Sand Castles

Clash of Clans-like, but very different. An incredibly ambitious idea for which I got the core working, then realized it was far too hard to do on my own … and as a 16-year-old. (And with “core working”, I mean players could make an account, get an entry in the database, and build a town hall that upgraded itself on a nice timer.)

I ended up referencing this in one of my Wildebyte Arcades books, but only vaguely and in the afterword. (As an example of how hard it is to make such games and how much I learned from just trying it once.) So I feel fine sharing these specific ideas and you’re free to use them.

My “Problems” with Clash of Clans

More unique units

Problem: Way too many different standard units that don’t do very different things (in the end), and are not unique to the player.

Solution: A small set of completely different units, and everyone can “forge” their own units. (By combining stuff, gaining experience, etc.)

More creativity and skill beyond troops

Problem: A player will never win from someone who’s a little better than them, because their troops are too weak or their levels too low. There’s not much strategy or genius tactics to employ.

Solution: which units you choose, their placement, and their timing/actions will make a huge difference.

For example, I can choose a sniper first if I need to kill some high-profile targets. Then I can send in a negotiator who tries to settle things peacefully, or more people will be killed. Or, I could place a sniper, then use some distraction units to lure many people into a certain area, and then the sniper can easily take them all out.

Limited base building

Problem: Base building is generic. You can only place things at ground level, and attacks are either ground of air, nothing else.

Solution: base building uses multiple levels (underground, ground, several height levels). Furthermore, you can choose to connect buildings, or modify them in a certain way. Buildings are customizable modules, not fixed squares.

For example, you can choose to connect tall buildings via pathways in the air, or you can decide to connect a small storage unit to an existing one, instead of building a completely new one.

You can also build underground tunnels, and place traps at convenient locations, or hide valuable items in the dark maze.

Environment matters too little

Problem: Nature and environment plays too small a role. Everyone builds on the exact same green square, that’s it.

Solution: attacks can go over ground (with different possible terrains), or over water, or over hills, or via air. Players start with a certain terrain, and can choose themselves whether or not to keep/incorporate certain elements.

For example, building a port has many advantages. However, it also leaves you vulnerable to powerful attacks over water.

Only war and fighting

Problem: War and attacking random bases is everything – no story, no other purpose, no other meaning or narrative.

Solution: people can also simply buy from each other, or perform negotiations and get allies. Furthermore, everyone’s base also contains many “normal” or “life-like” buildings, such as a marketplace, or fountain, or whatever. These are important.

For example, this makes it possible to actually have a society and culture in your cities, and to actually see things happening and moving and progressing.

Solution 2: everyone’s base actually has a position in the world, and their buildings and what they do is connected to neighbour regions.

For example, with an explorer you can find out what’s happening around you, and you can start an army with everybody in your region. On the other hand, a single city can be providing a certain resource for everyone, or if things are going badly, people will need to help each other.

Solution 3: The name sand castles comes from the fact that everybody’s stranded in a weird desert-like land. Nobody knows who’s to blame for this apocalypse, but they sure as hell want to find out. Everybody needs to rebuild society from scratch, and keep out the evil demons, but everybody has opposing ideas about this. That’s what the narrative should be build around.

All units used are, well, used

Problem: When units finish the attack, they all die. Even the ones who have full health.

Solution: simply put, every unit is extremely valuable, and you only lose one if he/she is actually killed in combat. It should be meaningful—losing a valuable unit should perhaps even have emotional value.

No weather / day-night cycle

There’s no weather—it’s always day, and the sun’s shining bright.

Solution: add a night mode and weather influence, depending on the base’s timezone and location. Another thing to add might be that you actually have to travel to an opponent, but that might be more annoying than useful.

For example, at night certain units become more active, or when it snows units outside are more easily killed.

Clans are quite weak and limited

Problem: You can only join one clan, and the clan is usually nothing more than a name for holding some people together. There’s no real purpose or ideal, no reason they’re fighting or trying to convince people to join.

