Today we’d like to introduce another member of the WWWest-Online team, who goes by the name of Dikla. Dikla is a graphic designer and illustrator, and has been doing that for a living for several years now (though she’s been doing it for fun since forever. That’s right, before dinosaurs). 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 
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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?
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: