Mortal Online Beta

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

Skill advancement over time

There are a few ways that you can handle skill advancement in your game:

  • Increase over time
  • Increase through use (either success, failure or both)
  • Purchased with gold, experience or some other token
  • Increase with character level

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

Maiden Desmodus Beta Launch

It’s been almost a year, but we’re finally open for public beta testing. After several delays and despite still having a lot of stuff to do, neither Wade nor myself really wanted to wait any longer. I know it’s tempting to keep holding off until everything is just right, but the priority for both of us has always been to produce a game for people to play.

On the one… Continue reading

FMud version 0.9 released

FMud is a simple web based Flash mud client.

A running demo, feature list and installation instructions are available on the FMud project page.

Download it here.

Version 0.9

Released on 16th June 2009.

  • Client can again be resized by altering the height and width parameters in the embedding page
  • More improvements to ANSI colour handling, removed bold text
  • Removed embedded font due to Flash Player display

Iron Realms Flash Client - Triggers

Hot on the heels of my introductory screencast comes this one on making triggers with the IRE client. Hopefully I managed to explain the ‘this’ keyword without making it sound too baffling!

Next up will probably be a remake of my aliases tutorial with improved sound and maybe some better examples… Continue reading

Iron Realms Flash Client - Introduction

Now that IRE are using the Flash client as their default web based client for new players, I thought it was about time I got around to doing some more screencasts. I even splashed out on a new headset so hopefully the sound is a bit better quality this time.

This first video is just a brief introduction looking at the interface and preferences options… Continue reading

Gold Farmers

This is a regular sight on my World of Warcraft server.

Gold Farmers advertisement

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

MUDdy Hobo Interview

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

Overcoming automation in PvP combat

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

A modern text MMO?

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