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? Read the rest of this entry »

Yeah, I’ve been itching to say that since the first post on this blog.

Anyway boys and girls, today we’ll be talking about the thing that Westerns all through the ages are famous for. That’s right, it’s time to talk about combat. Be it a showdown, a bar brawl or a shootout between a Sheriff’s posse and an outlaw gang, I can’t recall a single Western that didn’t feature at least one fight. In addition to that, a major factor of practically every MMO I’ve ever played is combat. Even if it isn’t the main point of the game, it always plays some important part (with the exception of A Tale in the Desert). And somehow, we’ve managed to write two dozen posts without properly touching on the subject. Well, ladies and gents, allow me to correct that oversight.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in the day, when a company (or an individual) wanted to make a game, they’d usually choose a platform and make it. When a game console company (Nintendo, Sega, etc.) made a game (or payed for one to be made), it was for their systems. You didn’t see “Super Mario Brothers” on any system that didn’t have “Nintendo” written on it.

Nowadays, that isn’t the case. Many games are made by  third parties, and though politics and various deals can still result in a game being released for only a single platform, most games are released for at least two. Actually, since the PC is now as good a “console” as others (well, maybe not as good), even games released by Microsoft for their XBox, are released on another “platform” as well . Anyway, I digress.

Read the rest of this entry »

In an earlier post I started talking about the chat system in WWWest Online. As promised, a follow-up post.

When you chat, you’re sometimes chatting to a specific person, and sometimes just yapping away in a chat room. We’re going to have several built-in chat channels in the game for different uses. A general chat channel, a marketplace channel, maybe a newbie channel, things like that. We’ll also be including separate channels for party chat and guild chat, and perhaps we’ll allow player-made channels; we’ll have chat commands to allow the players to navigate between these channels. We’re obviously putting in a bunch of chat commands to manage player-to-player chat (e.g., tell, reply, retell), chat history (e.g., last messages sent and received), and other basic functions.

Read the rest of this entry »

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?

Read the rest of this entry »