WWWest-Online Development Blog

Hello again everyone.

It’s been a while since our last update, but it’s high time we got this show back on the road. When it comes to this blog, the last year has been a quiet one, for several reasons. We’ve already mentioned that for most of us working on this project, WWWest-Online is something we’re doing in our free time, and quite often the demands and realities of real life take precedence. And though we haven’t let silly things like our jobs and such keep us from actually working on the project, I have to admit we have let them affect our priorities, and most of the time spent working on WWWest-Online was spent doing design or code work, and we kept putting off the “writing about it” part, and for that we apologize.

So what have we been up to?

Quite a bit, actually. We’ve been busy with the overall design, and have started some proper development, and we’re pretty happy about what we’ve got so far: the game design will soon be completed, and we’ve got a pretty comprehensive knowledge base in place, which provides us with a firm base on which to start creating the game’s lore. If you’ll recall, one of our goals in WWWest-Online is to create a mostly accurate rendition of the Old West; so for a while now, we’ve been digging up information about anything and everything Old West.

We’ve got the game interface in place. That’s not to say that it’s all prettied up with all the bells and whistles, singe we’ve done little to no graphic design for it. We do, however, know what will go where, and have started integrating the various systems into the main game screen. What systems, you ask? Well, we’ve got the chat system up and running, for one thing (chat, emotes, history, etc.).

Players (well, theoretical players) can create accounts and characters for themselves now. They can generate or choose a name for themselves and select an avatar based on their gender (the whole Avatar thing is really still in its diapers. In another post we’ll tell you about our plans for that). After logging in, players can see the main game screen, along with a chat panel and a functioning map window. In the spirit of accurate portrayal, we’re trying something different with the map system (different from any map system we’ve seen so far, at least). I won’t go into too much detail about the maps just now, as I will put up a post about it later on, when it’s more evolved; but for now I’ll just say that the map in WWWest-Online is a dynamic, changing thing, and I think you’ll like it when you see it.

With WWWest-Online, we’re trying to break from the “click ’till you drop” theme that is so prevalent in browser-based games, and make something a little different, and we think the framework that’s starting to take shape reflects that. We’ve got our next few milestones written down in detail, and we’re hard at work implementing the new content.

That’s it for now. Keep your ear to the ground for more updates soon.

Kraz