We did use RoR as our backend part of the application. The game logic for the trading card game is still written in Java as a SFS extension.

We are working on some Ruby + SFS integration now. For instance, we want to start a game room (activating the flash client and SFS) from the html page.

Let me know if you want to know anything else.

Getting to this post after a google search for smartfox + ruby. just wondering how that ended up working out for you. did you indeed go with ruby for your back end?

Thank you for the feedback. I am very excited. One main purpose of this blog is to get interested folks to participate in the development of the game. We want to know what is important to you.

As mentioned in the post, we are co-branding different ‘planets’ (websites) with various corporate partners (essentially it is franchising). Different planets have different pricing plan. However, there would be a planet, the starting planet, the home human planet where everything is free. This is related to the setting of that planet, which is based on a future Earth. In the setting, human beings are materially self sustaining; think Star Trek’s economy.

In Encephalon, you use credits to buy cards (or maybe booster packs). You can earn credits by playing games (losing or winning), winning daily tournaments, exploring the website, commenting on artist’s artwork, replying on the forum, etc. Essentially the whole game is free to play. Well, at least on our starting planet.

But if you want, you can convert cash to credits. It is going to be very cheap though. Let’s assume that 50 credits can buy you a pack of 10 random cards. We would charge only 1 USD for purchasing 50 credits. Note that we haven’t confirmed the means of collecting cards yet.

The balancing of the game is an issue, especially since it is a *customizable* card game. In a future article, we are going to write about the balancing criteria and methodology. Please stick around.

You might be interested in these other posts by our team:
http://hatchlings.wordpress.com/tag/world-design/
and http://hatchlings.wordpress.com/tag/encephalon/

Thank you for your interest again.

Make this totally free to play and participate, and you’ve achieved a dream I once had myself in creating something truly everyone could be involved in.

Why can I not enjoy TCG/CCGs? Well, for one, I don’t have cash available to dive in and get what I need. Two, I can never find anyone who wants to dive in with me. The net has always found ways to fix the second problem. Making the game free would fix the first.

The problem lies in balancing. Will all cards be considered “equal”? As in, no card overpowering another?

For our initial release, we are going to use Flash + SmartFoxServer + PHP (or Ruby on Rails) + AJAX.

Any suggestions?