Solution: people can form their own pacts and allies, even multiple at the same time, and /or they can join one of the major (political) groups. People can even convince each other, peacefully or not, to join their ranks. Similarly, this opens up the opportunity for backstabbing, betrayal, and (counter)espionage. Lovely.

The idea

The player receives a city in a desert/sandy land. The player only has a small gathering point in the center, and some resources.

Resources

The resources in the game are

Food: For creating people, and making sure they survive.
Water: For making people survive, and creating buildings
Wood: For creating simple buildings
Stone: For creating advanced buildings
Time: For inventing things, and speeding things up

ALTERNATIVELY, I could go more with the metaphorical “time” theme, and use resources such as:

Love:
Energy:
Culture:
Trust:

However, I think it’s best to use the first list as the actual, directly expendable resources. The alternative list are “hidden” resources – things that are generated over time by many factors, and you can see them but not directly interact, and you can use them but not directly spend them.

Buildings

Buildings:

City Hall: The main building where everything starts
Home: A place where people can live (no matter who; regular civilians, fighting units, merchants, etc.)
Barracks: Any fighting units are trained here
Market:

Units

Defender:

Pros: Someone with fight training, who can easily take out bad guys from up close.
Cons: Slow, untargeted, and easily defeated by weapons

Detective:

Pros: Can detect spies or other bad guys in the city early on, carries a small gun
Cons: Weak when fighting up close, only targets specific units

Sniper:

Pros: Shoots with great accuracy from great range
Helpless when fighting up close, can be detected/shielded by <some building>

Spy:

Pros: During a fight, you can place these in another player’s city. They gather information, and can steal secrets.
Cons: Can’t fight at all, when exposed can lead to you losing resources or being attacked violently.

Ninja:

Pros: Extremely fast, undetected by many buildings/sensors, can fight at all ranges
Cons: Relatively weak attack, can’t attack buildings

Other ideas

IDEA: Unique troops. There are standard troops (sniper, negotiator, bomber, etc.), which can be leveled up. However, the current state of your town influences their stats. For example, higher culture means that the negotiator is more efficient/succesful. Similarly, your level of research/technology/materials/buildings determine what you and your troops can do.

IDEA: Allies and army sharing. By negotiating you can become allies with somebody, and therefore join their community. This has several advantages: you can send each other resources, you can send each other troops. Army sharing means that you have the complete army of the whole community at your fingertips when attacking, BUT if you use somebody else’s unit (and he dies) you must pay back the cost.

IDEA: Negotiator. To come to an agreement, for example peace of alliance, one must send a negotiator. The chance of success depends on many factors: your negotiator, the position of the other town toward your town/actions/community, with how many troops you’ve come. Why? In case things go wrong, you can bring in the extra troops to get your revenge, but bringing too many troops ruins your chance of success.

IDEA: Spy. Spies can be placed inside another city whenever you visit/attack/negotiate. Once a day (or something), they provide intel. They tell you what the other player has done, what his town now looks like, etc. Most importantly, they steal secrets and technologies.

You can make a spy return at any point in time. If the spy is caught, two things can happen. The spy returns to you, or the spy dies. In the first case, the spy is either strong enough to escape, or it has given the enemy intel as well.

IDEA: Distractor. A distractor does what he can to distract the attention of enemy units. He disguises himself as a local and talks to the units, or he steals something to get the police going after him, stuff like that. He has almost zero hitpoints or attack, and is very expensive and hard to employ effectively. But when you do it right, you make things a lot easier for the rest of your army.

IDEA: Farms. A farming hut alone doesn’t bring in any food. You have to build “farmlands” around the farm. Each one gives you a certain amount of food (in the form of plants/vegetables/fruits), with a bonus when you have more. If you have a certain area, you can buy an animal. Animals provide even more food over time, or you can slaughter them once to get very much food (but lose them forever).

IDEA: Water pumps. A water pump retrieves water from the ground, but only if there’s actually water underneath it of course. Therefore, there are only limited places where a pump can be positioned, and not every place is equally efficient. You can extend water lines under your village, though it takes a lot of time and resources.

