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I had a problem with something in Puzzle Pirates. Not only did I get a real response from a real human being, but they actually went back through logs, have been asking probing questions, and look like they're going to fix my character (to my description) even though nobody really knows what went wrong.

I nearly left when I found that all of my stuff had been blasted by a bug, but their great service and willingness to work with / believe me has made them a customer for life (or at least a very long time).

They have been much better than Blizzard's legendary "We're destroying a year of your work so suck it up" form letters. Props to the guys at Three Rings: You rock.

On Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates's doubloon servers, there's no subscription fee; instead, you pay with a special currency called doubloons as a delivery charge on various items (which usually need to be replaced every 30-60 days) and for badges that let you participate in different parts of the game (which also need to be replaced every month). A labor badge lets you work in shops, a captain's badge lets you start your own crew, etc.

The only way doubloons enter the economy is when they're purchased with cash for around 25 cents each. They disappear once they're spent on items or badges. However, you can trade them for the other currency, pieces of eight, which flows freely from NPCs - most transactions are done in POE, including wagers and the non-delivery-charge cost of items. But unlike in Second Life, you can't [officially] change doubloons back into dollars.

The result is that players with a lot of time but little money can just play the hell out of the game and earn enough POE to trade for doubloons, and players with a lot of money but little time can buy doubloons and trade them for POE as needed. (I spent around $50 to get enough capital to start up a couple shops, and now they're successful enough that I may never need to pay cash for doubloons again.) Players with neither can still play the game for free, but some parts of it will be closed off to them. The system seems to work really well.

http://www.puzzlepirates.com/

The way they handle this is a micropayment system, in the form of doubloons. On a doubloon server, you buy doubloons for ~25 cents each from Three Rings (the developers). These are used to pay for the parts of the game you use - such as access to higher ranks and items - in addition to the in game currency of Pieces of Eight. The doubloons are sunk out of the economy completely, whereas the Pieces of Eight go to the merchant who you buy things from (who is also a player).

The key is that they have a player-driven exchange, where you can offer to buy and sell doubloons (the micro payment currency) for Pieces of Eight (the virtual currency). The price point fluctuates with demand, but it effectively allows those who want virtual cash to buy it - but only in the form of paying for other players' subscriptions.

So if you are an adult with a full time job and a credit card, you can pay other people to make cash for you by paying for their playing time directly. Conversly, if you're cash strapped, you can play for free by putting in the extra time to earn in-game cash and sell it for doubloons.

This system doesn't apply to the Subscription servers, which are a traditional fixed price model. But the Doubloon model has helped them really take off in terms of revenue.

But as a working professional, I don't have the same time to devote to the game that high-school and college students do.

Exactly. That's where I completely agree.

The problem is that it's not your fault. It's a game-design fault. Why does the game require ridiculous amounts of game time?

It seems like of the games listed, the majority are straight clones of existing games, and three are heavily genre pieces.

Indie games have to be bastions of originality! We need you guys to incubate the weird and wonderful ideas, like Facade, Dada, stagnation in blue, and most everything this guy does. Heck, subspace is still an original indie game, even though it spawned a ton of clones and fell into obscurity. Puzzle Pirates was a risky original take, and it rakes in the dough.

'come on, guys! If you think it is hard now, try creating original ideas and gameplay with a 100 toothbrush salesmen and bankers breathing down your neck. This is your time to shine. This is your proving grounds. Sure, Ambrosia has seen success through polish over originality, but where is the soul in that?*

*Note: I actually really like Ambrosia. I still think Chiral is one of the best puzzle games ever made.

The quests are pretty much the exact some gameplay wrapped up with different names and faces past level 12.

For those people who haven't played it, WoW's quest system is exactly this simple. Your quest is to acquire X number of item Y, and take it to person Z, thus unlocking the next quest. That is it. That is what all of the quests are. Sometimes the person gives you an item right away and tells you to take it halfway around the globe. Sometimes you have to go halfway around the globe to kill a bad guy for an item, which you then take the rest of the way back. Sometimes you have to hang out and kill 50 guys until the 1 in 10 drop rate nets you 5 items, which take you back to the guy who asked for them. But they are all terribly formulaic, and get exceedingly dull.

The quest system is by far the weakest part of WoW.

Seriously, I could sit and play DS or GBA for hours while "playing" WoW.

I actually play Puzzle Pirates while playing World of Warcraft. Browsing Slashdot is also a favorite.

"3. Travel should be easy"

yea, and you should get your mounts at level 30.

You should get your mounts at level 20 or 10. Seriously, why is walking from point A to point B along an empty road for half an hour ever considered viable for inclusion in a game? It's like you're trapped in EA's "The Fairy Tale Adventure" where walking between towns took realistic amounts of time and had realistic encounter densities. (i.e. one every hour)

And if we can't skip the crap, at least let our characters auto-follow the road. It's really annoying while you're trying to read or play another game when you have to keep popping back into WoW to get your character unstuck from a tree while auto-walking.

