Development Preview

I am very happy to inform you that I have just released a new development preview version of the game at CodePlex:

http://www.codeplex.com/wormhole

While this is obviously still a very early work in progress this demo will almost make you feel like you are playing a single game turn.

Go ahead and try the following:

1. When the game loads, click yes to keep the hand.
2. Play Merrin by double-clicking on her, you will see that your power decreases.
3. Assign Jack & Maybourne  to the current mission and click the pass button. You will see that the characters are stopped, the mission is an success and you are prompted to assign a glyph.
4. Double click Jack to get the glyph. And click yes to play another mission.
5. Fail the next two missions on purpose to see how the failed mission pile works.
6. Select not to play another mission and then double click on the failed missions to place them back on the mission pile.

Naturally you do not have to follow the exact sequence as above, but I am sure that this will give you some indication of the work that has been done up to this point.

Next up I will have to get the two player element going which will involve getting network communications (though IRC) running as well as implement the Villain user interface elements.

Hope to hear from you soon, and tell me what you think thus far by posting a comment!

After the Fall

Before I start with anything else: It is my pleasure to announce that the source code for Wormhole X-Treme has been checked into the CodePlex repository and can be downloaded here.

At this point I am going to hack away at it for a while by my lone self since it is still very early days and I have a very specific implementation in my head. But please have a look at the code, tell me what you think and please make suggestions and comments, I love feedback!

Also note that the code is currently under the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL). I can’t say I am completely happy with this license and will perhaps try to change it later or apply a duel license to the code, but I am sure it will do for now to just get the stuff out there.

As some of you may know, or will see from past blog post below, projects like these are a bit notorious in that they sometimes get forcibly shut down by the (in my opinion greedy) publishers of the original game. To mitigate this problem and keep SOE/Ci off my case I decided a wise course of action will be to focus on implementing dream sets – cards not officially part of the Stargate TCG.

Doing this will not affect the architecture or design choices of the game engine as the dream cards uses the exact same mechanics as the official cards, and since this project is open source the window for industrious developers to implement the official cards on their own remains open.

After doing some basic googling I found the following two dream sets which I would like to implement:

• After the Fall
• Fight for Abydos

I really like how Elite Anubis Guard organized his set for the development thereof and I urge all aspiring dream set developers to follow his example and send me a link to their dream set – I will publish it on this blog and eventually implement it in the Wormhole X-Treme online game client.

Open Source

Let me start by introducing myself, my name is Hannes Foulds and I am a professional .NET developer from South Africa with quite a bit of experience, and a lot of passion for creating software.

Poor Rodney has been extremely busy lately, you know saving the galaxy and all that, and did not really have much time to spend on the Stargate TCG. Consequently he asked me to step in and help out where I can.

As with everything coming under new management there will be some changes around here. The first important change being that the source code for Wormhole X-Treme will now be open source.

I decided to host the code at CodePlex which will give me a nice Team Foundation Server source control environment. The project can be found here: http://www.codeplex.com/wormhole

You will notice that the CodePlex site is a bit sparse at this point and I also have not checked in all the code yet. Please bear with me for a while to get everything setup, but remember that this blog will always be your first stop for finding out about new releases and read news of the ongoing development.

Drop me a comment below and tell me if you are still interested in this project!

Stargate Atlantis Animation

A little Stargate

Firstly I would like to sincerely thank you for visiting my blog and taking an interest in how things are progressing.

Today you can download another preview to see what has been keeping me busy. In this preview you will see that I am another small step closer towards a fully playable game.

• Game Preview
• Microsoft .NET 3.5

When first launching the game you will see that the user input dialog (the gray box on the bottom right) ask you whether or not you want to be dealt a new hand, after selecting your option you are given your power for the turn, and cards that can be assigned or played from the hand are highlighted with a green border. Also when you play a card form your hand the player power is automatically decreased. Another thing you will see is that when you assign a character to the mission the points the card adds to the mission are automatically shown.

Here are some of the things I will be working on next.

1. Resolve a mission and allow a team member to earn glyphs.
2. Stop/Block cards and show the appropriate icon in the user interface.
3. Show the failed missions for the turn and allow the player to select the order in which to put them back in the mission pile.
4. Allow the dynamic display (on the cards) of card cost and skills as some card effects will change these during play.

After getting the above tasks out of the way I feel it is really important to start focusing on getting the two player element of the game going. To make life much easier I decided that I will use an IRC server as the game server for online play. What this means is that you will be able to play a game across the internet with anybody via IRC, and if one IRC server is down you can just choose another - for LAN only games you can always just run a local IRC server.

Anyway, thanks again for dropping by, and please keep visiting and commenting, it helps to keep me motivated to continue development ;-)

Fight for Abydos

In virtually all trading card games you will find cards made by the fans and tools like Magic Set Editor makes creating these cards very easy.

In the past I’ve always thought these dream cards were pretty to look at and a great creative outlet, but never knew how to use the unless I printed them out on a fancy color printer, or created unattractive hand written proxy cards.

Now that I am developing this free game I realize that these dream cards are actually something amazing that can keep the Stargate TCG alive for as long as there are someone interested in playing and contributing. This revelation came to me when I realized that I can just as easily implement dream cards in my game as I would implement the “real” cards.

I urge you to read this post by Elite Anubis Guard and help him out on the Fight for Abydos forum to create dream cards, I am itching to implement them in the game and soon we will be able to play with awesome dream cards!

Jack O'Neill Starter Deck

In today’s preview download you will see that this application is starting to look much more like a playable game. I have added all the cards from the Jack O'Neill Starter Deck and you will notice that the team characters appear where they should when you launch the game.

You can try out the following actions:

• When you click on the mission pile a mission is played.
• When you click on the deck icon a card is drawn and placed in your hand.
• When you double click on a card in your hand it goes to the support card area.
• When you double click on an event in your hand it goes to the event area and then disappears after a couple of seconds.

When implementing online trading card games there are two things which I really see as the holy grail, they are automatic rules enforcement by the game engine and a good AI player. Right now I have a pretty clear vision in my head of how to enforce rules in a very efficient manner and want to tackle that task next.


To make development and testing easier I am only going to allow for single player solitaire games in which the player are given an unlimited amount of power (playing as the hero player) and will be allowed to play obstacles and adversaries against himself. Once I get all the rules going for the starter deck cards I will add the user interface elements for the villain player, and get the network communication going to allow for two player games.

Thank you for the interest you have shown, and please stay tuned to see some rules enforcement soon!

• Free Stargate Trading Card Game - Preview
• Microsoft .NET 3.5