I guess it’s fun to get a little magical/special element in the game, where you can get water by other means if you are a high level.
Similarly, there’s more special creatures that can be in your farm/work for you at higher levels.

IDEA: Technology tree. By building laboratories and hiring scientists, you get research points over time. These can be spent to research certain technologies, which enable many more possibilities, and make your buildings and troops unique. This tree is absolutely huge, to make it unlikely that everybody has researched everything or exactly the same things. It also gives people a motive to steal secrets and technologies from other players.

IDEA: Towns with secrets. When somebody visits a city, there’s only a limited amount of information present. Obviously, just by going to the town gates, you can’t see everything that’s going on inside.

There are multiple things that can help you with that: Air units that explore the area, units that sneak inside the town and do nothing else than explore, technology that can scan areas, spies who have stolen the town’s secrets for you.
There are certain buildings/units/structures that will always remain hidden, though.

IDEA: Controlling units. You control exactly where you place your units, and you can click on them to directly give them orders.

Orders include: where to go, what to do, what weapon/tactic/technique to use.
If orders are omitted, the default action is executed. Before you go to fight, at home, you can set the default option for each troop.

IDEA: Placing units. Of course, units can’t just come out of nowhere. Usually, units are placed outside of the town, as if they just arrived there by foot (or bike, or car, or whatever). However, it might be fun to be able to drop certain units in the middle of the city by airplane, or some other mechanism (firing them out of a cannon/catapult?), or get inside from undergruond.

IDEA: Gaining more land. You start with a small area of land, just enough to get the basic necessities going. As you level up, you can get more land around it. Three options: automatically, by buying it, or by exploring it.

PROBLEM: Simplicity I really need to keep things simple, logically as well as visually.

One thing I can do, is add more mechanics, troops and buildings only at higher levels. So, the town center can have level 1-40, and with every upgrade you get only two or three new things, usually connected to one new game mechanic.
Similarly, I would love it if I could keep everything in a blocky, low-poly style. I do want to give it some warmth and visual sophistication, though, for which I will need to find the right way to create buildings and troops.

IDEA: Time as central theme. Time can be slowed down, or sped up. Items, such as bombs, have timers you can change. (And if not, you’ll have to change your strategy based on those timers). People can look into the future, or resurrect things from the past.

This could be AWESOME, but I need to figure out exactly what and how, and keep it simple enough that I can implement it.

IDEA: Rebuilding the world/hope/optimism as the other central theme. Alternative resources, such as energy, trust, and love should play a big role. Yes, the “standard resources” are the ones that can be collected from other bases and must be used to construct things. But, the “alternative resources” must be at a high enough level to perform certain actions/buy certain buildings, and they also influence the stats of your city.

It’s really important that people have a lot of freedom in building their city, so that from the start they can build something unique that does something unique for this world.

IDEA: Interconnected world. Every city has a location, which means that they can provide something for people close to them. Perhaps certain people live within the same region, province, country, whatever, and different cities fulfill different functions.

IDEA: Realism is nice, but magic and impossible things are much more fun and varied.

IDEA: Divide the world into three factions:

Guardians of time: can speed up time, or slow it down. They can make buildings build faster, work faster, make your units move faster, slow enemy units, resurrect things from the past, look into the future.
Guardians of space: can teleport themselves, move any object anywhere, make units and buildings take up less (or even no) space, or make them larger ( = improve efficiency)
Guardians of matter: can create things out of nothing, or instantly kill/destroy things

When you start, you can choose which one you want to join. (Or, should I make it possible later in the game, or make it possible to switch? Perhaps with a huge penalty.) Each of the factions of course blames the others for destroying the world, and you can’t fight against people within your own faction. Also, each faction brings unique units and abilities.

Implementation details

Efficiency:

Batch the update calls. When the user closes the game, or is inactive for some time, or fights another town, that’s when we update. Otherwise, we must ensure that the in-game town runs in parallel with the server town.
Save the most-often updated things seperately. For example, the storages and other resource buildings are used the most often.