5. Every class should have lots of things to do.

Unfortunately, I don't think this is true in WoW. When soloing, you have basically one or occasionally two winning strategies. When partying, your role is clear and defined from the first screen of your character creation. Sure, you can choose to heal with heal or you can choose to heal with flash heal, but overall you're pretty pigeonholed.

If you want to change your role, you need to build up an alt from scratch... a generally tedious process that people do again and again.

9. Err on the side of being over-the-top

Part of WoWs style is that everything is larger than life slightly (or more than slightly) cartoony, in a good way. In tabletop gaming, just as you shouldnt hoard your best ideas, you shouldnt be afraid to be over-the-top.

Hmm... I was just feeling the opposite of this. Sure, artistically WoW is a little over the top. But the quests I've done this session included curing a sick girl who went right back to sleep, killing some people because they were stomping on the grass, keeping some courier from getting robbed by highway bandits, and fighting crocodiles for handbags. None of these were particularly "over the top." None even left any impression on the world at all. They barely registered an impression on me.

World of Warcraft has been successful for many reasons, not the least of which is that it took a terribly, terribly slow genre and made it just mostly slow. But we still have quite a ways to go. WoW is still a grind, albeit a slightly less painful than normal one. It still takes hours and hours and hours of play to tick your level up one notch. It still rewards conservative, riskless play rather than running into the enemy's nest with guns blazing. And that quest system... could use a thorough overhaul.

(reply to grandparent)

Compatibility with more games. Other than WoW, what popular MMORPG runs on Mac OS X?

Puzzle Pirates, Everquest, Second Life, Lineage, probably others. Puzzle Pirates and WOW are enough for me.

Other kinds of games are sorely lacking, but MMORPG's are basically covered.

Compatibility with more vertical-market apps such as the one used by your employer.

You shot who in the what now? A: any custom applications that a business requires its employees to use should be on a remote browser anyway B: your employer does not get to decide what OS you use for your home computer, unless they buy it for you C: most of that stuff is super-light and trivial to run under emulation. If not A, B, if not B, C.

Compatibility with more peripherals sold at retail stores.

Very true, and quite annoying. However, you'd be surprised how much runs under OSX without additional software. Things like all mice, keyboards, most cameras, all hard drives, etc. Scanners and wireless network components will bite you if you aren't looking, but it isn't too hard to look. There is usually quite a bit out there which is compatible anyway.

This used to be much worse, but with my recent foray back into OSX I've found everything I've needed without many problems. The switch to BSD has been kind to Apple hardware.

Compatibility with web sites that are made exclusively for Microsoft Internet Explorer technology and for which there are no close substitutes.

You're kidding, right? I haven't come across a site like this in years. Even my stock broker's site is cross-browser, cross-platform. The last I.E. only site I came across was an internal bug database that was getting junked for a myriad of reasons. Nobody following good coding practices anymore requires I.E. on Windows. The reasons range from general buggyness, to security problems with Active X, to needing to run from Win2k backend servers. And that there are a lot of technologies out there which are faster to work with, cheaper to develop and implement, and all of which happen to be cross-browser.

Several games.

Jake2 (Quake 2 clone) as the AC already posted.
Puzzle Pirates
Tribal Trouble (good!)

check out javagaming.org for tons of discussions about the subject.

and tools? how about:

LWJGL: http://www.lwjgl.org/
JMonkeyEngine: http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/
Xith3D: http://xith.org/

And there are probably tons of other games and tools I'm forgetting.

And regardless what the trolls will say, it is perfectly possible to create a 2006-level game in java.

One of my housemates is doing graduate work in education. We've spent a while theorizing how to use a MMORPG with a working player driven economy (like Puzzle Pirates / http://www.puzzlepirates.com/ ) as a teaching aid. We are pretty certain that with the right sort of guidance, a MMORPG could be the ultimate teaching tool for group interactions (like economics). We came to this conclusion after he saw me giving officer training to a new officer in which I was sitting and explaining economic theory so that the new officer could be more successful in trading.

Having taken a couple college classes dealing with marketing and economics, I can tell you the simulations don't compare to actually playing against real people. The simulations are good, but people are better. And the MMORPG give a large base of willing people to learn from.

I know it's not the same, but it's the only MMOG I can stand to play. Finally, a virtual world for the terminally brilliant.

It's like those dumb puzzle games on Yahoo, but every puzzle works towards a piratey goal, like drinking someone under the table, or running a smoothly operating pirate ship, or defeating an army of other pirates. The games are fun and short, and you can get interesting things done in less than half an hour.

