Project history
Motivation
Mojmír Fendek always liked to play TCG (Trading Card Games), like Magic The Gathering (MTG), Lord of the Rings (LOTR) TCG , Game of Thrones, Yu-Gi-Oh TCG... But one day new edition of cards and rules for LOTR TCG were realeased, which ruined the game from the point of view of many players including Mojmír. All those players stopped playing LOTR TCG and sold all or most of their cards. He swore on that day, that he will never play that game again, not by the new rules, that is. He had a plan in mind - to use his knowledge as a programmer and develop a web-application. He named it LOTR Unspoiled free online card game.
The game rules and mechanics proved to be too complex for a turn-based webgame. The game would be too user unfriendly and players would have to wait a long time to finish a game - there are simply too much things the player and his opponent can do within one turn. Thus he realized, that this game can be implemented only as a standard application which could be played over LAN. Since he had not much experience in this field and the project looked too large for one person, it was stored with all data in his personal vault of unfinished projects (right next to Ultra Cook 2008).
Project starts
Some time has passed and in the first half of the February 2006 new semester started and a course "Development of interactive internet applications" picked Mojmír's interest. The final exam in this course was to programm a fully-operational web-application.
He had two options. To create something quickly implementable, but not useful in any way - just for exam use only, or something which would not be so easy to implement, but could be useful. LOTR Unspoiled crossed his mind again, but it was too complex for a web-application and there would also be some copyright issues. However, he liked the online card game idea. Then he recalled, that he played a simple turn-based card game - Arcomage, in the Might & Magic series. Arcomage was very simple compared to LOTR. It could be implemented as a web-application. Idea of Multiplayer online Arcomage or MArcomage was born.
After some consideration, the project still proved to be too large for one person to implement until final exam. He needed at least one more person to join his project. Many other students already had their own little projects and weren't interested in something this large. One of the students - Viktor Štujber hadn't a project of his own yet and showed interest in the project. Since Mojmír already worked with Viktor on another project for a different course (Compilers), he gladly accepted. Thus the project MArcomage started.
Project was completed according to specifications (more or less) in time and for final exam both Mojmír and Viktor got A's, thus earning 4 credits for their study. MArcomage was already playable online, because Viktor provided a server were the application could run 24 hours a day. MArcomage had only basic functionality (compared to current version), but it picked up interest of some players. Some time passed and project was left idle (no more development) until...
Project continues
In the first half of September 2006, Mojmír found an exploit of the study system. He found a course "Dynamic Internet Applications" which was meant for students in the Math department, but could also be assigned by students that are in the Informatics department. This course was roughly the same content as was "Development of interactive internet appliacations", it had even the same exam (to create a web application). Mojmír intended to use this to his advantage.
He proposed the teacher of this course an idea - instead of developing another web application he would continue to develop MArcomage, because he had lots of ideas how to improve this project. The teacher agreed. Viktor was again offered to participate and he agreed once more. MArcomage was improved, much of the bugs he contained were fixed, cards were balanced, some new features were added. Also the HTML code got improved thanks to a course Modern Approaches to Web Design, that both students attened. After final exam both Mojmír and Viktor got A's and again earned 4 credits for their study. The teacher started to play MArcomage afterwards, but only for a few weeks.
After one year of development multiple players were active on MArcomage, so Mojmír and Viktor decided to continue their struggle for an excellent free online card game. They did not only enjoy the development and had fun, but with every day spent on this project, their programming, designing and analitic skills improved.
While there are still many web technologies to test and learn, the project team does not run out of ideas and there are players that want to play the game, the project will go on...