Clash of Clans-like, but very different. An incredibly ambitious idea for which I got the core working, then realized it was far too hard to do on my own ... and as a 16-year-old. (And with "core working", I mean players could make an account, get an entry in the database, and build a town hall that upgraded itself on a nice timer.) I ended up referencing this in one of my _Wildebyte Arcades_ books, but only vaguely and in the afterword. (As an example of how hard it is to make such games and how much I learned from just trying it _once_.) So I feel fine sharing these specific ideas and you're free to use them. ## My "Problems" with Clash of Clans ### More unique units **Problem:** Way too many different standard units that don't do very different things (in the end), and are not unique to the player. **Solution:** A small set of completely different units, and everyone can "forge" their own units. (By combining stuff, gaining experience, etc.) ### More creativity and skill beyond troops **Problem:** A player will never win from someone who's a little better than them, because their troops are too weak or their levels too low. There's not much strategy or genius tactics to employ. **Solution:** which units you choose, their placement, and their timing/actions will make a huge difference. For example, I can choose a sniper first if I need to kill some high-profile targets. Then I can send in a negotiator who tries to settle things peacefully, or more people will be killed. Or, I could place a sniper, then use some distraction units to lure many people into a certain area, and then the sniper can easily take them all out. ### Limited base building **Problem:** Base building is generic. You can only place things at ground level, and attacks are either ground of air, nothing else. **Solution:** base building uses multiple levels (underground, ground, several height levels). Furthermore, you can choose to connect buildings, or modify them in a certain way. Buildings are customizable modules, not fixed squares. For example, you can choose to connect tall buildings via pathways in the air, or you can decide to connect a small storage unit to an existing one, instead of building a completely new one. You can also build underground tunnels, and place traps at convenient locations, or hide valuable items in the dark maze. ### Environment matters too little **Problem:** Nature and environment plays too small a role. Everyone builds on the exact same green square, that's it. **Solution:** attacks can go over ground (with different possible terrains), or over water, or over hills, or via air. Players start with a certain terrain, and can choose themselves whether or not to keep/incorporate certain elements. For example, building a port has many advantages. However, it also leaves you vulnerable to powerful attacks over water. ### Only war and fighting **Problem:** War and attacking random bases is everything -- no story, no other purpose, no other meaning or narrative. **Solution:** people can also simply buy from each other, or perform negotiations and get allies. Furthermore, everyone's base also contains many "normal" or "life-like" buildings, such as a marketplace, or fountain, or whatever. These are important. For example, this makes it possible to actually have a society and culture in your cities, and to actually see things happening and moving and progressing. **Solution 2:** everyone's base actually has a position in the world, and their buildings and what they do is connected to neighbour regions. For example, with an *explorer* you can find out what's happening around you, and you can start an army with everybody in your region. On the other hand, a single city can be providing a certain resource for everyone, or if things are going badly, people will need to help each other. **Solution 3:** The name *sand castles* comes from the fact that everybody's stranded in a weird desert-like land. Nobody knows who's to blame for this apocalypse, but they sure as hell want to find out. Everybody needs to rebuild society from scratch, and keep out the evil demons, but everybody has opposing ideas about this. That's what the narrative should be build around. ### All units used are, well, used **Problem:** When units finish the attack, they all die. Even the ones who have full health. **Solution:** simply put, every unit is extremely valuable, and you only lose one if he/she is actually killed in combat. It should be meaningful---losing a valuable unit should perhaps even have emotional value. ### No weather / day-night cycle There's no weather---it's always day, and the sun's shining bright. **Solution:** add a night mode and weather influence, depending on the base's timezone and location. Another thing to add might be that you actually have to travel to an opponent, but that might be more annoying than useful. For example, at night certain units become more active, or when it snows units outside are more easily killed. ### Clans are quite weak and limited **Problem:** You can only join one clan, and the clan is usually nothing more than a name for holding some people together. There's no real purpose or ideal, no reason they're fighting or trying to convince people