ternus / arcnet

The webapp used for the Assassins' Guild ten-day "Arcadia Rising."

ARCNET: a comprehensive webapp for an Assassins' Guild ten-day

ARCNET is a complex, multifaceted webapp written in January 2010 for the MIT Assassins' Guild ten-day game "Arcadia Rising." I (Christian Ternus) wrote it over the course of ~a month under heavy time pressure; please forgive the resulting roughness.

Though written to Arcadia's specs, many pieces of this webapp may be useful to you if you're running a similar game. It's written in Django (albeit an earlier version, see below); if you know Django, you'll probably be OK.

A breakdown of key directories and files follows. The code is broken out into several Django apps, possibly allowing you to grab only what you need and leave the rest behind.

• core/: the central character model on which everything else depends. If you're reusing this code, you want this. Includes code for character profiles.
• cyber/: the hacking mechanic, including ICE, the hacking obstacles: sudoku, word search, "Social Engineering," etc. There are a number of clever tricks here.
• elog/: a unified event logging system, used to notify characters, the public, and the GMs when stuff happens.
• mail/: a complete player-to-player mail system. Supports anonymous mail at the cost of computrons (a game currency).
• media/: blog-style posting, uploading of video and audio, the Public Opinion mechanic (~voting). Supports Facebook-style tagging of characters in posts, and bonuses to images that contain certain topics ("at least six weapons in the picture"). Characters can see what posts they're tagged in.
• pedia/: the Arkipedia, a compilation of information about the Arcadia station. Might be useful for an in-game reference.
• research/: the research mechanic, including ultra-spiffy auto-generated research tree images, colorized for your pleasure.
• templates/: templates are not split out by app, so you'll need to pull the ones you want from here. All the static images and so forth live in here.
• settings.py: the Django settings file
• test.py: the game database initialization code. Check this to see what sorts of data we populated Arcadia with.

This code was written using Django 0.96. It probably needs some serious updating to work with any newer version. It also may have odd dependencies; good luck.

This code is released under the GNU General Public License version 2. If you use it for your game, I'd appreciate a mention, and I'd definitely appreciate you forking this code on GitHub and making your improvements public (once your game has run, of course.)

THIS CODE COMES WITH NO WARRANTY OR PROMISE OF FUNCTIONALITY WHATSOEVER. IT IS ALMOST CERTAINLY INSECURE. IT MAY BREAK ON DAY EIGHT, REVEAL SECRETS TO YOUR PLAYERS, COMPROMISE YOUR SERVER, AND KICK YOUR PUPPY. NEITHER THE AUTHORS NOR THE MIT ASSASSINS' GUILD ASSUME ANY LIABILITY WHATSOEVER FOR ANYTHING YOU DO WITH THIS CODE. DON'T COME CRYING TO ME IF IT DOESN'T WORK.

Enjoy!

-ternus

December 2012