WWWest-Online Development Blog

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.

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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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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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