle background processing and getting that from App Engine required a lot of work arounds. The latest version of the roadmap for updates scheduled for App Engine in the first half of this year includes all of that and quite a bit more.

• Service for storing and serving large files
• Datastore import and export utility for large datasets
• Billing: developers can pay for more resource usage
• Support for a new runtime language
• Support for scheduled tasks
• Task queues for performing background processing
• Incoming email support
• XMPP API (that's the ability to send and receive instant messages via the XMPP/Jabber protocol)
  

Given that many people who want to start a PBBG have often not done a lot of web development work before, I think the idea that App Engine offers a hosted environment with a lower barrier to entry so they can write an application without worrying about how to configure servers and deploy software (or perhaps scale past a few hundred players) is a good thing. I'm not going there any time soon myself, but I like to always keep an eye on it. After all, maybe soon they'll be supporting Rails as a development platform too.

Upcoming Changes To Big Villain

Just recently I've fixed some problems with logging in or to be more accurate failing to login. But what I've got upcoming is code that checks to make sure a newly created player is correctly setup before letting him/her into the game proper. That will involve making the user choose how many secrets to keep in the game and which ones (some have higher VP values than others).

That brings up victory points in general. Obviously the real numbers are not even started yet, but the general idea is that scoring for a user will be done by giving out victory points for money on hand, number of clueless employed, number of minions, number of agents, vps for different lairs constructed, secrets of your own kept successfully until the end of the game, secrets of others revealed during the game, and evil schemes completed. Each of these will have a curved scale of some kind so you can't just sit and turn the crank in one category until the end of the game and expect to win. You've got to diversify and have some success in multiple areas in order to have a good score.

After I've got the setup completed then I'll be turning my attention to the operation that you run to find one of an opponent's lairs.