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 »