This is the first part of a four part series that covers the history of Dragon Duel. Throughout November and December a post will be made each week to cover various aspects of the game’s history. Make sure to check back in.

So the launch of Dragon Duel got pushed back again — Not a surprise given the history of Dragon Duel. However in the mean time the site has been updated to take in any users who are interested in playing the beta when it releases. If you would like to sign up check it out.

Dragon Duel is an odd topic. Did you know there have already been four different versions of the same game rehashed over and over? We seem to keep going through a constant development cycle that never ends. The sad part is that all of these games ended up working really well too. We just never pushed them for release because they worked totally different that the original Dragon Duel did. We really wanted to keep the stats and current user base the same without having to change too much. This time around we kicked that philosophy  out the door and revamped a lot of different metrics kind of combining elements from all of the other versions of Dragon Duel together. Lets take a look at the past shall well?

Dragon Duel (2005)

Started by Luke Hackett Dragon Duel started off of what is know as a “Dragon Swords” base of code. This was some base of code that a bunch of developers were working and it got leaked out onto the internet. Lots of bitching, moaning, and hacking up code later Dragon Duel gave its breath to the world and started to take in players.  Luke’s invovlement in the game is somewhat unknown to me. I really did not know him nor was I a member of the DD community at that time.

Dragon Duel – Three Easy Payments (2006)

I approached Luke after seeing a post that he was selling his games due to a lack of resources. I emailed him on 5/16/06 and things started to get rolling. Price and other elements were discussed the basics came down to this (from his end):

• Two Games: DDRPG, SOD
• Totally unique!
• DDRPG.net
• $200!

So the deal went through, however with some snags. Luke told me from the start that all the games were unique:

Hey, DD is original but SoD was open source (I helped make the original source) but it’s so different it cannot be recognised as the way it originally was. I’m not really fussed on the price because I really need to sell… So pretty much offer a price and yeah I’d probably say yes.

–
Luke Hackett.

However a few weeks later I was informed they were just “clones”/rip-offs. Already having the code and paid into it we settled on $150.00 and I never heard from Luke again.

I moved Dragon Duel over to one of the original Bandhoster servers that I had and got everything setup. While the initial configuration wasn’t too bad the code was a pile of crap. Long blocks of code that looked similar to:

$checkban = Mysql_query("Select * from bans where id='$id'");
if(!$checkban){
Mysql_query("insert into bans (id,time,mod) values ('$id','$days','$playerinfo[username]')");
echo "Player $id has been banned for $days days.";

}else{
Mysql_query(“update bans set time=’$days’ and mod=’$playerinfo[username]‘ where id = ‘$id’ “);
echo “Player $id has been rebanned for $days days.”;

}
Mysql_query(“insert into bans (id,time,mod) values (‘$id’,'$days’,'$playerinfo[username]‘)”);

mysql_query(“insert into usernews (id,user,text,time) values (”,’$id’,’$time You have been banned for $days days by $playerinfo[username] for unacceptable messageboard posts’,'$realtime’)”);
$bloke = $id;
// Manager Records
$plaintime = date (“l dS of F Y h:i:s A”);
$track2 = mysql_query(“INSERT INTO `trackweap` (`id`, `userid`, `adminid`, `change`, `tstamp`, `tstamp2`) VALUES (”, ‘$bloke’, ‘$playerinfo[id]‘, ‘Received a $days MB Ban from $playerinfo[username] ($playerinfo[id])’, NOW(), ‘$plaintime’);”);

$et=time();
//admin tracker
mysql_query(“insert into admintrack(time,admin,msg) values (‘$et’,'$playerinfo[id]‘,’$playerinfo[username] has banned $id’)”);
$trackrecord = mysql_query(“INSERT INTO jailrecord (time, admin, convict, msg) VALUES (‘$et’,'$playerinfo[id]‘, ‘$id’,’$id MBB for $time$gold‘)”);
// Add jail record
mysql_QUERY(“update jailrecord set convict=’$id’, jail_by=’$playerinfo[username]‘, jail_reason=’MBB for $gold’ where id=’$id’”);
// check unbanned
$resetthree = Mysql_query(“DELETE FROM bans where time=0″);
}

}

A lot of junk that we had to go through and try out best to fix. Little did I know that once I had this code up and running I was walking into a trap.