WWWest-Online Development Blog

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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Most browser-based games are of a certain type. Hell, most every game is of a certain type. A game is either an adventure game or a shooter, a RTS game or an RPG. Sometimes you’ll have little mini-games of a different type than the game itself (Oddly enough, the only examples that popped into my head was the mini-games in “Beavis and Butthead in ‘Virtual Stupidity‘”, or the classic homage mini-games in Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude – I’d add a link, but the homepage is kinda adult…). Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great things about playing a multi-player online game is the fact that you’re playing with players from all over the world, so when thinking about a web-based game, it seems obvious that the game should support every language possible the only question is to what extent….
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Since the Old West wasn’t rife with dwarves and goblins, and you’d have to look real hard to find an elf or ogre (actually, you’d have to drink real hard, but you get the point), playable races in this game will have to be slightly different than what you’ll find in an average game. Now that I think about it, most “modern” games I’ve played had no such thing as race. Fantasy themed games always had some of the classic races, sometimes with another one or two thrown in the mix (Tauren, anyone?), and sometimes games with a more futuristic settings will have races of their own; EvE Online had the Minmatars, Gallente, Amaar and Caldari (I think..), and the Dune games had featured the “nations” of that universe (If you’re like me, you’re now hearing the intro to Dune II playing in your head… “…and the insidious Ordos” – and yes, I know the Ordos aren’t canon material, but that’s what stuck in my head ). Read the rest of this entry »

Another question that needs addressing is time. In practically any game (or anything in life, for that matter), time is the most valuable resource. In real life, time “allotment” is not a problem – it just goes by. In any real-time game (RTS/FPS games, or MMORPG’s like WoW and such) it’s just as simple. In browser-based games, however, it’s a bit different. Or at least it can be. Due to their different character, browser-based games don’t actually have to be real-time, so this is another decision that needs to be made.So how do we do this? There are three popular ways of going about it, so let’s discuss each in turn:

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