Best of all, if you don't have much of a stake in getting ahead in the game or having the best pirate clothes, you can play for free on micropayment (Doubloon) servers. I've whiled away many hours at no cost to myself. The monthly, if you want it, is $10 or less.

Check it out for a refreshing break from ready-to-slash stance.

http://www.puzzlepirates.com/

With Verizon's 1xRTT network, you can get up to 144 kbps (in practice, more like 80-100 kbps) even without a data plan. In most of the country, this is still the best you can get; EVDO is only available in the biggest markets.

Most if not all America's Choice plans include "NationalAccess MOU", which lets you use 1xRTT data connections at the same rates as voice calls--i.e., free at night and on weekends. Officially, you're not supposed to use it for anything but Mobile Web and Get It Now, which are features built into the phone, but they never seem to enforce that rule. The latency on 1xRTT sucks, but it's fast enough for checking your email, trolling Slashdot, or even playing slow-paced games like Puzzle Pirates.

BTW, to use it, set your PPP software to dial #777 with the username "(your 10 digit phone number)@vzw3g.com" and the password "vzw".

http://www.puzzlepirates.com/

All puzzle-based. Great economy/social atmosphere (on the paid Oceans). $10 per Month. Great for short term or long term game time. I'm Radiskull on the Midnight Ocean if you care to nerd.

Take a look at http://www.puzzlepirates.com/, it's not exactly what you ask for, but I like how it's all about puzzles and player skill, and not so much about investing huge amounts of time.

i think these people might agree with you..

All these games are (WoW, DaOC, STG, ect..) are big statistical simulations where the players do nothing but tweak numbers (player stats).

Agreed, the levelling up is usually just as exciting as filling in numbers in a spreadsheet, but there are some MMORPGs that try to do something new. You are even stuck on thinking that it has to be about combat and killing stuff. These people try to do something even more innovative, which might be why they haven't become as popular:

Puzzle Pirates, the first mmoarrrrrpg. You simulate combat by solving puzzles. Different players that crew the ship perform different puzzles, the better they do the more tokens the captain gets (movement, cannon shots, ship health..) to use when the sea battle commences.

A Tale in the Desert, a game that has NO combat. You "win" over other players by performing artworks, building pyramids, getting people to vote for you or performing cermonies and rituals, like for instance
"Have 20 charactars stand still and quietly observe the sunrise. If one speaks or moves away the ritual is destroyed."
or "Bury a large bag of money in the desert. Tell 10 other players where it is. If the bag remains for a week undisturbed you have passed the test of friendship. The other players get nothing for participating in the test. Unless they cheat, in which case they get the money."

You can get laws voted through that changes the whole game, and so on.

Both games are characterised by having more mature and social players than the hack and slash games, and a much larger percentage of female players.

I haven't played them myself though more than the demos. I stay away from most games and especially online games after shaking off a one year Everquest addiction 5 years ago.

Try them! Both have demos available, ATITD have a Linux client, PP both Linux and Mac (runs on all platforms that have Java actually).

Have you tried looking into http://www.puzzlepirates.com/? Of all the mmorpgs i've played so far, it has been the only one lacking that deadly boring grind. There are no levels and so no artifical level barriers; new players can party with old players without problems.

Although it is not a space setting, the game also features a trade-driven, player-run economy.

It doesn't cost anything to give it a spin, the client is a free download and there is a free trial account. Even better, it runs natively on linux and mac, as well as windows.
If you do drop by the Midnight Ocean, feel free to give me a shout.

~Trinsic, Fleet Officer of the Pink Panthers

In Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, there is no third-party gold farming market, because anyone who wants to spend their way to in-game wealth can do it by directly paying the company that runs the game.

The game has two currencies: "pieces of eight" (POE) and "doubloons". POE spring freely into existence from NPC battles, admin-sponsored tournaments, etc. just like your typical MMORPG coins. Most prices, prizes, wagers, and wages are set in POE. Doubloons, however, only enter the economy when they're purchased by players spending real dollars. Both currencies exit the economy regularly - POE through taxes, losing battles to NPCs, buying goods from NPC merchants, etc.; doubloons through a "delivery charge" on various items and "badges" that must be purchased with doubloons to unlock game functionality for a month at a time.

Doubloons and POE are traded on an open market, so players who don't have real money to spend can simply earn a lot of POE and trade it for doubloons when they need to buy an expensive item or a badge. Players who'd rather spend money than play for several hours a day can buy doubloons and trade them for POE.

Since items and badges are constantly wearing out and must be replaced using doubloons, there's always demand for doubloons, and since every doubloon in the game has to be purchased with real money, there's always cash coming in to keep the company in business. And since doubloons are traded for POE on an open market, spending your way to in-game wealth doesn't upset the economy: as more doubloons become available, their value in POE drops.

