I am beginning the development of a broser based game in which players take certain actions at any point in time.
Big parts of gameplay will be happening in real life and just have to be entered into the system.
I believe a good kind of comparison might be a platform for managing fantasy football, although I have virtually no experience playing that, so please correct me if I am mistaken here.
The point is that some events happen in the program (i.e. on the server, out of reach for the players) like pulling new results from some datasource, starting of a new round by a game master and such.
Other events happen in real life (two players closing a deal on the transfer of some team member or whatnot - again: have never played fantasy football) and have to be entered into the system.
The first part is pretty easy since the game masters will be "staff" and thus can be trusted to a certain degree to not mess with the system. But the second part bothers me quite a lot, especially since the actions may involve multiple steps and interactions with different players, like registering a deal with the system that then has to be approved by the other party or denied and passed on to a game master to decide.
I would of course like to separate the game logic as far as possible from the presentation and basic form validation but am unsure how to do this in a clean fashion.
Of course I could (and will) put some effort into making my own architectural decisions and prototype different ideas. But I am bound to make some stupid mistakes at some point, so I would like to avoid some of that by getting a little "book smart" beforehand.
So the question is:
Is there any kind of architectural works that I can read up on?
Papers, blogs, maybe design documents or even source code?
Writing this down this seems more like a business application with business rules, workflows and such... Any good entry points for that?
EDIT:
After reading the first answers I am under the impression of having made a mistake when including the "MMO" part into the title.
The game will not be all fancy (i.e. 3D or such) on the client side and the logic will completely exist on the server. That is, apart from basic form validation for the user which will also be mirrored on the server side.
So the target toolset will be HTML5, JavaScript, probably JQuery(UI).
My question is more related to the software architecture/design of a system that enforces certain rules.
Separation of ruleset and presentation
One problem I am having is that I want to separate the game rules from the presentation.
The first step would be to make an own module for the game "engine" that only exposes an interface that allows all actions to be taken in a clean way.
If an action fails with regard to some pre/post condition, the engine throws an exception which is then presented to the user like "you cannot sell something you do not own" or "after that you would end up in a situation which is not a valid game state."
The problem here is that I would like to be able to not even present invalid action in the first place or grey out the corresponding UI elements.
Changing and tweaking the ruleset
Another big thing is the ruleset.
It will probably evolve over time and most definitely must be tweaked.
What's more, it should be possible (to a certain extent) to build a ruleset that fits a specific game round, i.e. choosing different kinds of behaviours in different aspects of the game. This would do something like "we play it with extension A today but we throw out extension B."
For me, this screams "Architectural/Design pattern" but I have no idea on who might have published on something like this, not even what to google for.
