Slashdot Mirror

No, but I remember Game!, which is also very much hand drawn.

Multiplayer games also benefit greatly from network effects. Nobody would play WoW if they were the only one on the server.

If you don't have a 9 figure marketing budget, you're probably struggling to get more players, and as mentioned already, most multiplayer games aren't fun without a lot of other players. So keeping that in mind, why would you go and shoot yourself in the foot by turning away 90% (or probably more) of your potential users by requiring payment up front?

For example, Game! is free to play and has been played by thousands of people, it also has a marketing budget of $0. I can only imagine if I'd required payment up front it'd probably have been played by dozens or maybe hundreds instead. That's a pretty big difference.

Unsurprisingly, people have been conditioned to expect things for free on the Internet. Making the jump from free to a penny is much larger than the jump from a penny to $10 or probably even $100. People will spend $5 on a latte every day and think nothing of it, because nobody is giving away free lattes, but ask them to spend $5 to access a website and they'll balk, after all, there's all those other websites that they can access for free.

Maybe this will provide disincentive to companies that simply snarf up all possible personal data because they can (I'm looking at you, Facebook). This is by far one of the most annoying trends as of late. That's why Game! doesn't ask for any personal information (because it doesn't need it) and makes email optional (if you want to be able to recover your account). Perhaps others will follow suit...

I think it's a little of both, but mainly the former. One adapts to their environment, and playing Scrabble requires you to see words differently than most. Similarly, if you play enough Game! you'll start seeing puns in everything!

I think the bigger problem with microtransactions is that games that utilize them have a strong tendency of virtually everything revolving around microtransactions to the point where it's completely impossible to play without buying something every 5 seconds. I hate the concept of buying your way through a game, I mean, what's the point? Sure, I could actually try and enjoy this game, or I could dump $100 into it stretched over a few weeks so I can spend less time playing it. But aren't games supposed to be enjoyable? Spending less time playing them seems to defeat the purpose.

Personally, I think if a game offers something something in exchange for real money (aside from possibly the game itself), it should not affect gameplay itself. Maybe someone really wants a slightly different looking avatar, and if they want to pay a few dollars for it, so be it, it doesn't hinder anyone else's enjoyment of the game. Regardless, that's why you won't find any microtransactions (or macrotransactions, for that matter) in Game!, as it focuses on being fun to play, apparently a novel concept these days.

i think a good example of this was portal 2 hats. but people still got extra angry at them.

I think the bigger problem with microtransactions is that games that utilize them have a strong tendency of virtually everything revolving around microtransactions to the point where it's completely impossible to play without buying something every 5 seconds. I hate the concept of buying your way through a game, I mean, what's the point? Sure, I could actually try and enjoy this game, or I could dump $100 into it stretched over a few weeks so I can spend less time playing it. But aren't games supposed to be enjoyable? Spending less time playing them seems to defeat the purpose.

Personally, I think if a game offers something something in exchange for real money (aside from possibly the game itself), it should not affect gameplay itself. Maybe someone really wants a slightly different looking avatar, and if they want to pay a few dollars for it, so be it, it doesn't hinder anyone else's enjoyment of the game. Regardless, that's why you won't find any microtransactions (or macrotransactions, for that matter) in Game!, as it focuses on being fun to play, apparently a novel concept these days.

It baffles me that people still require email addresses for random account signups. Either people are going to provide their email address, or they're not. Make it required and they'll just feed you a fake/disposable one, or not make an account at all. How about you treat your (potential) users with some respect and just make the email optional? That's what Game! does and it works well.

Just like old browsers, IPv4 only clients will continue to haunt us for years to come. It depends a lot on your audience, Game! for example sees something like 10-20% IE users (all versions combined), the rest using Firefox, Chrome or Opera. But if you look at the cross-section of browser usage in big companies, you'll see something closer to 80% IE usage (and primarily IE6/IE7 at that).

I predict that once XP goes off extended support, people will finally start migrating away from it and IE6 will die with it. This will be a massive step forward for the web and can't happen soon enough. Even ignoring the fact that we can stop working around IE6's remarkable retardedness, being able to use SNI willl be a major plus.

A big part of games is learning, but also that of mastery and accomplishment. People like to get things done, and they also like to feel that they're constantly getting better. Today's games have picked up on this and virtually all of them have "achievements". People like these because they can put numbers to what they've done and compare themselves to others easily. If I have a thousand achievement points, I obviously much better than the guy over there with just fifty.

