As some might know, I’m writing on a new persistent browserbased game that is located in space.

On the galaxynomads development blog (which I can’t access at the moment, because I have no access to my old email account) I announced in November 2006 that I was going to develop it with Ruby on Rails. As time went by a few things came up and I found a great new job (day to day Rails development, yeay!) and I also moved to Berlin earlier this year.

So as you can imagine I haven’t had much free time to develop the game. I did some small things and all, but nothing really that good to show off really. Basically groundwork for all the game mechanics.

Last week I took a short leave and I could actually work on the game a bit. I built 2 prototypes of a hexagon tiled map, using some of the stuff I learned from looking at weewar.com and kdice.com which are also very popular and great browserbased games.

The first prototype didn’t work out so well so I started a new one by using a new approach. So the second time it really worked like I had expected it to. It isn’t pretty yet, but the basics work. The map has several layers with an imagemap on top. This is how it looks so far:

It highlights all the surrounding hex tiles when you hover over one tile and shows what map points (extra money points or capture points i.e.) and units are currently inside the tile. You can also click on the map to activate a certain tile.

I used jQuery for the DOM stuff this time, because it’s a very nice lightweight alternative to prototype and scriptaculous. So far I haven’t run into any issues.

If there are any developers or designers interested in joining the game making process feel free to leave a comment and I will get back to you. ;)