to join. **Solution:** people can form their own pacts and allies, even multiple at the same time, and /or they can join one of the major (political) groups. People can even convince each other, peacefully or not, to join their ranks. Similarly, this opens up the opportunity for backstabbing, betrayal, and (counter)espionage. Lovely. ## The idea The player receives a city in a desert/sandy land. The player only has a small gathering point in the center, and some resources. ### Resources The resources in the game are - Food: For creating people, and making sure they survive. - Water: For making people survive, and creating buildings - Wood: For creating simple buildings - Stone: For creating advanced buildings - Time: For inventing things, and speeding things up ALTERNATIVELY, I could go more with the metaphorical "time" theme, and use resources such as: - Love: - Energy: - Culture: - Trust: However, I think it's best to use the first list as the actual, directly expendable resources. The alternative list are "hidden" resources -- things that are generated over time by many factors, and you can see them but not directly interact, and you can use them but not directly spend them. ### Buildings Buildings: - City Hall: The main building where everything starts - Home: A place where people can live (no matter who; regular civilians, fighting units, merchants, etc.) - Barracks: Any fighting units are trained here - Market: ### Units Defender: * Pros: Someone with fight training, who can easily take out bad guys from up close. * Cons: Slow, untargeted, and easily defeated by weapons Detective: * Pros: Can detect spies or other bad guys in the city early on, carries a small gun * Cons: Weak when fighting up close, only targets specific units Sniper: * Pros: Shoots with great accuracy from great range * Helpless when fighting up close, can be detected/shielded by \<some building> Spy: * Pros: During a fight, you can place these in another player's city. They gather information, and can steal secrets. * Cons: Can't fight at all, when exposed can lead to you losing resources or being attacked violently. Ninja: * Pros: Extremely fast, undetected by many buildings/sensors, can fight at all ranges * Cons: Relatively weak attack, can't attack buildings ## Other ideas IDEA: **Unique troops**. There are standard troops (sniper, negotiator, bomber, etc.), which can be leveled up. However, the current state of your town influences their stats. For example, higher culture means that the negotiator is more efficient/succesful. Similarly, your level of research/technology/materials/buildings determine what you and your troops can do. IDEA: **Allies and army sharing**. By negotiating you can become allies with somebody, and therefore join their community. This has several advantages: you can send each other resources, you can send each other troops. Army sharing means that you have the *complete* army of the whole community at your fingertips when attacking, BUT if you use somebody else's unit (and he dies) you must pay back the cost. IDEA: **Negotiator**. To come to an agreement, for example peace of alliance, one must send a negotiator. The chance of success depends on many factors: your negotiator, the position of the other town toward your town/actions/community, with how many troops you've come. *Why?* In case things go wrong, you can bring in the extra troops to get your revenge, but bringing too many troops ruins your chance of success. IDEA: **Spy**. Spies can be placed inside another city whenever you visit/attack/negotiate. Once a day (or something), they provide intel. They tell you what the other player has done, what his town now looks like, etc. Most importantly, they *steal secrets and technologies*. > You can make a spy return at any point in time. If the spy is caught, two things can happen. The spy returns to you, or the spy dies. In the first case, the spy is either strong enough to escape, or it has given the enemy intel as well. IDEA: **Distractor**. A distractor does what he can to distract the attention of enemy units. He disguises himself as a local and talks to the units, or he steals something to get the police going after him, stuff like that. He has almost zero hitpoints or attack, and is very expensive and hard to employ effectively. But when you do it right, you make things a lot easier for the rest of your army. IDEA: **Farms**. A farming hut alone doesn't bring in any food. You have to build "farmlands" around the farm. Each one gives you a certain amount of food (in the form of plants/vegetables/fruits), with a bonus when you have more. If you have a certain area, you can buy an animal. Animals provide even more food over time, or you can slaughter them once to get very much food (but lose them forever). IDEA: **Water pumps.** A water pump retrieves water from the ground, but only if there's actually water underneath it of course. Therefore, there are only limited places where a pump can be positioned, and not every place is equally efficient. You can extend water lines under your village, though it takes a lot of time and resources. * I guess it's fun to get a little magical/special element in the game, where you can get water by other means if you are a high level. * Similarly, there's more special creatures that can be in your farm/work for you at higher levels. IDEA: **Technology tree.