(Note: Only half of the Puzzle Pirates servers use doubloons. The others charge a monthly subscription fee and the above discussion doesn't apply to them.)

Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates attracts gamers of all ages without resorting to those tactics.

Play time is unlimited, however, the doubloon system allows players to essentially trade money for time. There are two currencies: pieces of eight, which flow freely from NPCs and admin-sponsored tournaments, and doubloons, which only enter the economy when they're purchased with real dollars. The prices for most items are set in both POE and doubloons, the doubloons disappear from the economy as soon as they're spent, and POE can be traded for doubloons on an open market. So if you want to buy that fancy sword, you can either play for a couple weeks to save up POE and trade some of them for doubloons, or spend a couple bucks for a handful of doubloons and trade some of them for POE. The players with money but no time subsidize the ones with time but no money.

Neither POE nor doubloons are finite, but they exit the system regularly, and inflation hasn't been a problem. The economy stays balanced by changing tax rates, changing spawn rates for raw commodities, and providing plenty of opportunities for money to be lost/spent and leave the economy.

Paying to play is entirely optional, at least on doubloon servers (there are also servers where monthly subscriptions replace doubloons). If you don't have the time or money to get doubloons, many parts of the game are closed off to you, but you can still have fun.

Linux is supported, and mentioned on the box, because the game's written in Java. (You can even run it on a Mac and play a special bonus game, "watch the colorful spinning beachball", that isn't available on either Linux or Windows!)

Of course, another big factor that attracts older players is the gameplay itself. You don't need the quick reflexes or hand-eye coordination of someone who grew up playing Nintendo, because everything is a puzzle game, from sailing to swordfighting. If you can play Bejeweled, you can help run a ship.

Puzzle Pirates. Proof that Java isn't dead.

A bit off-topic, but you can find many women on the internet today, and a lot of them are into gaming. The thing is, a lot of games are simply not designed to appeal to the majority of women, having testosterone-fueled themes like tons of violence and not a lot of social contact. Go into an online game like Puzzle Pirates, where team (crew)-based pillaging and working together is the way to make POE (money), and socio-political contact is the only way to truly advance within one's crew, and you'll see an almost even split of the sexes. It also helps that it's a puzzle game mostly, and has methods of play for both the casual gamer and someone looking for an exciting hours-long affair.

I met my girlfriend in that game, and many, many other people have done the same (I swear, last spring the game could have been renamed to Yohoho! Dating Pirates). It's all in where the game is targetted, and most games, sadly, are still targetted almost exclusively at males.

I didn't compare it to puzzle pirates, that was another poster... but anyhow. Puzzle Pirates doesn't have leveling either. There is no treadmill in Puzzle Pirates unless you count earning money (via pillaging or economy). You are rated in your skills against other players by how well you perform those skills.

Other than that they only resemble each other to the same degree that all MMOs do.

Well only if you mean to say "they only resemble each other to the same degree that all mmogs set in the Carribean golden age of piracy do" which currently is one game: Puzzle Pirates. With another now in beta: PotBS. Other mmogs don't feature sea-battling or pillaging or naval blockading at all.

I guess the similarity would only be obvious if you had actually spent any honest time playing Puzzle Pirates (i.e., participating in the navy, economy, politics, war, blockading islands, sea-battle with broadsides and sailing and gunning and repairing and bilging and grappling and melee, crafting, shipping, foraging, commanding a crew and vessel, building and owning a ship or ships, learning charts, customizing the appearance and dress of your pirate, injuries at sea for patches and pegs and hooks earned not chosen, furnishing your home(s) with player crafted goods, etc). You don't level though. You are bestowed a rank by other players and by the navy.

PotBS really does sound (from developer descriptions), as the other poster put it, like Y!PP but in 3D. Everything in their feature list is already in Y!PP except the DirectX requirement (Y!PP is multi-platform). When the beta is more open I'm sure plenty of posting will come out by players with extensive experience in both games.

I'll tell you what -- I've been playing Y!PP for like 2 years. Ask me about any feature that PotBS has and I'll explain how it works in Puzzle Pirates. That way we can determine what's revolutionary about PotBS.

I'll start off with one from the screenshots -- it seems that PotBS has day and night. In Puzzle Pirates it is always daylight on the high seas and it only night at an island when the undead walk. Night time lasts on the island until all of the skellies are defeated. The Developers of Puzzle Pirates axed day and night back in 2002 here and here from the feature list (it even sounds like if Puzzle Pirates was rendered in 3D and not pre-drawn sprites it would have day/night...). Pirates never sleep. :-D I'll expect that PotBS has accelerated time like in say, Zelda or GTA making the feature anything but revolutionary. Real-time day and night has already been featured in Animal Crossing (though that's probably not the first example).

