I played a little Allods Online during the closed beta and was impressed with what I saw. It felt polished for a free to play game, and there was just the right balance of WoW clone and original features to give it a broad appeal. This week the cash shop opened, and boy are the Allods players not impressed.
While this poll question might as well have been… Continue reading
We recently launched Maiden Desmodus on Kongregate and part of converting the client for their site involved integrating their user authentication with our own account system. This was a fairly simple process, but I’ll outline the steps I took here in case it proves useful to anyone else.
When users connect to Maiden Desmodus for the first time, either using our web client or via telnet they are first… Continue reading
We’ve started on the design for the next game and as it’s going to use a completely custom client I’ve been looking around at more general socket servers for the backend. I had toyed with the idea of using our existing engine built on top of Nakedmud, but came to the conclusion that we need something more robust and scalable for this new game. So for the last couple of… Continue reading
Earth Eternal is a new browser based MMO from Sparkplay Media, a company formed by Matt Mihaly and Chris Kohnert of Iron Realms Entertainment. I’ve been keeping an eye on the development because of the MUD connection and recently got around to trying it out. This isn’t going to be a review of the game, instead I just want to talk about how I think the design… Continue reading
I’ve been following Mortal Online for a while now and was tempted to purchase the game to join the beta, but when I saw the price of 69 EUR I decided to wait and see for a while before diving in.
Looks like I made a wise decision as by all accounts the beta isn’t going well, infact it is barely going at all. I don’t know what the… Continue reading
There are a few ways that you can handle skill advancement in your game:
In the next couple of posts I am going to examine a few of these methods, starting with the skill advancement system used in Maiden Desmodus.
With Maiden Desmodus I chose a time based method of skill advancement where… Continue reading
This is a regular sight on my World of Warcraft server.
I know it’s not the greatest screenshot, but hopefully you can see that it’s a website address spelled out with corpses. As you might expect, the website is selling in game gold. I notice a lot less channel spam these days and I guess Blizzard must have managed to crack down on it so… Continue reading
I was recently interviewed by Wes Platt for his MUDdy Hobo blog. I got to ramble on about my projects and spout my views on MUDs and gaming without challenge or criticism, so it was a lot of fun!
One thing he touched on was the concept of multiple games behind a single portal and it has gotten me thinking about all sorts of things we can do with Maiden… Continue reading
PvP combat is something that is very dear to my heart and nothing quite beats the rush from testing myself against a human opponent. You just don’t get those extremes of emotion from the elation of victory to the utter despair of defeat when fighting against mobs. One problem you are going to face when designing a PvP combat system is how to control the impact of client side scripting… Continue reading
I know I said last time I was going to look at areas where graphical games could learn from text MUDs, but I don’t think that’s a very interesting topic. I think it’s far more useful for those of us working in text to look at what we can learn from the big budget modern graphical MMORPGs. Here are a couple of design themes from modern MMORPGs that I’d like… Continue reading
