WWWest-Online Development Blog

Whenever I think of westerns what always comes to mind is people getting thrown out of windows… What’s that got to do with anything, you ask? Nothing really, I just find myself thinking a lot about windows and the Wild West lately .

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about is the WWWest-Online game interface. We have been thinking quite hard about how things will look and what to do to retain the maximal in-game feeling. When I say “in-game feeling”, what I mean is that we want to create an experience where, when the player is playing the game, he’s got everything he needs in the game itself – no need for new windows, new tabs or new anything. So one of the most obvious things that keeps popping up (double entendre unintended) is the concept of windows. Think of every desktop game you have played, did you ever have to leave the window to do something game-related? No? So why should web based games be any different?

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In any multi-player environment, it stands to reason that talking to each other should play an important role. ‘Talking’ in a computer game can take on many forms – it could be actual real-time conversation (voice chat) using software like TeamSpeak or Ventrilo, or with some in-game functionality provided by the devs; or it could be written chat (which is what most games support and provide), or even a more off-line conversation using an in-game mailing system, or even official/unofficial forums.In WWWest Online, we’ll probably have in-game chat. It’s simply not a voice chat kind of game (most, if not all, browser-based games I’ve seen aren’t, while we’re on the subject) – that’s usually reserved for fast-paced games like FPS games, or for activities that require a high degree of coordination, like raids in WoW. But I don’t want to go the other way, either. Most browser-based games I’ve seen either have a chat that opens in another window, or only have forums.

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