PBM News Blurb - March 21st, 2011

[Gads]

Will good luck Hatch. I say go for it! It really doesn't matter what the reasons are for wanting to design, write and run a game in my opinion, though 'wanting to do it for yourself' surely has to be one of them. Without that it will fail.

So many people never get around to doing what they actually want to do, so its great to hear from people like yourself. I've been wanting to design a game for a long long time and am just so happy that I've finally taken the leap and got stuck in. We've got so much work to do, my biggest worry is thinking we've taken on too much!! :-)

Cheers,

Sean

I was interested in learning about your chosen technologies. I'm surprised you might not be catering for IE. Personally I am a Chrome user, but you'll be ruling out a fairly large user base. Whether we like it or not, IE has the majority of the market. The fact you are using JQuery should allow you to be far less concerned with browser compatibility. Not so?

I'm halfway joking about not using IE. I rarely use it myself and I'll probably make a half-hearted attempt to test with at least IE 9 and try to fix any incompatibility issues that come up, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it.

Keep in mind that I'm really only developing this game for myself. I could care less if it's a commercial success or not. If I cared about that I would be developing it for Facebook. Don't read this as some type of political statement against commercial games. My feelings about this are only for MY game, which is burning a hole in my soul right now for me to get it out of my head and onto the web server. I think about it constantly, and have trouble getting my brain to shut down about it at night to go to sleep.

Mapping? I'm doing it as a complete brute force hack. For system maps I set up two nested arrays to start at the top left corner and loop through square by square until it reaches the bottom right corner. At each square I check to see if there's something that needs to be displayed in that square and create a new image anchor, or else display an image anchor that shows a black square. The cool thing about star system maps based on squares is that you can easily build them with a grid of html img anchors.

Most of the game is just hacked together. I'm not a professional coder, so I'm pretty sure I'm doing some things badly and will probably have to do a lot of optimization at some point to handle more than a few dozen people playing at the same time. My CSS file is a spectacular mess right now. Heh. My functions PHP file is 2600+ lines of code and growing every day. I really need to split it up to be more manageable.

Honestly though, if I get 100 people playing this game at some point I'll be happy enough with it. Maybe it will have a lot more people, maybe less. I just need to get it finished right now and then I can take a deep breath and think about the future of it.

Hatch
http://projectlibertine.blogspot.com