Today, I am stoked to bring you Progress Wars - the ultimate game of progression.
If you enjoy spending time on Facebook “games” like Mafia/Pirate/Ninja/Viking Wars/Clan/whatever you’ll most certainly be thrilled by Progress Wars!
I have analyzed popular Facebook games and distilled their enticing gameplay into their core game mechanics. What’s left is only the stuff that makes a game like Mafia Wars tick - none of the fluff. The result is Progress Wars.
Progress Wars is the result of a lazy Sunday and a desire to point out the pointlessness of many casual games. I’ve had this idea ruminating in my head for a while, but this Penny Arcade strip finally triggered me to actually implement it.
On the techno-babble side of things, it’s Rails 3 with Haml, Sass running on a free Heroku plan. Client-side it’s HTML5’ish with liberal use of CSS3 aided by jQuery.
You should totally implement this as a Facebook App if you ever have free time. I 'dislike' those farmville type games myself and would love to just have this to scoff in the faces of all my friends who are way into those kinds of games. Yeah progress bars!
You should really make a Facebook version of Progress Wars. ;) I like the idea since I used to play Mafia Wars daily until I realized how utterly pointless and shallow it was.
Ah, the lure of progress based games. I actually reached level 5 before quitting ;)
This makes me even more glad that I rejected all those FB invites...
Hehe, a Facebook-version would be pretty awesome, but it sounds an awful lot like actual work. Remember, I also need to find time to play Mafia Wars ;)
Awesome idea :-)
You just need to be able to compare yourself with your FB friends, and I'm sure it will be a killer app! :D
(And then you could also extract everyones personal info and sell it to anyone interested in profiles with a tendency to gaming addiction.)
Such a great game. Have you guys done the "Hijack a Small Rat" mission on Level 31? The end guy was so hard!
Awesome, when's the iPhone app coming? :)
Wow!! this will become game of the year 2010. You must think of putting it in all the social networking sites.
Great work, hilarous! Kind of sad though, that the Progress Wars UI is much better than most MMOs. ;-)
dude, the progress bar loads outside the box (running on chrome 5.0.342.3 dev).
you might want to check that.
unless, of course, that was as designed.
Leeroy is right, if you click fast enough and let the script catch up it will make the progress fill run outside of the box on the right.
Also, we really need a high score list to brag to others. Hiding from silk traders at level 38 should come with bragging rights. ;-)
You just need to implement an arbitrary points system and achievements for nothing and you have the most awesome current trends game ever!
there s a psychological reason that makes games such as mafiawars work on facebook. You can watch this great talk from a guy from dice (battlefield, mirror edge) that explains all that:
http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-Presentation/
I did consider an achievements system based on total randomness - alas, there are only so many hours in the day.
The massive progress bar bug should be fixed as far as I know. If not, it's a feature.
You can also level up quicker by timing clicks of the mission progress button to coincide with the smaller, upper-right level bar as it falls down to zero again. If timed properly, however far down it fell until the point you clicked it, it'll remain there and add on progress up from that point. I got from level 16 to 17 in about 3 clicks that way =P And yes, I play perhaps 7-10 Facebook apps that are essentially slightly-more-complex versions of this game ~_^
I used to play games like Farmville, Mafia Wars, Happy Aquarium on an regular basis, but they've slowly lost their addictive grip on me over time. I still log in from time to time to level up or something like that...
Anyway, I've posted the link to the game on my Facebook page and I'd love to see something like this actually being implemented as a Facebook application.
How big can the mission titles get? I’m pretty sure this is the first time I saw something like this in my almost 109 levels:
“Harvest Enchanted Motorcycle Hunter Stranglers Wielding Invisible Bandyclefs”
Jakob, are the mission titles fixed or are the randomly generated every time a new one is needed? As in, is my first (or hundredth) mission the same as everybody else’s?
Progress Wars uses Reality Altering Non-Deterministic Organic Missions to ensure no two player experiences are exactly the same.
And also, level 109? Please tell me you're kidding or cheating.
Currently, “Flip Out And Kill Feathers”, halfway level 119
So no, not kidding. Didn’t skip any levels either. My brain hasn’t decided on the cheating part yet. I might start doing that because you need an enormous amount of clicks around here. There was a reason I asked for a high score list and bragging rights, you know ;-)
so simple yet so brilliant and yes sadly I think a face book app would take off.