WWWest-Online Development Blog

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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As I’m pretty sure I’ve already mentioned, I’m no big expert on the Wild West. Heck, I ain’t even American. Like most folks my age I’ve seen my share of Western movies – some were actual Westerns, some were comedies set in a Western theme (think “The Man from the East”) and one was just a parody (“Blazing Saddles”, naturally). Read a Western-themed book or two, not much, really.

The thing is, with this game, we’re going for real information. We’re not looking to make it an educational game, per se, but we do want it to give accurate information about the Wild West. As accurate as we can while still making it fun, anyway, because let’s face it – like most periods in Humanity’s history, the Wild West had it’s low points, too.

Towards that end, we’ve now formally started studying the Wild West. Whether it’s important events, or just famous ones, or famous people, the language of the era, the technology in use (yes, trains and guns count ), or the politics in the background, we’re aimin’ to know it.

It’s not much of an update – but we figured we’d let you know what’s up, since we’ve been a bit on the quiet side lately…

Kraz

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 »

So remember when we started this blog, I wrote that there aren’t any Western-themed web based games out there? Well, it appears that Tenderfoot Games^TM have decided to prove me wrong. Well, not quite wrong – they’re not making a web-based game. But they are making a Western-themed MMO called Wild West Online^TM and Wild West Online: Gunfighter^TM. They’re not revealing much about Wild West Online yet, other than some concept art and an overview. About Gunfighter they have a little more information, such as the planned release date (this spring) and some graphics.

That’s it really, mosey on over there and take a gander, if you’re so inclined. Just thought you’d want to know.

Another thing about character advancement is what the character does when it hits the level cap. What I’m talking about here is ascension. Once again, a little info for the uninitiated: Some games have an “extra” feature beyond leveling, and that’s ascension. What it means is that once a character reaches a certain level it has the option to ascend. This doesn’t have to apply only to level-based games with level caps – the character doesn’t have to ascend – the player could keep playing it to hunt for loot (if there’s a cap) or keep leveling it (if there is no cap), but the option to ascend will be given. Ascension usually means that the character goes back to level 1, but with certain bonuses. It could be slightly higher stats, or faster xp gains, or retaining a certain skill. It could basically be anything.

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