We've been watching for the revolution for over a year now. The PotBS devs must have been reading the YPP forums, because nowadays they are touting their 'no level treadmill' just like puzzling pirates were saying a year and a half ago.

I didn't compare it to puzzle pirates, that was another poster... but anyhow. Puzzle Pirates doesn't have leveling either. There is no treadmill in Puzzle Pirates unless you count earning money (via pillaging or economy). You are rated in your skills against other players by how well you perform those skills.

Other than that they only resemble each other to the same degree that all MMOs do.

Well only if you mean to say "they only resemble each other to the same degree that all mmogs set in the Carribean golden age of piracy do" which currently is one game: Puzzle Pirates. With another now in beta: PotBS. Other mmogs don't feature sea-battling or pillaging or naval blockading at all.

I guess the similarity would only be obvious if you had actually spent any honest time playing Puzzle Pirates (i.e., participating in the navy, economy, politics, war, blockading islands, sea-battle with broadsides and sailing and gunning and repairing and bilging and grappling and melee, crafting, shipping, foraging, commanding a crew and vessel, building and owning a ship or ships, learning charts, customizing the appearance and dress of your pirate, injuries at sea for patches and pegs and hooks earned not chosen, furnishing your home(s) with player crafted goods, etc). You don't level though. You are bestowed a rank by other players and by the navy.

PotBS really does sound (from developer descriptions), as the other poster put it, like Y!PP but in 3D. Everything in their feature list is already in Y!PP except the DirectX requirement (Y!PP is multi-platform). When the beta is more open I'm sure plenty of posting will come out by players with extensive experience in both games.

I'll tell you what -- I've been playing Y!PP for like 2 years. Ask me about any feature that PotBS has and I'll explain how it works in Puzzle Pirates. That way we can determine what's revolutionary about PotBS.

I'll start off with one from the screenshots -- it seems that PotBS has day and night. In Puzzle Pirates it is always daylight on the high seas and it only night at an island when the undead walk. Night time lasts on the island until all of the skellies are defeated. The Developers of Puzzle Pirates axed day and night back in 2002 here and here from the feature list (it even sounds like if Puzzle Pirates was rendered in 3D and not pre-drawn sprites it would have day/night...). Pirates never sleep. :-D I'll expect that PotBS has accelerated time like in say, Zelda or GTA making the feature anything but revolutionary. Real-time day and night has already been featured in Animal Crossing (though that's probably not the first example).

We've been watching for the revolution for over a year now. The PotBS devs must have been reading the YPP forums, because nowadays they are touting their 'no level treadmill' just like puzzling pirates were saying a year and a half ago.

I didn't compare it to puzzle pirates, that was another poster... but anyhow. Puzzle Pirates doesn't have leveling either. There is no treadmill in Puzzle Pirates unless you count earning money (via pillaging or economy). You are rated in your skills against other players by how well you perform those skills.

Other than that they only resemble each other to the same degree that all MMOs do.

Well only if you mean to say "they only resemble each other to the same degree that all mmogs set in the Carribean golden age of piracy do" which currently is one game: Puzzle Pirates. With another now in beta: PotBS. Other mmogs don't feature sea-battling or pillaging or naval blockading at all.

I guess the similarity would only be obvious if you had actually spent any honest time playing Puzzle Pirates (i.e., participating in the navy, economy, politics, war, blockading islands, sea-battle with broadsides and sailing and gunning and repairing and bilging and grappling and melee, crafting, shipping, foraging, commanding a crew and vessel, building and owning a ship or ships, learning charts, customizing the appearance and dress of your pirate, injuries at sea for patches and pegs and hooks earned not chosen, furnishing your home(s) with player crafted goods, etc). You don't level though. You are bestowed a rank by other players and by the navy.

PotBS really does sound (from developer descriptions), as the other poster put it, like Y!PP but in 3D. Everything in their feature list is already in Y!PP except the DirectX requirement (Y!PP is multi-platform). When the beta is more open I'm sure plenty of posting will come out by players with extensive experience in both games.

I'll tell you what -- I've been playing Y!PP for like 2 years. Ask me about any feature that PotBS has and I'll explain how it works in Puzzle Pirates. That way we can determine what's revolutionary about PotBS.

I'll start off with one from the screenshots -- it seems that PotBS has day and night. In Puzzle Pirates it is always daylight on the high seas and it only night at an island when the undead walk. Night time lasts on the island until all of the skellies are defeated. The Developers of Puzzle Pirates axed day and night back in 2002 here and here from the feature list (it even sounds like if Puzzle Pirates was rendered in 3D and not pre-drawn sprites it would have day/night...). Pirates never sleep. :-D I'll expect that PotBS has accelerated time like in say, Zelda or GTA making the feature anything but revolutionary. Real-time day and night has already been featured in Animal Crossing (though that's probably not the first example).

