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?

We intend to give our players the feeling that they can do everything in the same game window. How, you ask? By opening “mini windows” inside the main window. For example, let’s say you want to view a character profile while you are on a mission, since you just saw something in chat that got your attention. Why should opening this character’s profile disturb your current activity, or force you to go to another tab or browser window to see it? Now the obvious solution is pop-ups, but since I really truly hate pop-ups there will be none of those.

When you will enter the WWWest-Online game world you will have your virtual desktop inside the game; everything that is somehow game-related will happen in this virtual desktop in a very manageable way. Of course one of the features will be adding separate windows and the ability to manage them. Since we’re going to be giving the player the option to open quite a few of these mini windows in the game, some kind of window management functions like “minimize all”, “bring to front” and such will have to be implemented. But have no fear, We’ll be creating those as well.

For those of you that have been following the development and wonder why we are suddenly talking about the windows and user interface if we are in the chat development phase, the simple reason is that the chat itself is part of the user interface, but the full answer is… well, wait for the next chat-related post and you’ll see .

That’s it for now, hopefully I’ll have more updates soon.

Scopti