This project is an open source re-creation of the once popular MMO Dark Throne. The name Dark Curse originally belonged to another game from the same company Lazarus Software. I never had the pleasure of playing that game, but as far as I can tell, it's basically the same as DarkThrone with a different theme.
So, why purposefully name the project Dark Curse, and not DarkThrone? It's certainly a little confusing but I picked this for two main reasons. Firstly, Dark Curse was never as popular and so is not as well known. Secondly, at the time of writing DarkThrone itself is still live and playable (sort of). Finally, Dark Throne is the name of a Norwegian metal band and they play havoc with the SEO.
In order to get the development environment up and running you need the following:
- NodeJs (v16.x)
- NPM (v8.x)
Follow the instructions below to download the code, install dependancies, setup and update your database and run the server.
git clone git@github.com:Moppler/DarkCurse.git
cd DarkCurse
npm install
cat .env-sample > .envsetup your postgresql database and get the URI
update the .env file with the database URI (and other values as necessary)
npm run migrate
npm start
Over time, I fully intend to re-create as much of the original game as I can. This will be a slow process, but I am hopeful that as the project gains momentum, It will gain additional contributors. The plan is to re-create the game, fully open source and free-to-play.
I'd like to stick closely to the original features and play style without being fully strict on things like the visuals. It would be pretty easy to re-create the original UI but there are several issues with the UI when compared to modern web applications. Namely, I'd like to address two critical areas that are lacking in the original game, Assessibility and Responsiveness. Both of these will be core considerations for the project and will always be considered.
I intend to run this project as I would any other development project within my professional career. While this is likely to be a pretty massive overhead for a project with a single developer, I hope that it can serve as an example to all developers of how projects like this are handled in a professional environment. I will do my best to ensure that I explain things as I go and will also try to keep a development blog up-to-date as I go.
I will go into detail of the application architecture in detail over the course of the application development cycle. I don't have everything planned out in my head just yet, but I do have some pretty solid ideas on how I would like to approach the major problems, so there isn't really a concern over building the game.
I have extensive experience building large scale applications that serve millions fo requests a day. I intend to bring that experience to the project and while my primary focus will not be scale, I will be very careful to ensure that the application I write will always have the potential to scale. I will also do my best to document this as I go so that future maintainers can understand my thoughts when dealing with code in the future.
(Backend) Typescript - While not the fastest, NodeJs and Typescript are incredibly powerful languages with an incredibly rich eco-system of libraries. It's a language that I really enjoy working with. There are always other options that one could choose for the job, but this is the one I'm most comfortable with and if I have any hopes of making something useful from this project, I need to maximise on the skills I already have.
(Database) PostgreSQL - While there are a lot of potential benefits to a NoSQL solution for storage, especially within games. I'm reasonalby confident that for this particular project, PostgreSQL is the best choice. The data structures that I am thinking about benefit from the relational nature of an SQL database. It's also the case that I am a big fan of SQL databases and so I am also sticking with what I know best. As part of my development approach, I will try to keep a separation of code that should allow for relatively painless swithing of persistence layer, should the need arise.
(Frontend) Handlebars - Handlebars is a templating language that I've used a lot over the years. While there are plenty of other options, such as React or EmberJs. The application I am building has no real need for anything fancy that comes from a "modern frontend". Just because it's a shiny piece of tech, doesn't mean we have to use it. I have no issue with the use of modern frameworks, but I also like to keep things simple. So, I'm going to stick with Handlebars, for now.