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Screeps

The world's first strategy open world MMO game for programmers

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Screeps

Screeps

Screeps

Screeps

Screeps

The world's first strategy open world MMO game for programmers

The world's first strategy open world MMO game for programmers

The world's first strategy open world MMO game for programmers

The world's first strategy open world MMO game for programmers

Artem Chivchalov
Artem Chivchalov
Artem Chivchalov
Artem Chivchalov
2 Campaigns |
Minsk, Belarus
$9,301 USD 522 backers
46% of $20,000 Flexible Goal Flexible Goal
Highlights
Mountain Filled 2 Projects Mountain Filled 2 Projects

Screeps is the first strategy sandbox MMO game with a persistent open world where you play by writing JavaScripts to control your units' AI. They live within the game and operate autonomously even while you are offline. This is a completely different experience of an online game which you have never tried before. A radically new idea you should positively have a look at!

Wait… JavaScripts?

Yes! If you are a programmer, didn't you think the last time you played your favorite online game that it would be cool to automate it somehow? Be honest: you did. Because it makes lots of sense: why waste precious time making routine actions that any bot could perform equally well? Why should you manually enter the game daily just to get a reward if a script could do this for you? No more wasting time on dumb movements even a child can do. We, grown-ups and programmers, can do much better. Screeps not only allows scripting, but moreover, it's a game wholly about scripts!  

What it looks like

In Screeps, each player writes an actual JavaScript program which controls the play. By managing resources, base, and units, you fight for dominance in the gaming space inside one huge persistent real-time universe. However, instead of traditional manual point'n'clicking, you build AI which controls everything without your direct interference. Think of it as macro-management of the world with the help of some Matrix-like computer, but you are in charge of how it works!


Your units continue living their lives even as you are offline! Just write a script, and they will mine and build. Improve your script, and they will conquer and defend. And all of this – while you are at work, sleeping, or walking your dog. Automagically.

There is no session match-ups: units of all players coexist in the same real-time persistent open world and obey the same rules.

You could build a large empire with a complex network of roads, sourcing, mining, manufacturing, border defense which would live on its own, while you would occasionally drop in from time to time just to check the situation and polish your scripts, if needed. Everything is ok, up and running? Fine, isn't it why you are a programmer? Ask for pay rise! :)

Screeps may be called a platform game. If you are a programmer, you well know how to study API docs and build an app upon an existing framework. Screeps gives you an opportunity to apply your skills to compete with other programmers (including right in your office) in a way you never thought was possible!

Game concepts

In Screeps, there is much programming and few game mechanics you need to understand, so now we'll summarize them all.

The game world consists of interconnected rooms. A room is a closed space 50x50 cells in size. It may have 1-4 exits to other rooms. A number of rooms in the world is limited, but increases as new players join the game. So the single game world is really huge and constantly expanding, like the Universe itself.

What is there in the rooms? Five types of surface (plain land, roads, swamps, ramparts, and walls), energy sources (the main game resource), and, of course, your units and buildings.

Spawns are your colony centers. They can accumulate mined energy and use it to create your units. There may be no more than 3 spawns in a room. Hence, by bulding 3 spawns in a room you actually conquer it.

The more spawns you build and hold, the higher your position in the Global Player Rank of the current game season.

You build units called creeps the same way as in other strategy games, but with one exception: you construct the "body" of a new creep out of 7 available body parts, the resulting body being a sequence up to 30 parts. It allows thousands of creep types and their roles: ordinary workers, huge construction machines able to harvest a source within a few cycles, weaselly couriers, heavy capacious trucks, fast and cheap scouts, well-equipped fighters with regeneration ability, etc. It may even be creeps resembling towers or fortresses for mining, defending, or seizing, with very little speed (couple of cells per minute), but monstrous characteristics. Everything is up to you, your tactics and imagination.

However, remember that any creep has a life cycle of 30 minutes. Then it "ages" and dies. So you need not just to control existing creeps but set up manufacturing and automatic control of superseding generations of your creeps.

Aside from creating creeps, you have to take care of infrastructure of your rooms. The roads you build allow slow creeps move faster which leads to effective logistics, the ramparts block movements of your opponents and give extra defense, while the spawn extensions allow building more powerful creeps.

Demo Playground

To show you how it all will look, we set a live Simulation Playground that you can play with right away! In this version, your scripts work the same way as in the real game, but are executed inside the browser, not on our servers. Right now you can try:

Tutorial – Learning basic game concepts step by step.

Survival Mode – Defend (or, more exactly, program defense) from computer-lead creeps, wave after wave, trying to stay as long as you can.

Custom Mode – Modify the landscape, create any objects, and play for two virtual players at once. This way, you can test your scripts without interfering with real objects and with no limits on CPU performance.

What is done so far

We have completed the entire game engine, game mechanics, and scripting gameplay! To make sure of it, just have a look at our live Simulation Playground .


What is left to do: fix the bugs, refine the server part, polish the balance, and the most important thing – buy and tune servers, so that your creeps could exist in the shared persistent world with other players rather than your browser.

The Indiegogo campaign will help us complete all the works on time and determine how much server resources we will have to purchase. But anyway, Screeps will go live regardless of the campaign results.

Timeline

This is what will happen in case we will reach the target. 

December 2014, Global Survival Mode Leaderboard. It will display individual scores and ranks of all the players of the single-player Survival Mode. You will be able to match your scores and compete with the best players from all over the world.

January 2015, Early Preview. It will start a month prior to the general availability of the game. Early Preview will be available only for Indiegogo backers with $10 or more. It will be a fully working multiplayer version with the purpose of testing game balance and equipment. At this stage, all the players with access to Early Preview will be able to get any service plan for free. After this stage is over and all the final fixes are made, the world data will be wiped. However, your scripts will stay, so you will enter the general launch armed to the teeth.

February 2015, General Availability. General Availability release will be launched in February 2015 after wiping the world data and exiting the Early Preview stage. You can start spending your CPU Credits from this moment.



Stretch Goals

$30,000 – The game engine will be open-sourced letting you learn the underlying mechanics and run a game simulation on your local machine in console as Node.js package.



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$1 USD
You will receive an email notification when we launch.
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30 CPU Credits

$3 USD
You will gain 30 CPU Credits.
9 claimed

100 CPU Credits

$7 USD
You will gain 100 CPU Credits.
8 claimed

200 CPU Credits

$13 USD
You will gain 200 CPU Credits and access to Early Preview.
55 claimed

300 CPU Credits

$19 USD
You will gain 300 CPU Credits and access to Early Preview.
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500 CPU Credits

$30 USD
You will gain 500 CPU Credits and access to Early Preview.
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1000 CPU Credits

$55 USD
You will gain 1000 CPU Credits and access to Early Preview.
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2000 CPU Credits

$90 USD
You will gain 2000 CPU Credits and access to Early Preview.
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Exclusive Badge

$100 USD
Upload your own image as an in-game badge for your creeps and spawns!
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Own Room

$150 USD
Design your own room in the game world which will be available to your spawns only!
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200 Early CPU Credits

$10 USD
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300 Early CPU Credits

$15 USD
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500 Early CPU Credits

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1000 Early CPU Credits

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2000 Early CPU Credits

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