Tempus

I was bored, but I had paper and pencils, so I developed Tempus when I was in high school. I think I was trying to emulate the success that I had with previous paper and pencil games that I made when I was in junior high school at repelling boredom, but Tempus was much different from those previous games because I didn't have a mandatory advisory period where I could just sit around with friends for 45 minutes in the cafeteria and play games on paper together before going home and playing custom Warcraft III maps on bnet.

Instead, Tempus was a game played in between classes during passing periods and lunch. As such, turns in the game took a long time. A very long time. It was often difficult to get everyone's moves before the day ended (there were about 20 players at its peak) and if I remember correctly, sometimes turns would take a few days to be finished, while in the meantime my friends asked me when they could take their next turn. It was a 4X strategy game loosely based off of Sins of a Solar Empire where alliances were formed, trading cartels organized, and coordinated military activity occurred.

The game eventually met its demise when I decided I had enough of maintaining the game. In particular, I was tired of calculating trade route income because it involved, as I would learn about later, recursion. It was then that I decided I wanted to program Tempus, so I didn't have to spend as much time maintaining it anymore. My first attempt went relatively well until I had my first exposure to network and thread programming. Both were things I had never done before at the time, and it was difficult trying to learn both at the same time. I ended up finishing the networking code for the game as part of my computer science project, but there was no gameplay; you could only connect to a server and start a game that didn't exist yet. I tried making it a second time, this time along with a team of people that I haphazardly recruited at school, but after a few months I learned a lot from the experience and the project died again. Although I had wanted to, I ended up never finishing the game before I left high school.

I came back to the game last year, when I attempted to program it again, cleaning up a lot of the code and reworking it so that the networking in the game worked much more smoothly. However, I quickly lost interest in the game after I started writing gameplay mechanics for the game, and I soon stopped working on it. I stopped working on it because I wasn't sure anymore why Tempus was so much fun. Looking back, I think most people played it because they were bored and wanted to do something else other than be at school. It soon became clear to me that I didn't know why Tempus was fun anymore and that I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. I no longer had a direction for the game.

A few months passed and Civilization V got a new expansion released for it called Gods and Kings. A friend gifted it to me and I ended up playing a few games with the new mechanics that were added to the game. Civilization V added two mechanics to the game, if you aren't already familiar: Religion and Espionage. I loved how you could customize your own religion by picking benefits and the icon that represented it. It was fun to create a made up religion that worshiped cat ears in pagodas built across the entire empire. I also liked the espionage, but it grew boring. Fast. I felt like they could have added a lot more depth to the espionage system in the game. I wanted to have see spies insert themselves into the framework of my enemies' nations, be able to recruit more spies, and have more opportunity to do more spying. I wanted spying to require more than just a few clicks of the button that told the spy what to do; I felt like it could have been much more involved and I was upset that I couldn't use it more extensively.

That's when I remembered all of the crazy things that happened in high school that made the game hilarious and interesting. A friend, mad for wealth, becomes the richest person in the game, quickly breaking the game by amassing more income than I expected and, I believe, ended up having more money than everyone else had combined in the game. An alliance, ASIA, which though composed of 4 members only one was of Asian heritage and another, FFS, which continued to plaster everything they owned in the game with ridiculous borderline-curse words and made me worried that if a teacher saw that in the game I would get detention or something. I remembered this, and over spring break I found that folder that had Tempus and the first two games that were played in it.

I brought the folder back with me and started to work on the game again, this time for One Game a Month. While I probably don't have enough time to implement very deep gameplay, as I'm planning on just making a prototype of the game, I have a couple of ideas on how to make the game interesting enough to serve as a launchpad in the future and I hope that I can spend some time playtesting the game this month with some of my friends. So far, I've implemented some awesome UI code that can build itself according to XML files, added a simple cvar system, and started on the networking code, but there's still a lot of work that I need to do. I'm not sure if I will finish, but I want to. I've never played the game before.