Game Development - The Project

By Cyrris

It’s no secret that things have been a little quiet around here lately. Very quiet, in fact. I can’t speak for the others who post here but for me at least, the lack of updates has not been without good reason. You see, recently things have started to move around here. Wheels have actually begun some kind of motion. Unfortunately this movement isn’t really related to Aelon itself, but rather another project (from here on simply referred to as The Project) which has finally broken free from the shackles of my own procrastination.

Rather than just spending my time writing on games and the technology that goes with them, I’ve decided to make one myself.

I should start by saying that this decision isn’t a new one. It was back in January 2002 when the idea first popped in to the head of a friend of mine. A few GameSpy Forumers (myself included) had been playing some browser-based strategy games, and after becoming disillusioned with the administration of a particular one we were playing, a small group of us set out to make our own. The sort of games I am talking about here are text-based - some good examples would be Planetarion and NukeZone. They are played by thousands of players, and are really all about being in a community and viewing a bunch of often-updated statistics. Despite this rather mundane description, I have always found them to be addictive and entertaining, though depending on how you play, they can suck up far too much of your time.

For a few months, we made some good conceptual progress, and the word from the project leader was that some prototype code had in fact been laid down. Things were looking promising. I had made an interface mock up (as that was my primary purpose on the team, followed by general game design and ideas). By June however, that same leader - a very popular poster on the forum I should add - disappeared without a trace. With only one other team member left with any substantial programming experience (and he was too short on free time), the project was essentially dead in the water.

Come October 2003, I was just about finished high school (what you’d call college in the US, I suppose). I felt I had enough free time and knew enough people with the appropriate skills to take another shot at creating a game. A review of the design document from the previous project ended with a decision to start afresh, perhaps with just one or two key ideas remaining. With a mostly clean slate, I conjured up a brief overview (2,800 words) and sent it out to those people who would be assisting me in The Project. We got off to a pretty solid start, with pages upon pages of intense discussion and brainstorming over how to make sure the game was interesting, fun, and fair. After high school, I started a degree at university and my free time largely went out the window. As such, The Project was often left alone for months at a time, usually seeing bursts of activity and design document revisions when I was on holidays.

It took 3 years and 3 major revisions, but finally at the end of 2006 I had a design document which I was happy with - 10,500 words plus countless other written resources about the units and other elements that made up the game. Add to this the extra experience I had from a moderator position in NukeZone (helping with both the community and new ideas for balancing the game with new units and such), managing my own website (this one), plus 3 years of learning computer science at university, and I was pretty much ready to sit down and start coding this thing myself. I am happy to say that as of today, substantial progress has been made on that front. However, given the sheer size of the project (and the fact that I am Project Leader, Interface Designer, and Lead Programmer), I don’t expect it to be in a playable form for a few months yet. It’s by far the most ambitious project I’ve undertaken, and learning how to code an entire site from the ground up in PHP and MySQL is not something I’ve done before. While I’ve found it rather easy so far, I dare say that my newbie status in PHP will mean a fair bit of re-coding will be done before this sees the light of day.

With that time line out of the way, I suppose I should sum up what I plan to do here. Essentially, this is the first installment (an introduction of sorts) to a series on game development, as seen from my perspective as The Project steams forward. I’d like to talk about how things were approached, what issues we ran in to, what solutions were found, and where it’s all currently at. I still have one more semester to go at uni, which may cause some time problems again, but now that I’m up to the coding part I am hoping to get into a routine of sorts to make sure it all gets done in a timely manner. I already have a few topics lined up for some of the future articles in this series, though I haven’t actually chosen which one of them to do first for Part 2. But whatever it ends up being, stay tuned.

Series Index

1. Game Development - The Project
2. Game Development - Playing Fair
3. Game Development - Communities
4. Game Development - The Gap
5. Game Development - Frustration