** By building laboratories and hiring scientists, you get research points over time. These can be spent to research certain technologies, which enable many more possibilities, and make your buildings and troops unique. This tree is absolutely huge, to make it unlikely that everybody has researched everything or exactly the same things. It also gives people a motive to *steal secrets and technologies* from other players. IDEA: **Towns with secrets**. When somebody visits a city, there's only a limited amount of information present. Obviously, just by going to the town gates, you can't see everything that's going on inside. * There are multiple things that can help you with that: Air units that explore the area, units that sneak inside the town and do nothing else than explore, technology that can scan areas, spies who have stolen the town's secrets for you. * There are certain buildings/units/structures that will always remain hidden, though. IDEA: **Controlling units**. You control exactly where you place your units, and you can click on them to directly give them orders. * Orders include: where to go, what to do, what weapon/tactic/technique to use. * If orders are omitted, the default action is executed. Before you go to fight, at home, you can set the default option for each troop. IDEA: **Placing units**. Of course, units can't just come out of nowhere. Usually, units are placed outside of the town, as if they just arrived there by foot (or bike, or car, or whatever). However, it might be fun to be able to drop certain units in the middle of the city by airplane, or some other mechanism (firing them out of a cannon/catapult?), or get inside from undergruond. IDEA: **Gaining more land**. You start with a small area of land, just enough to get the basic necessities going. As you level up, you can get more land around it. Three options: automatically, by buying it, or by exploring it. PROBLEM: **Simplicity** I really need to keep things simple, logically as well as visually. * One thing I can do, is add more mechanics, troops and buildings only at higher levels. So, the town center can have level 1-40, and with every upgrade you get only two or three new things, usually connected to one new game mechanic. * Similarly, I would love it if I could keep everything in a blocky, low-poly style. I do want to give it some warmth and visual sophistication, though, for which I will need to find the right way to create buildings and troops. IDEA: **Time as central theme**. Time can be slowed down, or sped up. Items, such as bombs, have timers you can change. (And if not, you'll have to change your strategy based on those timers). People can look into the future, or resurrect things from the past. * This could be AWESOME, but I need to figure out exactly what and how, and keep it simple enough that I can implement it. IDEA: **Rebuilding the world/hope/optimism as the other central theme**. Alternative resources, such as energy, trust, and love should play a big role. Yes, the "standard resources" are the ones that can be collected from other bases and must be used to construct things. But, the "alternative resources" must be at a high enough level to perform certain actions/buy certain buildings, and they also influence the stats of your city. > It's really important that people have a lot of freedom in building their city, so that from the start they can build something unique that does something unique for this world. IDEA: **Interconnected world**. Every city has a location, which means that they can provide something for people close to them. Perhaps certain people live within the same region, province, country, whatever, and different cities fulfill different functions. IDEA: Realism is nice, but magic and impossible things are much more fun and varied. IDEA: Divide the world into three factions: - Guardians of **time**: can speed up time, or slow it down. They can make buildings build faster, work faster, make your units move faster, slow enemy units, resurrect things from the past, look into the future. - Guardians of **space:** can teleport themselves, move any object anywhere, make units and buildings take up less (or even no) space, or make them larger ( = improve efficiency) - Guardians of **matter**: can create things out of nothing, or instantly kill/destroy things When you start, you can choose which one you want to join. (Or, should I make it possible later in the game, or make it possible to switch? Perhaps with a huge penalty.) Each of the factions of course blames the others for destroying the world, and you can't fight against people within your own faction. Also, each faction brings unique units and abilities. ## Implementation details Efficiency: - Batch the update calls. When the user closes the game, or is inactive for some time, or fights another town, that's when we update. Otherwise, we must ensure that the in-game town runs in parallel with the server town. - Save the most-often updated things seperately. For example, the storages and other resource buildings are used the most often.