Back in november I stumbled upon the crowdfunding of Screeps, a massive multiplayer online game designed for programmers. It is a strategy game where you do not play but program an AI to play for you. I decided to throw in some money because it made me excited and as a result I've been toying around for the past several weeks in the early access preview.

And I must admit that I quite like it. It is challenging: the game provides the basic game mechanics and functionality such as path finding and examing the playing field and manipulating it and the rest is up to the programmer. Basic things, like building a unit that collects energy or one that picks up energy from a creep that is mining for energy and bringing it to unit that needs it are quite simple. But once you have more than a few creeps things start needing coordination and it gets more complex.

I think this might also be a very good way to learn game programming: the game has a tick based architecture and in order to keeps things efficient you need to figure out a way to keep track of resources, overall state units and rooms. In the few sessions I've spent on the game I had to dive into some algorithms(implemented a breadth-search for finding suitable construction area), data structures(currently researching spatial hashing to group together local energy needs) and working out how to keep the game running efficiently.

I also happen to have two additional tokens for use in the early access preview. If anyone is interested I'd to happy to share them on first-come basis. However, please think about if you're actually gonna play or just want to check it out and abandon it. There are quite a few players who's AI seem starved, unresponsive and stuck without being updated and it would be a shame if my tokens would be used in such a fashion too. If you do want to try it out for a bit, it has a built-in code editor and a partial simulation that runs in the browser under simulation, where also the tutorial can be found.

If anyone's playing: I'd love to hear other experiences.

I'd love to play. The demo is cool.

Edit: After rereading my post, let me clarify: I would love a code.

It sounds very interesting, and i'd love to try it, but my backlog of games i probably wont be able to give it much love.

My browser blocked the link as a known attack site.

My browser blocked the link as a known attack site.

Mine just had an issue with the certificate. I think it's because they force https but they don't have a valid certificate.

Sounds cool, though I'll wait for the final version to play it.

The main reason I'm interested is that I had an idea similar to this about 20 years ago, but of course I never got very far with it. So I want to see if it comes close to what I envisioned and if it's actually fun to play :)

My browser blocked the link as a known attack site.

Mine just had an issue with the certificate. I think it's because they force https but they don't have a valid certificate.

It's neither, they DO have a valid certificate, just not for that url, just remove the www before (they have a cert for screeps.com but not for www.screeps.com and the OP linked the wrong one)

hmm, i've been playing around with the game quite a bit in simulation. it is quite fun to be honest, and if you still have a token to spare, i would absolutely love to play this game, i think i can make time for it.

Looks cool, messed a bit with it in simulation mode but I still need to learn it better. I'll probably practice for a bit and then try and get into it whenever it comes out (later this year it seems). Not sure how the CPU time system is going to work out, and it's not clear to me how expressive the system really is just yet. I imagine it will be heavily sandboxed as the remote code execution possibilities are endless otherwise.

I don't think it is possible to call code from outside the sandbox. I've seen a few error stacktraces that mentions lodash's runInContext(), so I strongly doubt that you can even access code or memory from outside said context.

That being said, its possible to add any library you'd like to include as long as it doesn't rely on external bindings. There are limitations, such as the game doesn't appear to have any folders. My source on disk is divided up into folders but after uploading with Grunt it is all flattened which can be tricky in larger projects.

I still have an Early Access code available, gave one out to slicer4ever via a PM.