For all the time and effort that high budget games put into fancy graphics, they often miss the simple things that make a game fun (learning, achievement, mastery). Take Game! for example, it's deceptively simple at first, allowing you to learn things at your own pace, but for the OCD crowd there's so many things to find, combine, and cook that to do all of it is quite the task. However, more importantly, there's direct feedback in Game! about how many items you have out of the total, how many combinations you've found out of the total, etc. This gives people a concrete goal that they can strive for. Ideally, you strike a balance between casual and OCD so that casual players can play through the entire game without too much trouble (even if they might only get 10% of the 'achievements"), while the more OCD players can gradually work their way through every single "achievement".

A big part of games is learning, but also that of mastery and accomplishment. People like to get things done, and they also like to feel that they're constantly getting better. Today's games have picked up on this and virtually all of them have "achievements". People like these because they can put numbers to what they've done and compare themselves to others easily. If I have a thousand achievement points, I obviously much better than the guy over there with just fifty.

For all the time and effort that high budget games put into fancy graphics, they often miss the simple things that make a game fun (learning, achievement, mastery). Take Game! for example, it's deceptively simple at first, allowing you to learn things at your own pace, but for the OCD crowd there's so many things to find, combine, and cook that to do all of it is quite the task. However, more importantly, there's direct feedback in Game! about how many items you have out of the total, how many combinations you've found out of the total, etc. This gives people a concrete goal that they can strive for. Ideally, you strike a balance between casual and OCD so that casual players can play through the entire game without too much trouble (even if they might only get 10% of the 'achievements"), while the more OCD players can gradually work their way through every single "achievement".

Since the beginning, the iPhone has had busted CSS support for position: fixed; elements, which is terribly unfortunate as it makes Game! difficult to play. How does the Nexus S fare?

Try out WittyRPG, it's got a small community but it's alot more social than mafia wars. It's also very quaint.

Hey, either way, at least they won't have to upgrade to play Game!.

Game! is also similar in that all moves are permanent, however it does have the permadeath option (dubbed hardcore mode) available for new characters (once you get at least one past level 10).

It doesn't always have to be that way. Game! is completely free for example, no buying your way to victory.

Now that's definitely an advantage of web games like Game!, there's no client to download in the first place!

There's different kinds of multiplayer too. In an (RT)S like Civilization or Starcraft, you're pretty much bound to have a number of peers which can either be human or computer controlled, and this pretty much obviates multiplayer. In a lot of MMORPGs like Game! or WoW, you can arguably play them as "single player" games, without really interacting with other humans at all, but few people do that. On the other hand, the number of ways you can interact with other humans in an MMORPG is much broader than that which you'd normally find in an (RT)S game.

Then there's a whole different class of games where multiplayer isn't really an obvious addition. Consider something like Resident Evil, adding multiplayer to that would be quite unusual (which is probably why it was purely single player). The most obvious way to add multiplayer would be to have a co-op mode, but it seems that co-ops modes are pretty rare these days (I'm not entirely sure why), and it would totally throw a wrench into just about everything else in the game, from camera angles to difficulty, not to mention the impact to the story.

Really, I don't think anybody is complaining about multiplayer in the first two types of games, they're a welcome addition there. The problem is in the last class of games where multiplayer isn't an obvious addition. Certainly, multiplayer can be a brilliant addition if done properly, but if it's just tacked on, it'll probably be wasted effort aside from being able to check that invisible checkbox in some executive's mind.

Everybody is trying to improve their Javascript execution speed, so it's really not a big slip. Really, you can't blame them, after all, it lets you play Javascript games like Game! that much faster!

That's pretty much the best advise you can get — never trust the client. But as with everything in technology, there's no silver bullet. You also need to consider what you're passing back from the client, try to pass as little as possible, the less you pass back, the less you need to validate and the less chances you have to make mistakes. Also consider what form the data you're passing the data back from the client is in... validating integers is trivial, validating freeform text (especially if you're going to be displaying it somewhere on a page!) isn't.

In the case where you are displaying freeform text from the user (and you'll be hard pressed to avoid this), there are a lot of security problems you need to consider. Ultimately, if you don't let the user use HTML (ever), you can avoid basically all of them, though there's other issues (users pasting very long "words" to break your layout, but that's only a nuisance, not a security problem). If you do let users use HTML (for anything), you need to consider XSS and CSRF (though it need not be cross site).

Basically, read more, and always be thinking about security when you're adding new functionality that takes user input. It's really not that difficult to do, you just need to be aware of the issues. I've done almost exactly the same thing with Game!, it's not open source, but that really doesn't change any of the security issues.

I think the more likely situation is that there's a spectrum of gamers from casual to hardcore, with lots of people in between. RIght now, the people in between are quickly bored with casual games, but quickly frustrated with hardcore games. So, as the summary is saying, what gaming needs is more games like Game!, simple enough that anyone can pick them up and play without reading the manual, but with enough depth to actually keep people interested too.