We've been watching for the revolution for over a year now. The PotBS devs must have been reading the YPP forums, because nowadays they are touting their 'no level treadmill' just like puzzling pirates were saying a year and a half ago.

All of these tasks are accomplished by, you guessed it, puzzling. And the sheer destructive power of a 60-man brig crew all puzzling together cooperatively is a wonder to behold, especially when there are fleets of brigs involved in a major attempt to take an island.

But, sadly, no hot alien chicks. Plenty of "dock tarts", though -- although don't get any ideas, this game is PG.

> So, for example, a specialist helmsman would be able to turn a starship more
> efficiently and execute more complicated manoeuveurs. Make it so that master
> engineers could coax more speed from a ship's engine and repair shields faster.

You're describing ship's crews and ship-to-ship combat in Yohoho Puzzle Pirates, an already existing MMORPG

Why would high production budgets be the anthesis of gaming? By their very nature of being basically fixed development, free reproduction, hudge budgets are to be expected. Besides, a year's worth of Star Trek TNG cost in the 8 figures, why would a year's worth of game development be any different?

BTW, with very specific exceptions when you put your game out to the worldwide development community you get crap. Even Art and music resources will need to be edited the heck out to get them to fit with your game in a way that a local artist would just know. Sure, you might find a cohesive, great group in the middle of nowhere ready to create an awesome interactive experience, but then you haven't moved to the Bazaar, you're just moved the Cathedral. Aesthetic experiences are difficult to create and require high team cohesion, great forward planning, and lots of focused revisions. Generally, outsourced software does not provide a great aesthetic experience.

And freed from the shackles of megabuck production costs and the time-to-market issues that they create, I have no doubt that novelty in games will start to flourish again.

There is nothing stopping what you describe now, and in fact shareware developers have been doing just that for years. Many people do independent game development, and some of them hit it big. Some of them do it overseas. Some of them make a living from it, or facilitating others. It hasn't torn down the cathedral, because some people really just want to play a football game with super realism. Or the year's most massive RPG. And yet the little guys have been surviving for years in this market.

I don't think time-to-market is as big a deal as people make it out to be. The world, and the market, won't be that different in two years. It certainly wasn't that different two years ago.

Nice imagery in your post though.

But also mind that Puzzle Pirates is vastly different from the majority of MMO's *because* it is puzzle-based, and not the "kill stuff, get bigger, kill bigger stuff" model.

(that sucking sound you hear is my karma plummeting)

Puzzle Pirates -
There is an option in puzzle pirates to play in a "dabloons" ocean. Dabloons are basically a form of in-game currency that you buy with real cash. While you need gold to buy things, you also need dabloons. You can use dabloons to purchase badges which allow you to do certain things in-game, such as play certain puzzles or lead a team of pirates. These badges generally last for 30 login days (as opposed to 30 calendar days)... in other words, they only degrade as you log in and use them. You can play Puzzle Pirates perfectly well for free, if you so choose, or you can pay to access certain features of the game. And it's pretty cheap: a badge that will allow you 30 login days of access to the most commonly used puzzle costs the real-world equivalent of a dollar.

Certain Asian-style games, such as Gunbound don't require a subscription, but allow you to use money to purchase in-game items. Or you can play for a really, really, really long time to earn the gold to have those items.

To give props to another game company, Three Rings Design has a puzzle game which, while it theoretically involves violence (cannon balls and pirates), is tame enough to be enjoyable both by their typical subscriber (thirty/fourty-something female) and also her young child. The take steps to make sure both the game and the community are family-friendly, including policing the games/forums, encouraging positive behavior in their community, and sticking to their guns on the issue of... well... not allowing guns in the game. And it looks like they're making a boatload of money, which is exactly the take-home lesson I'd like other developers to see: you can make money without being GTA.

I think one game that comes close to what you're talking about is Puzzle Pirates. It has a number of open-ended paths in the game. You can become a pirate and pillage, or be a shopkeeper, or just play games or hang out. It's not the most elaborate MMORPG, and it's written in Java which makes it available on a variety of platforms, but it can be a bit slow in performance.

Java Web Start does a lot of what you want.... Platform independent, distributed, automatic updates without any extra work for the user OR the programmers. Limited to a specific programming platform though. :-)

Puzzle Pirates is a neat game that uses it. It was amusing to see how astonished a lot of posters on Slashdot were when it was announced that they were releasing a game simultaniously for PC, Mac, Linux, BSD...
"How is it possible!?!"

Puzzle Pirates made it: they developed IP which was interesting enough to attract about 5k paying subscribers and then got into an arrangement with Ubisoft. So there is hope. And maybe there is hope for an indie MMORPG in a niche that can support 5k -- but there just isn't at several hundred.

