WWWest-Online Development Blog

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.

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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.

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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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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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