Ottomaan

Browser games nearly always ask you for something first: a username, an email address, a confirmation mail, sometimes a download. Anyone who wants to see the game has to prove up front that they will stay. That is the wrong order, certainly for a game that costs nothing.

On top of that comes the problem every text game has: a menu with fifty links tells a new player nothing. You see words, not a world. The exact opposite of what a game set in the Ottoman Empire should evoke.

So the brief had two halves. Let someone in without a threshold, and let them see at first glance where they are standing.

The game runs on the same engine I built for Crime Club: vanilla PHP 8 with MySQL, no framework, no Composer, no build step to change a line of text. Everything that grew there over the years in game logic, rounds, ranks, property and administration could come straight across.

The city is the whole layout. You arrive in Konstantiniyye and see the city from above: the saray, the bedesten, the sarraf, the kervansaray, the zindan, the harbour. Every building is a place in the game. You tap it, choose what you want to do there, and the page opens as a window above the map. There is no separate menu to learn first.

Turkish belongs to the setting, but it must not become a barrier. So under every Turkish name, in smaller type, stands what it means: Bedesten, covered market. Sarraf, money changer. You learn the words while you play.

You work your way through twelve ranks, from reaya to sadrazam. The empire counts eleven cities where you buy mülk that pays out by the hour, you join an orta, you steal horses, forge seals and run errands for the city. All of it in five languages: Dutch, English, French, German and Turkish.

Getting in takes one button. You are given a name straight away and you stand in the city; only when you want to stay do you secure your account. Sultan Süleyman walks you around in nine steps, or you skip the tour.

A game that lets you in with one tap and shows you straight away what there is to do, because the city replaces the menu. Anyone who stays longer finds a full text game underneath it: ranks, property, an army, a market with auctions and a court that rewards you at every rank.

Ottomaan is live at ottomaan.com.