More online games are appearing in the market, a few very good (Warrior Epic comes to mind) and some total rubbish.  However the marketplace has become more crowded as a result.  Now one thing that seems to be becoming more apparent is player’s requirements.  Players like casual groups/parties, where they can conquer some objective and culmulativly gain a reward/xp.  Players generally dislike repeating the same activity over and over again, even if it has a tangible outcome.  Players like being able to group with friends (be they in or out of the game).  Players like the freedom of being able to solo parts of the game.  15 ~ 20 minutes is an ideal length for a section after which point most people seem to be happy to have a break, those who want to carry on will just head straight into a new section.  Players do want a way of investing money into their game experience.  Buying novelty items is largely pointless, but equally players don’t want to see somebody who is flush spending vast amounts of cash on the game and gaining an unfair advantage.

I’ve had a bit of a rethink about maps and similar as well and am going to tweak W2 into more of a dungeon based game.  Travel will still be dangerous, but not require the player to navigate miles before they reach their destination.  During travel time events may occur.  An inn will be available in every village, town and city where you can recruit other group members or be yourself recruited.  Each group will exist within its own ‘instance’ so there is no chance of other parties stealing kills.  Dungeons will be randomly generated in the same way as the old Warhammer Quest game and will have a mixture of forested, jungle and interior ‘board tiles’.

I need to spend some time considering how characters will level up as well.  Warhammer Quest (WQ) and in fact Warrior Epic (WE) both have a gold = xp type system.  Everytime you kill something in WE you get gold and at the end of a dungeon that gets turned into XP.  In WQ you get gold as a reward for killing things and then spend it on training – plus other provisions.  I’m currently verging more towards a WQ-esq concept.  Monsters will reward gold coins, and you will be able to purchase silver coins.  Gold coins must be used training.  Silver and gold coins can be used to purchase provisions, such as healing potions, rope, bandages etc.  All monster drops will be split equally amongst the party, unless the player is ‘idle’.  I’m toying with the idea of having the skill system linked to a more traditional XP method, but specific to what you do.  So if a character hits something with a slashing weapon, they will gain XP in slashing weapons and can purchase a skill from that pool – providing they have enough skill slots (1 per trained character level).

The biggest benefit from going this route is that there is suddenly a definate path to follow.  Basic city/town > Simple Travel > Dungeon Creation > Combat.  Suddenly W2 looks less horrific!

I have however managed to find time to experiment with various map generation methods.  One possibility that I derived was using a canvas element.  This would work innately in FireFox and Google Chrome, but would need a hack for IE.  There is also a memory leak where a page refresh doesn’t clear the memory used by the canvas, so I’ve largely put that to one side as not being viable.  However I have generated a file progressive-downloader routine that would allow me to ‘prepare’ the images into an object and display a nice ‘loading’ progress bar.

I have spent a significant amount of time developing a core website framework.  This framework has been designed in a very generic manner and can be used for pretty much any web application going and provides a number of very useful functions and classes that can be used throughout the site.  One major element of this framework is that it provides a very expandable backend admin tool.  For those of you who don’t know, writing the backend system of a website often takes more time than the visual frontend…  Creating a framework in this manner also means that should I create some highly useful function or method of doing something, that item then becomes available on every website that is built using the framework.  So far this framework has been used as the foundation for 9 websites and counting…  The other really good thing is that it allows me to use well tested and proven pages and controls throughout websites.  For example, the Contact Us page that is the default in the framework comes with CAPTCHA validation, form validation and composes an email in html with all the frilly bits.  It’s been vigourously tested, has hours of code behind it and is proven to work – however I never need spend any time putting a contact page on a website ever again, beyond simple styling.  Another prime example of this is a payments module that I’m currently implementing.  This will provide a single method of taking payment from a customer for an item (or items).  More critically it will provide one coding interface, regardless of the payment provider.  Currently I’m coding it for ProtX as that’s what one customer has, but I’m going to open it up for PayPal, HSBC and others as and when I need them.

I’ve started to get back into the coding of the website again, which is a good thing.  I’ve made the decision that the game will be JavaScript / MooTools driven and that the only pages that will function outside of this will be the standard ones along the top of the screen (about, support, rankings, forums & home).  Although this may infuriate some people, I feel that I can develop a far cleaner and enjoyable game, rather than adding the extra bits on afterwards.  As such I’m developing a core UI driver that handles the visual aspects of the site.  All pages now load via AJAX and there is a nice looking page transition fade in/out and resize.  I’m working on the menus that pop in and out of the page now and putting my mind towards the map side of the game.

I’ve also made another decsion (going to have to have a rest soon).  Originally I was going to have it so that players had to click a button and their creature would wander off in a direction for a period of time, during which they may see Beasts to attack or other things to interact with.  Now having messed around with a few other games, I think that I need to allow the player to actually navigate their creature around instead.  What this does is shift the emphasis from a semi-automatic system to a much more player-driven system.  This also means that the map/navigation system needs to be created first and that I need to work out some clever ways of storing the data of a world.  One cool thing that this does mean is that I can code some clever bits such as difficult terrain.

I have also begun coding a chat element for the site.  I think that one key element that the original Wulfen game lacked was any kind of in-game player interaction, so W2 will have a chat panel off to one side of the game area.  I aim to have various channels within this (the usual world/town/trade chat’s), which hopefully should add quite a bit more depth to the game.

Fingers crossed the UI gets done shortly as I’m itching to start coding something!

I’ve been working on another project recently, so have deliberatly put W2 on the back burner until thats finished.  I expect that I’ll have all of the artwork done by the end of June and should have pretty much tied the other project up by then.

Its looking good!

Ursa are now just waiting colouring – again looks ace.  They’ve come out like rather dangerous teddies – with claws and armour of course

If I’ve not heard anything by the end of the week on the UI graphics, then I’ll check with the artist who’s doing that.

Once I have the website graphics I can actually crack into starting the site and putting together ideas/elements – its getting quite exciting!

I have now commissioned the 4 character pieces and a set of elements for the UI of the site.  They’ve cost me more than I was originally going to spend, but its going to be a worthwhile investment overall as these pieces will make or break the game.  Although its very shallow, the majority of people will rate any game on its looks first and gameplay second, so by putting their creation in the hands of somebody who is a professional makes the most logical sense.

I should have all of the characters by the end of April, and hopefully the same sort of timescale for the UI bits (or sooner).  What that means is that by the middle of the year, I’ll have at least something working – though far from finished.

Its all coming together!  I should then be able to get coding – woohoo!