What, no mention of Game!?

IE6 won't die until it's more painful to stay with IE6 than to upgrade away from it. So if you want to kill IE6, that means dropping support for IE6, or if you have paying customers, charge them more if they're using IE6, and tell them that. Game! did the former ages ago.

That said, you can surf the web right on the PS3 w/out linux at all.

The browser on the PS3 is pretty poor, it doesn't even render Game! anywhere close to correctly, or at least it didn't last I checked.

Just image how fast you could play Game! with that beast!

What I find more interesting, though, is that this would reveal the source code of your game to a much greater degree than, say, a Java applet does... allowing people to perhaps hook into or modify your code in order to cheat. An attempt to create anti-cheating measures would be interesting, to say the least.

Not really, you just leave the client as a glorified renderer and do all of the core game logic on the server side, like in Game!.

It seems like everyone is missing the elephant standing in the room — web based games like Game! are automagically cross-platform to anything with a browser.

Don't forget the stick that's stronger than the sword!

It depends on your audience.

Very much so. On one hand, we have large (>10k people) north american companies where IE6 + IE7 is over 90% of the usage (both scary and sad). At the other end of the spectrum, we have Game! users, where Firefox is around 60%, IE6 is less than 5% and Chrome and Opera divvy up most of the rest.

Most Universities don't teach any system administration. I don't know about you, but I picked it up hands on, by creating Game!.

...Flash games like Farmville on Facebook are unusable.

So play Game! instead, no Flash!

Casual online games don't need Flash. Just look at Game! for example.

Have you tried Game!? It meets your criteria and in fact, having a limited number of turns per day is built right in as a method of leveling the playing field.

The progression to more and more draconian DRM and more invasive advertising has been steady for at least the last decade. Though, it's worth noting that the Battle.net lobby has had ads in it since the beginning, it would seem that this combined with the no LAN play in SC2 is a real kick in the nuts for gamers. Though as you noted, the best way to be heard is to vote with your feet, Game! for example is both free and ad free. (shameless plug)

No, let me repeat that, advertising is very expensive.

I don't know about you, but I don't have 6 figures to lay down on advertising, so as an independent content producer (of which I am, see Game!)...

Oh, I see what you did there.

Probably the only utility the record industry provides to artists is that of promotion. Yes, the Internet makes it very easy to distribute music for next to nothing, but how do you find people to distribute it to? Word of mouth only goes so far, and advertising is expensive.

No, let me repeat that, advertising is very expensive. Go look up the numbers on Google Adsense and you'll see it's not unreasonable for every visitor to cost you (on average) $1. Assuming 10% of those people actually buy something from you (which is a very high conversion rate, more realistic would be 1-5%), and you need to make $10 sales (on average) per person, just to cover your advertising costs!

But, back to the record industry. They have large coffers and deals with all the radio stations, so they can easily push out a $$$$ ad campaign and get airtime for songs they think they can make a return on. They probably don't make huge profits on most artists (indeed, they may even lose money), but in aggregate they still (obviously) turn a tidy profit.

I don't know about you, but I don't have 6 figures to lay down on advertising, so as an independent content producer (of which I am, see Game!), it puts you in a very awkward position. For musicians, you can sell your soul to the music industry and hope there's some profit left over for you in the end, or you can go it alone and probably reach only a tiny audience, but keep all of the (tiny) profit for yourself. Or, you can lay down for advertising and promotion, which is expensive (as discussed already) and may or may not pay itself back.

Don't get me wrong, obviously the record industry is only interested in turning a profit for itself (and will probably screw over most artists that sign with it in the process), but if the Internet had completely obsoleted the record industry, artists would have wised up by now and the record industry would actually be gone by now.

Did you check if those search results actually have your pages in the results? I have one bot that really likes crawling Game!'s forums, and it always claims a referrer of Bing (and Live search before there was Bing) with a single word search term ("joined", "forum", "quest", etc). After finding that none of those searches would actually lead to me, I noticed that the IP ranges for this bot (65.55.107.0/24, 65.55.108.0/24, and 65.55.110.0/24) were almost the same as msnbot (65.55.208.0/24), in fact, many of the reverse DNS lookups for the former range gives msnbot. So, I'm fairly sure that this is just Microsoft trying to pretend they have way more users than they actually do. FWIW, I've seen about a dozen real users from Bing, and a couple hundred hits from the bot pretending to be a user.

That's why you make travel to everywhere instantaneous, like in Game!.

You mean like Game!? I don't really see many Mac users, substantially more Linux users actually.

