I’ve just released live one of my latest experiments – SoulHunter. It is a very simple game created using Drupal and harnessing the power of twitter ( allegedly ). Recently, I’ve started using Drupal a lot within my everyday job and so I thought the best thing to do was to also use it for my personal projects to aide in lowering the learning curve. Drupal is an incredibly robust system, and the beauty of using a pre-existing CMS is that 99% of the work has already been done for you ( I will admit, I’ve always been in favour of rolling your own, but now with Drupal, I think I have seen the light ).
The total development of SoulHunter has been around eight hours spread over the last couple of weeks, most of which was spent tinkering with OAuth and getting Drupal to play nicely with twitter. A lot of the current functionality has simply been implemented by using the vast number of Drupal modules to solve problems that I come across. In addition to those I have around seven custom modules which implement the ‘core’ of the game.
The game itself is simple enough, and is designed with viral growth in mind. You start with an empty screen and go around collecting the souls of twitter users. On successful capture of a soul, you automatically tweet your victory, which is intended to encourage spreading the word of the game. There is actually quite a complex system of spells working in the back end, which I have simplified by employing an automatic system for picking the best spells for capturing a certain soul – I’ve done this to keep the game as simple as possible with the current trend of one click wonders being employed as core game mechanics.
Every user starts with access to two core spells. A direct damage spell and a confusion spell. As a users ‘soul power’ ( the experience points of the game ) increases, so does the complexity of available spells. As different souls have very different attributes ( using a system based upon creating a seed from twitter user name ) different spells will effect users in very different ways. If the game does gain some interest then I will be sure to expand the back bone system with some more verbose information about what is going on – perhaps even making the collect souls page more of a game rather than a one click wonder.
I must admit, most of the spells are quite Lovecraftian in nature. Even when trying not to mention the Elder Ones, C’thulhu etc; I find his ideas and concepts creeping into my work. Ah well, if you have access to that sort of eldritch thinking, why change your thins? 🙂
SoulHunter is one of three personal Drupal projects I’m working on at the moment and the only one which is near a fully finished state. It is great being able to code a module for one project, knowing that it will plug and play with my others – saves quite a bit of time, and re-usable code is always the best path to go down!
So feel free to give SoulHunter a go. If you don’t have a twitter account, then for shame on you! It is much less evil than facebook and I’m guessing most of you have accounts with that evil empire! Once signed into twitter, you can easily log into the game by click on the ‘Sign in with Twitter’ button on the front page – everything is automatically handled, so you don’t need to do anything before you can start collecting souls 🙂
Once again, my regular ending, if you find any bugs, or have feedback or even future suggestions, please either comment, email or tweet me!
The Hunt for Souls has begun …
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