Puzzle Pirates http://www.puzzlepirates.com/ now allows free play forever on their 'doubloon oceans', and the cool thing is that there is an in-game exchange for players to trade doubloons (the currency you buy with real cash) and pieces of eight (the standard in-game currency). High end items and privileges like being an officer in your crew require doubloons to purchase, but it's better than a recurring subscription.

The really cool thing is that Puzzle Pirates has brought the market for sellers and buyers into the game, and cut ebay and other secondary markets out of the loop.

At first it might seem crooked that someone can roll in and buy US$20 worth of doubloons and then trade some of that for pieces of eight and be "rich" in the game, but it actually all works out. There are people who just want to have fun, maybe can't play very often, and make enough money that $20 is no big deal. Then there are hordes of 13 year olds that have tons of time but no money. The genius of the system is that both sides win: the 13 year olds get to trade their time spent playing (earning pieces of eight) into doubloons and get access to higher-end features, and the older casual players can turn their doubloons into pieces of eight and get the items they want without playing more than they want to.

The doubloon exchange is like a stock market. The offers to buy and sell are displayed and the price is not fixed by Puzzle Pirates, it's all up to the players. It totally works and just goes to show that embracing the market can be a good thing, rather than trying to stop players from doing what they want to do.

Of course, another reason this works is that you don't "level up" in puzzle pirates, so there's no reason to sell a character.

The example I provided was, in no way, tailored to C++. If you're doing scientific computing, or graphics programming you can't get away from doing tight loop calculations. Many (ie almost all) of the graphics algorithms are O(n^3) or higher!.

You know you CAN in fact compile Java to native binary, if you are willing to sacrifice OS independence through the JVM?

Yes you can do everything you want in java, and yes it will run fine, but there's a reason you'll NEVER -- EVER see a top commercial game written in java, it's because the performance simply isn't there.

Puzzle Pirates

To be fair, all of game development involves firing buckshot in hopes that something will stick. You whip up 50 ideas, and throw them at publishers. Publishers twitch a finger when you describe 10 of them, so you go off and develop those ideas. You come back, and they're interested in 3. You make 3 full fledged demos, and 1 gets picked up for a full build. They shotgun blast you with features they're thinking about, and you pick the dozen that sound the least painful. You run off to make your E3 Demo. Your E3 Demo is proof that your minimum gameplay is all you need, but while you're out there your publisher promises the press that your game will have every feature imaginable and some that aren't. Any features that seem to stick get begrudgingly implemented amongst much cursing. You polish up whatever hydra you've created, and you put it in a box. The publisher's marketing people then forget about it and bury it in a list somewhere, or maybe it sticks to them and they advertise it in everything from Home and Garden to Time Magazine... maybe the game magazines if you're really lucky. And after all that, the gamer will look at the cover of your box in a store and go "eh."

I agree, though, that if they want to attract female gamers they need to drop the girls jumping on trampolines and deliver more quality content that isn't about having the most blood or the biggest linebackers. The Xbox isn't even particularly bad in this department, but you would never know it by their marketing.

I don't know if it is still there, but I've heard that Microsoft's head game development studio has a grand staircase leading up to a giant topless female bust. Getting rid of THAT, and making a major concerted effort to hire female developers would help. That's not to say that women necessarily make games better suited for women, but three or four woman on a development team is usually enough to end a lot of the unprofessional stupidly masculine stuff that happens on all-male teams and pushes women out of gaming. Could you imagine a woman sitting in on the decision to have a BloodRayne "extra bouncy juggies" cheat? If you can't say it to a fellow female developer with a straight face, you shouldn't put it in the game.

When I first met her my girlfriend would never touch gaming. She thought it was entirely degrading to women. That's all that had ever been shown to her through advertising and media... Sex object girls jumping up and down while fast cars drive by (I'm looking at YOU, Namco). Or huge sweaty linebackers smashing into eachother. Or even Mario rescuing the princess. That's all she knew, because that's how the industry on average chooses to portray itself. That's not, thankfully, all the industry provides. We have games like Nintendogs, Virtua Tennis, Hot Shots Golf, The Sims, and tons of others. Heck, Quake 3 managed to be an action dream without being demeaning to women. Eventually I got my girlfriend hooked on DDR, Katamari, and Karaoke Revolution, but it was quite the uphill battle to change her perceptions. And whenever I see the doom trailer, I can feel things slipping back down.

It's not that we have to start attracting women to gaming. We just need to stop repelling them.

There are lots of games done in Java, mainly for mobile phones through J2ME.

Note also the MMORPG Puzzle Pirates which is Java both on desktop and server. It's not cutting edge in the sense of pushing the boundaries of the latest graphics cards, but then I wouldn't do that in Java anyhow. But Puzzle Pirates shows you can make a commercially and critically successful modern game in Java.

