Have you ever felt the burning need to ride aimlessly aimfully around the London Underground? Well, then I have good news for you.
My new in-development project is Mornington Square (holding page only so far!) - it's a adaptation of the classic game of Mornington Crescent, a game universally enjoyed by young and old.
The key part of the adaptation is that, unlike other online versions, this one is played by riding around the real underground. A GPS phone (and a location broker like Fire Eagle) updates the server with where you are (this does mean climbing out of stations each time you make a move).
The rough gameplay outline goes as follows (if you want just the technical nuggets, skip a bit):
First, contestants start either in the same location, or in predetermined equidistant-in-time-from-the-destination locations. They're all heading towards the same place - say, Mornington Crescent.
Before each move, the server analyses each player's location and assigns them a pseudorandom set of rules they must follow for the next move. Rules limit the lines you can travel on - so, for example, if you're told that the Occidental Grouping Restriction applies, you can't use Aldgate or Aldgate East. (The rules all have explanations for new players, and a map of possible moves, including restrictions imposed by rules, is shown)
The choice isn't random; the server will try several tens of sets of rules and select the one it think looks most appropriate (which is usually the one blocking any short routes - it knows.)
Then, each player looks at what moves they're allowed (you're always only allowed to move on one line at a time, so you have to choose an appropriate next stop), and gives the server a time estimate, and then they start moving.
Players must get to their next stop in the time they allocated; if they are late, they suffer a 5-minute time penalty. If they are early, they must wait until the end of the time they originally allocated - this encourages good time estimation!
The whole process repeats until someone makes it to the destination and their time runs out (or their penalty period does) - then they're the winner.
You're required to submit your location at the end of every move, to ensure you're in the right place. One possible measure for stopping location cheating is to ask the person to stand next to a local landmark you know the position of, but this shouldn't be a problem early on.
The server also has an overview page showing all the players, their current moves, and generally useful information.
So, it sounds good, but it actually works, as well! So far the rule-calculation code and map drawing code is all done, so it's just the location and timing left before there's a fully-functional beta, which I shall hopefully be demoing at BarCampLondon6 (possibly by actually playing it that evening).
The site is built using Django, of course, along with my usual use of Cairo for drawing the custom Underground maps for each player's move (they're geographical, and not the proper Underground style yet, however).
Rules are defined by exclusion functions - a rule can exclude any route, set of station names, or stations matching a regular expression. An A* algorithm does the route planning, scoring each ruleset based on the shortest route to each destination, allowing more time for interchanges between lines (I have basically invented a small travel planner).
I am perhaps too excited at the prospect of an excuse to go around riding the underground, and emerging from the surface, only to find that the server has decided that on the next move, wild lifts are high, and so I can't go through Covent Garden, but it'll all come out in testing (which I shall be doing in secret before the next DJUGL).