Yes, you web developers. You need to explicitly stop supporting IE6. Give IE6 users a strong warning that IE6 is completely unsupported and not recommended for use, much like Game! has since about 2005.

It's in a similar vein, but another thing I find really annoying is when games draw their own cursor instead of using a hardware accelerated cursor. It instantly makes me not want to play the game ever, as the mouse is incredibly choppy in comparison, no matter how fast your system is.

For example, yesterday I had a hankering to play Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which is a game that was released in 1999 and required a Pentium 133 to run. While it's still as fun as it always was, the cursor is still choppy, even on a modern system. I'm pretty sure the entire game runs at a fixed 30 FPS or so, including the mouse. In this case, it's not as annoying, because it's entirely turn based, but it'd be a much better game with a proper mouse cursor.

New games are still making this mistake and it baffles me how it doesn't infuriate the developers enough to fix it.

I certainly design with (input) snappiness in mind, if you have a peek at Game! you'll notice that everything is very fast. Pages are small and load fast, AJAX is sprinkled about heavily to improve response time (though only where it makes sense), etc. It's not difficult to do really, you just have to keep it in mind.

The main problem with linux desktop usage is that all the games are made for Windows...

Not all games, Game! for example.

They could just all get netbooks and play web games, like Game!

They'll be buying out Game! and integrating it with /. next

I picked this up for my personal use. I used to use CS3 and the like for work and that was fine but I was tired of booting into Windows to help clients. I know game!designers use gimp. Gimp itself is a great product, I did notice that the book was solid but it left a lot to be desired in covering the lackluster interface. Your mileage may vary.

I fail to see the problem with always on internet. Sure, its not appropriate in some places but I couldn't imagine now having access to game! or youtube when I want them. Don't tread on me!

It's amazing to compare the cost to produce an indie game like the one in the article to a big name game, such as most games you can find in a brick and mortar store. Cost figures aren't usually released, but you can bet that EA probably spent 10-100x more on Madden n+1 than the ~$120k quoted in the article. Now, Madden n+1 probably also sold more copies, but it's definitely not 10-100x better of a game (some would argue it's worse, but I won't go there). So, where does all that extra cash go? Sure, diminishing returns (big company inefficiency, time creating flashier graphics, etc) accounts for some of it, but more likely is that advertising takes the cake. Advertising is incredibly expensive, so much so that only big companies can afford to do it, presumably it usually results in a net profit, but those numbers aren't generally available. It's an unfortunate situation, as there's definitely more to fun games than flashy graphics, and as it stands, most indie games are doomed to a relatively tiny audience, far smaller than they deserve.

So what can be done? Most people that play Game! seem to enjoy it a lot, but word of mouth only goes so far. How do we get indie games to a larger audience? I think that's a question a lot of people are trying to answer, but the Internet certainly helps, without it, we'd be unlikely to see indie games that get exposure outside of the town or possibly country that they were made in.

Also, working position: fixed; CSS support in Safari. They really have no excuse for breaking it. Anyone know if it's been fixed yet? If so, I could update the monsters in the Pit of Defiled Standards in Game!

I signed up for http://www.wittyrpg.com/ instead. Way more interesting and no waiting for the service to be available to new users.

Google farts and redirects you to: http://wittyrpg.com/ BEST Online RPG. EVER.

I agree that 1000 unique visitors is peanuts, but as for how to do HA, it really depends a lot on your situation. For example, the primary server for Game! started acting up about 2 weeks ago, but it mattered little as I was able to flip over to the backup server and came out with barely any downtime and no data loss. In the mean time, I was able to diagnose and fix the primary server, then point the traffic back at it. In my case, all the dynamic data is in MySQL, which is replicated to the backup server, so when I switched over I simply swapped the slave and the master and redirected traffic at the backup server. You also have to consider the code, which you presumably make semi-frequent updates to. In my case, the code is stored in SVN and updated automagically on both the master and the slave simultaneously.

Having said all that, there's more to consider than just your own hardware when it comes to HA. What happens if your network connection goes down? In most cases, there's nothing you can do about it except twiddle your thumbs while you wait on hold with customer service. Redundant Internet connections are expensive due to the fact that you basically need to be in a big (and expensive) colocation facility to get it.

Also, how easy it is to have HA depends largely on how important writes are to your database (or filesystem). Does it matter if this comment doesn't make it to the live page for a couple seconds after I hit submit? No, not really. Does it matter if I change my equipment in Game! but don't see the changes immediately? Yes, definitely. Indeed, if your content is 100% static, you can just keep a dozen complete copies and put a load balancer in front that pulls dead machines out of the loop automagically and be done with it.