PBM News Blurb - March 21st, 2011

[GrimFinger]

Gad Games
Sean Cleworth over at Gad Games has begun posting to his company's blog, again, firing off a couple of interesting blog postings over the last week or so. Metadata, Map Making, & a Logo features Sean expounding upon some of Ilkorark Rising's world features and new logo motif. Turn-based or Real-time? delves into some of the Gad Games' mastermind's thoughts on how to Ilkor: Dark Rising should approach the issue of text-based browser games.

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Adventures By Mail
Dropping by the Adventures By Mail website, I came across an announcement, of sorts, pertaining to something called Project Libertine, an upcoming 4x Space Exploration Browser being created in the tradition of the Play by Mail games that so many have loved over the years. With numerous blog postings dating back to mid-2010 that chronicle the progress of the game's development, it's evident on the blog's face that this project is making progress towards fruition, and is not a dead project, at all. The first posting in the Project Libertine blog is a good place to start, if you want to catch up on the project from its beginning, last year.

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Spellbinder Games
A recent excursion over to the Spellbinder Games website led me to fire off an e-mail to that company, to see if they are still actively running play by mail games such as A Bledian Diary, Horses For Courses, LT Wars, Kickabout, and Galactic Empire. As of press time, no response has been received from Chris at Spellbinder Games to the e-mail that I sent to him. In fairness, though, I only sent the e-mail, yesterday, so a response may yet be forthcoming.

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Orbo's CTF 2187 Website
My explorations across the vast expanse of the Internet have led me to Orbo's CTF 2187 fan site, a place which features both Frames and Frames-free choices for navigating through the information featured on his site. CTF 2187 was a closed-ended commercial PBM game formerly produced and run by Advanced Gaming Enterprises. If you visit Orbo's site, be sure to drop by his CTF 2187 Players Gallery and his Command Post archives.

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Stupidly Named Internet Football League
Dave, the manager of team New Wave Punks, is looking for managers for other teams to play in the SNIFL, a free to play PBEM based football (soccer) game. The game used ESMS/ESMS+ software originally created by Eli Bendersky and later modified by Darren McKee. Attempts to check out the International Rosters page on that site yielded PHP errors. To apply to be a SNIFL manager, click here.

[Hatch]

GrimFinger,

Thanks for the mention in the news blurb today. My name is Hatch and I'm the developer of Project Libertine. I'm not really looking for a lot of publicity since I'm still very early in game development, but it's good to know that someone is reading what I write on occasion.

I put a link to your site on the Adventuresbymail.com page in appreciation of your mention and I hope people that go to that site looking for a PBM game can find what they're looking for here.

Thanks,

Hatch

[GrimFinger]

Hey, welcome aboard the site, Hatch!

I appreciate the link. Your blog is actually one of the better PBM-related blogs that I have encountered, to date. It actually has something posted in it, some good blog entries, in fact.

How did you learn about this site, if I can ask?

[Ramblurr]

Hatch,

I just read through your wiki, and wow, I swear I laid out the exact same plans for a similar game in my notebooks. Libertine sounds precisely like the sort of game I've been missing looking for. You should make a post about it in the PBM games forum to start up some discussion.

[Hatch]

Thanks Ramblurr. I'm trying to make the kind of game that will appeal to the old grognards like us who played back in the 70's and/or 80's and also try to bring some new folks on board as well. I know my 5 year old son thinks the game is cool, so that's one critic I'm satisfying.

I've shown some of the game to a few younger college age guys I know and they seem to think it's cool concept as well. I'm trying to get to the point that I can have an early alpha type test later this year, where I let people create accounts and run around in ships in a few star systems for a few weeks. I'll keep it all updated on my blog and drop a note here as well.

Hatch
http://projectlibertine.blogspot.com

Hatch,

I just read through your wiki, and wow, I swear I laid out the exact same plans for a similar game in my notebooks. Libertine sounds precisely like the sort of game I've been missing looking for. You should make a post about it in the PBM games forum to start up some discussion.

[ixnay]

Hatch, I just read your blog, and am also quite interested in this game!

Let me know if at some point you might allow folks like me to playtest!

I started a thread here awhile back about developing a PBweb game in the grand space empire tradition of yore. I still plan to do it, but real life has been keeping me a little too busy. But perhaps I should take inspiration from your ethic of "forcing yourself to write at least a few lines of code each day", even if only to fix a small bug or re-align screen elements.

I have read other threads from those who want to create games but don't know how to program, including some who are building "computer-assisted" games with the power of macros. I guess I need to use my powers for good and build a game already, like you are doing. Bravo, and keep posting to your blog!

[Hatch]

Thanks for the kind words, Ixnay. I'm still using the philosophy of doing at least a few lines of code each day. This past Sunday night I was feeling bad from allergies and having a busy day and I sat down in front of the computer and opened up my ToDo list for the game and just sat there and stared at it for a bit. I literally almost fell asleep sitting there. Heh. Finally I just opened up a page at random and started working on the Scoop Gas Giant action. A few hours later I was almost done with it.

There are times I literally only do a few lines of code, but usually once I start coding (breaking) stuff, I get more done than I thought I would.

If you want to learn some good coding skills, I recommend the Head First books. Start with the one on HTML and then go from there. I've been coding for almost 30 years, but I still picked up these books and refer to them often because they have good code examples and show good ways of doing things instead of just code snippets.

Hatch
http://projectlibertine.blogspot.com

[Ramblurr]

What language/framework are you using on the back end? I see you're using SQL for storage and JQuery as a frontend JS lib.

[dthacker]

Thanks for getting Darren McKee's name in the ESMS listing. He deserves credit for the ESMS+ branch of ESMS.

Dave

[Hatch]

What language/framework are you using on the back end? I see you're using SQL for storage and JQuery as a frontend JS lib.

PHP, Javascript with JQuery, and MySQL. No framework. I'm writing everything from scratch other than a few things involving JQuery, although I did use an free login/registration script, which I may end up replacing in the end.

I use Notepad++ with the FTP plugin as my IDE. I'm using Chrome and FF as my browsers. I really dislike IE and may end up putting code in the game to tell people who get to the main page with IE to GTFO.

Hatch
http://projectlibertine.blogspot.com