I'm not going to post any more game development or Big Villain news on my personal blog anymore. I've got a new one devoted only to that subject at http://www.madgameslab.com. Since I'm doing a little work on the game every day or every other day I'm already up to five or six entries on the blog. If you have any interest in my game or in PBBG development in general, go check it out!
The contest to create a complete PBBG in two months has concluded and unfortunately Big Villain is just not ready yet. It’s a shame it wasn’t ready in time, but after about a month I was already getting pretty doubtful. It’s just too big a game for me to complete by myself in that timeframe with all the other stuff I have to do in my life. Nevertheless I’ve had a ton of fun working on it and absolutely nothing is going to stop me from completing it. I was working on the design of the site just last night to try and get it to something that doesn’t make your eyes bleed when you look at it. Hopefully by next week I’ll have accomplished that.
Anyway, some people did finish their games in the allotted time. Here are the final entries (though I’m not sure you can get into all of them yet, I think some authors were only planning on letting in the judges at this point):
I’m planning to take a look at each one I can and see what others were able to accomplish since October 11th when the contest started. I’m alternately impressed and disappointed with what I myself was able to accomplish in the same period of time. I figure I’ve got at least another six weeks or so of part time work before I’ll be ready for a beta of my game.
The Browser-Based Game Zone is holding a game contest. If you build a PBBG between now and December 11th, 2008 you could win a lot of promotion on various sites around the web. Because I already have one designed that I really need to get serious about, I've decided to enter the game Big Villain (designed by myself and Darin Clark) into the contest.
If you follow my blog for any reason at all, you know that I started rewriting a series of tutorials on building a PBBG from PHP into Ruby on Rails. I've been posting those tutorials over at the BuildingBrowsergames.com website and hopefully they will be helpful to others. For me it has been helpful because it forced me to improve my Ruby on Rails skills and the fact that I'm nearly done (I did an outline of the last few entries it would take me to catch up with Luke the other day) gives me a boost because it reinforces the idea that I can start a project and finish it.
Part of what I'm fighting here is my own nature. I design something I think is going to be fun to build and interesting to use (or play in this case). Then, I procrastinate... a lot. After all, if I never built it, I can still imagine how great it is, but if I build it and people don't think it's fun or I can't get enough people to come to make it a success, that's failure. And failure is completely different from never having tried. Eventually I come up with some other super cool new idea and I can abandon the old one in the name of pursuing the "better idea".
So by saying, "I'm joining, I'm going to compete too," I'm hoping that it will serve as motivation for me to not only start this seriously but finish it as well. I've got a deadline that I've got to meet and I've said publicly that I'm going to meet it. OK, enough self revelation, what's the game?
You play as a mad scientist trying to take over the world. You gather parts for your world domination schemes, build lairs, hire minions and secret agents and launch operation after operation to build up your evil empire or defeat your opponents. None of this is ever taken very seriously though. When you first start out, your secret lair is your Mom's basement. You can install death traps in your lair like sharks with friggin' laser beams and you can secretly control quasi-legal companies like the RIAA and an inkjet ink manufacturer. The parts to world domination schemes are as varied as duct tape and a George Foreman Grill.
If I do it right, it'll be a fun game to play with a healthy dose of the ridiculous.
When I started reading the series of blog posts on the site Building Browsergames, I thought it was cool that somebody had started a project to build a persistent browser based game (PBBG) and shared the code. But it has gone a great deal further than that. Every post that features code is done first in PHP and then repeated again with Perl. Beyond that is the frequency of posts. Having worked on XPlus, DevGames.com, and finally GameDev.net I've heard about hundreds of game projects started by enthusiasts. I can tell you that the vast majority of them have grandiose ideas and then reality intrudes. After a while it gets hard or boring and they stop.
But not this time. Dozens of entries later, you can actually see a bunch of the pieces that make up a simple PBBG sitting there and there's lots of interesting design advice to go with it.
Now it's my chance to participate in the creation of this Rosetta Stone of programming, because that's what it is. The original Rosetta Stone was a tablet carved with bureaucratic proclamations about taxes and statues, it's value lay in the fact that it had the same text in both Greek and Egyptian languages and it gave us a key to begin decrypting hieroglyphics. Maybe this one isn't quite up to that level, but it gives us a place to start discussing PBBG design and it gives us that in both Perl and PHP. My contribution is a simple one. I've gone back and started rewriting all the same code again, this time in Ruby on Rails.
Perhaps someone else will add Python with Django versions of everything or Java and some mix of technologies. I don't know. But whatever happens, this might prove helpful to someone looking for a language to learn, looking to learn about PBBG building, looking to learn programming, or looking to move from one language to another. For me personally it was an attempt to both improve my own basic skills at Ruby and Rails as well as hopefully adding to something that might prove helpful to others.
The entries as they stand today:
| Designing Your Game's Database | |||
| The Registration Page | |||
| Why You Should Be Hashing Sensitive Data | |||
| Using Configuration Files | |||
| The Login Page | |||
| Cross Site Scripting: What It Is And How To Prevent It | |||
| A Flexible Stats System | |||
| Implementing A Flexible Stats System | |||
| Implementing An Email Confirmation System | rails |
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| Getting Started With A Templating System | |||
| Making Your Forms Auto-Focus | |||
| Making Your Forms Remember Their Values | |||
| A Brief Design Document | |||
| Putting It All Together | |||
| Adding Stats | |||
| Displaying A User's Stats | |||
| A Simple Combat System | |||
| Creating The Bank | |||
| Healing Your Players | |||
| Forcing Users To Log In | |||
| Designing A Flexible Items System | |||
| Retrieving Items | rails |
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| Reducing Repetition | rails |
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| DRYing Out Our Database Connections | N/A |
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| DRYing Out Our Stats | N/A |
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| Securing Our Hashes | N/A |
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| Simple Cron | |||
| Using The "On-View" Method Instead Of Cron | |||
| Buying Weapons | rails |
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| Swapping Weapons | rails |
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| Integrating Weapons Into Our Combat System | rails |
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| Buying Armor | rails |
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| Integrating Armor Into Our Combat System | rails |
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This woman's story about her spouse developing games for EA sounds like the worst case of employee abuse I've read of for the gaming industry but by no means is it far outside the norm.
If you are really thinking of game development as a career I think you need to rethink that idea. There is better money and reasonable hours available elsewhere doing software development.
This is a news bulletin for many people but not for anybody who has ever even peeked inside the industry. There's a new white paper over at the IGDA (IGDA - Quality of Life White Paper). You have to be a member to download the 90pg. complete report but the summarized highlights are no surprise. People within the game industry are grossly overworked and at least somewhat underpaid.
"Only 3.4% said that their coworkers averaged 10 or more years of experience." - Yeah, that would be because by that time they've figured out they can make more money for fewer hours doing development of something other than games.
"Crunch time is omnipresent, during which respondents work 65 to 80 hours a week (35.2%). The average crunch work week exceeds 80 hours (13%)." - One developer in Dallas was known to have put cots or couches in all the offices and have YMCA memberships around the corner so people could go shower.
When I created the X-Plus and DevGames.com websites (prior to participating in GameDev.net) it was to become a game developer. I imagined that it would teach me about how to develop games and make industry contacts to get a game job. Here's a news flash, never create a website to learn about anything. If you develop a big successful community you will learn a great deal about building successful web communities, not about your topic of choice. Everything I learned about people within the industry taught me the following things: