WARNING: If you’re not interested in RPG games, or Ruby programming, ignore this blog post.

A few years ago, when I was learning Ruby, I had an idea for a game.

Here are my initial notes for the game that I jotted down before writing code:

• You start out with a small team of heros.
• Foes start streaming in.
• You fight the foes.
• Results: deaths/stats upgrade/skill acquirement.
• Payment: you get paid for your hard work and effort by the town for your kills.
• Shopping to upgrade equipment.
• Cash in experience for stats upgrades.
• Heros can permanently die.

The inspiration was the “Tower Defense” games that were hugely popular.

I considered basing the game engine on D&D, but instead chose Fudge game system.

I implemented a number of features, including:

• Name generator
• Creature library
• Foe generator
• Hero generator
• Combat system
• Items system
• Skill system
• Open ID

Why did I do all this? To amuse my son, Emerson. We played the game on my computer.

I have tossed it out onto the Internet (http://towndefensegame.com), so you can play the game too :) Source code (rough & unrefactored) has been posted to http://github.com/ryw/town-defense-game for your amusement. I decided to not try and quickly clean up the source code before posting, except what I had to to get it deployed.

The UI is ugly and layouts need fixed in certain browsers, sometimes a hero dies during battle then gets hit again and is somehow brought back to life (bug), there are no tests, there is no instruction on how to play the game.

But it’s out there now so Emerson can play whenever he wants, and now I’m motivated to clean it up.

Feel free to play it and see if you can get hero’s on the top 20 list. I’m warning you now, however, that Emerson is competitive.

So I was talking with Michael Guterl, about the lack of a true Ruby user group in town. Rather than complain about it, I whipped out http://cincinnatirb.org/.

There are some well-known Ruby people in town; I’m not one of them. Despite my lack of credentials, I do love Ruby and don’t totally suck, but more importantly, the time has come for a Cincinnati.rb.

Come one, come all, it’s open hacking night every night—we’re going to let the meeting drive itself to wherever it wants to go.

P.S. We’re flexible about meeting space, but we’ll kick it off at the RecruitMilitary HQ in Loveland on Nov. 17th for meeting #1 at least.

Drop us a note if you want to show up :)

After a very hard decision-making process, we’re going to hold off on switching to Ruby + Rails for now at The Devine Group.

Primary factors:

1. Apparent lack of or difficulty in implementing cookieless apps (we need it for our assessments)
2. Lack of adequate charting components (we need for our reports)
3. Lack of internal knowledge of Unix-based deployment (Apache, FastCGI, etc.)
4. Lack of internal knowledge of Ruby
5. Internal resistance to switching from Microsoft platform (old dogs, new tricks)

I won’t go over all the things that impressed me about RoR, the list would be too long—I’m going to keep my eye on it and I’m not ruling it out for future development projects.

Well I’m getting sold on Ruby on Rails—My background: I started with implementing Perl scripts, then PHP, then ASP, most recently ASP.NET. In some ways it seems a step back to go to UNIX-based web tech, in other ways it feels a step forward (Agile, Design Patterns, Ruby’s highly OO nature, Test-Driven Development, Ajax, etc.) Anyone else make the jump from ASP.NET to RoR who regretted it + moved back to ASP.NET? I haven’t read many posts out there from people who went to Rails (actually built something) who reverted back…