Monkey Island vs. World of Warcraft - "Monkey World": Everyone wants to be a mighty pirate! But do you have the pure unbridled insult skills? The power over puns? The utterly whimiscal mind? Prove your mettle online with many thousands of rival pirate-wannabees!

Ever hear of Puzzle Pirates?

I know they haven't released any groundbreaking news lately, but, well, you should play Puzzle Pirates. You just should.

Check out Puzzle Pirates: http://www.puzzlepirates.com/. It sounds like pretty much what you describe: a MMORPG where everything in the game, from sailing the ship to swordfighting to manufacturing is accomplished via Bejewelled-esque puzzle games. It's a great concept, and it works really well.

For the brief period that I played, I got into two ship-to-ship combats. You can have several people on the same ship, in the roles of sailing, carpentry, gunnery, bilge pumping, etc. etc. Each of these tasks is tied to a specific mini-game... you play the sailing game better, you go faster. You play the swordfighting game better, you defeat your enemies.

The only thing that I think keeps Puzzle Pirates from going huge is the cutesiness of the characters, who look like little lego men. If the game was still cute and friendly, but maybe a bit more "serious"-looking, it might attract a much larger fanbase.

I'd like to see more games based on a micropayment model like Puzzle Pirates' Doubloon Oceans. Doubloons are basically quarters that you put into the "machine" of the game to buy things like swords and ships. The payments scale with how involved you want to be in the game, so there's a very low barrier of entry for those who just want to play casually.

If you want to be an island governor with a fleet of deadly black pearls, you pay more, but probably not as much as you would subscribing for all the time it took to build up your fleet. And if you want to log off for six months while you finish your doctoral thesis or write that symphony (okay, okay...or play that other MMO), you don't lose months of subscription fees. Also, the game client is free.

Yo Ho Ho Puzzle Pirates is platform independent.

Depends on the game. Puzzle Pirates keeps adding new puzzles, revising old ones, changing the rules on player interaction, and adding new elements to game play.

Incidentally, they don't fit the kill-the-dragon/rescue-the-village stereotype either.

If someone could write a excellent graphic intensive Java application (e.g. a game) to showcase Java's viability as a desktop platform, it would help address this developer adoption problem.

Like Puzzle Pirates?

http://www.puzzlepirates.com/

Or Eve Online if you like that sort of thing...

No pirate applications? Darn, I was really hoping...

Forgive the horrible humor.

This surprised me too. Why would anyone make a quick, 2D, puzzle game targeted to one platform? Why should I check this out when I can run things like puzzle pirates on any platform that runs java?

You haven't tried to get Java running on Ubuntu, have you?

No, mainly because I use Debian.

I have, however, got Java running _perfectly_ on Debian, and am currently playing Puzzle Pirates. I do feel unclean for using it, though.

21:36 <resiak> install java
21:36 <dpkg> First, read <java licensing>. Still here? If you're in sarge or sid, ask me about <java-package>. If you're in woody, grab java-package manually from http://packages.debian.org/java-package and then ask me about <java-package> for instructions on how to use it. Also, ask me about <java-package howto>
21:36 <resiak> java-package 21:36 <dpkg> somebody said java-package was the new name for mpkg-j2se... err, I mean j2se-package... DAMN IT, CAN'T THEY PICK A NAME?! Anyway, it lets you build a .deb file from Sun's non-free upstream Java distributions. See "man make-jpkg". Cf. "make-kpkg" (from kernel-package).only in sarge and sid currently, but it's a -all package, so it's safe to use it in woody. This packages lives in 'contrib', so make sure you have that in your sources.list.
21:38 <resiak> java-package howto
21:38 <dpkg> http://www.debian-administration.org/?article=142

Go speak to dpkg on freenode. You'll need to /j #debian.

This link offered no more information that one can get by clicking on the documentation for the puzzles. In fact, the documents have more information, and have pictures.

This link offered no more information that one can get by clicking on the documentation for the puzzles. In fact, the documents have more information, and have pictures.

You get progressively better ranks in the puzzle for faster completition times per board (you'd typically complete several boards over the course of a battle or a trip between two navigation points), and better ranks for your many sailors increases the speed at which the ship sails, to a predetermined maximum based on hull type (in battle, its slightly different -- I think you get four moves max regardless but if your sailors are cruddy you won't get all of them -- that could be disastrous because it allows the other ship to get somewhere it shouldn't be, like directly behind you to pound you with unanswerable cannonfire).

Puzzle Pirates, by the way, is the best free trial you'll ever play in your life. Even if you uninstall it and never get into the MMORPG part the puzzles are just breathtakingly fun to play. Its a puzzle game, except the puzzle MATTERS (imagine playing Gem Fighter to settle crew-to-crew combat and being able to brag to people that you swordfought seven guys at a time, including a Cleaver (high rank of AI), and killed them all).