Ye Olde Blah

Hey guys,

Not sure how active this forum is, but I thought I'd just bring up that I'm working on a flash game inspired by Shining Force. It's still in development, but you can follow me on my blog or on this thread. I'd rather have shining fans like myself playing this game than people who don't appreciate it.

The site is here: http://www.nostalgia-mmo.com
http://www.gathering-light.com

or the blog at: http://www.nostalgia-mmo.com/blog
http://www.gathering-light.com/blog

Ciao!

Chris W

We're not dead yet ;)

Always nice to see new projects on the go, and yours is looking very nice. I'll post an update on the main page about it tomorrow, and I look forward to seeing more progress :)

Thank you Ty, it's much appreciated.

Glad to hear you're not dead. I came to this forum a long time ago, it was nice to see all the enthusiasm about fan games. I'll be sure to send the players from my game to your forum.

Chat again soon!

Edit:

The URL is being changed to http://www.gathering-light.com

I just did some work on the GUI and I'm pleased with how it's turned out. Of course it needs some real graphics, but the layout works nicely for now. You can move your mouse over any of the members in your party and it will display their equipment and the items they are carrying plus all their stats (still to be decided). Below that there is space for your inventory items, which can hold stock and be given to any of your party members. Obviously you can't bring your entire inventory into a battle, just what the characters are holding.
To the left of that there will be the spells known by the character.
In the bottom left corner, is the RANK, WIN and LOSS stats for the PLAYER.

All information is stored server side, but the game still remains single player. You can search for players in the arena, which are pulled up randomly, from there you can check out their status page and all of their members and then battle them. Your rank will either increase or decrease depending on your wins and losses, party level sum, total gold, ect, ect.

Even though battles are all single player, you can still trade, join guilds, and enter tournaments. There is also a story mode which you can play when you don't feel like PvPing. Story mode allows players to gain special characters, items and unlock new PvP maps.

Here's the new Status layout.
(http://i772.photobucket.com/albums/yy4/gatheringlight/status2.jpg)

Hi Chris,

This looks awesome! Just one thing.

Are you aware that "oren" means "ears" in Dutch? ;)

Cheers! & Good luck!

Looks good Chris, keep it up! :)

So what is the word for just one ear?

It's "oor" :)

Now I hope no one(especially ChrisW) takes this the wrong way, but looking at the blog posts it's so reminiscent of all of us shining game developers.  Take a look at the titles: (in chronological order)

    * The Beginning
    * The Idea
    * That’s Rank
    * Screenie This!!!
    * Procrastination…
    * A Neverending Battle
    * Get rid of your life
    * A Short Break
    *  Refreshed

It's an honest list of the stages most of us go through whenever we get motivation for a project.  This should be noted by all new game developers, who will need to come up with a plan for themselves to combat whatever it is that holds us back - since it seems to me, our desire to complete is as great as ever, but other things come in the way much more easily.

I know I'm guilty of all of this, and it's both frustrating and depressing. It's a mix of many things; trying out new technology, wanting to create something "perfect" first time around, and generally stopping when things get tough. Also, there's no set deadline and so no pressure to finish things. I want to finish it, but I just seem to be spinning my wheels. This then leads to the whole self-doubt problem, and we know what that does. Oh, and also writing a game is pretty damn hard ;)

How to beat all this? I've no idea, although I will say the "competition" with Dev all those years ago really helped get something released. Sometimes you need an external element to stop you wasting time tweaking stupid stuff. At least I do.

Hey guys,

To make a long story short, the original concept used polling as the method of retrieving data. After a little bit of research, I found out it was fine for a few players, but when moving into the hundreds and thousands, it just wasn't feasible.

I've had to look into using a server instead, but the learning curve (not to mention the price) for a commercial server is steep. The project is still alive, I just wish I hadn't of been so click happy when posting here in the forums. I'll update eventually. For now, I apologize.

Chris W

Other options:
 Limit the number of players in a particular game world
 Poll by "distance" from you.  ie: split the game world into areas and only poll your area and adjacent areas.
 Stop polling at x number of people.


Finally, having thirty people play your game is better than none - and may provide you with some people willing to help sponsor your game to get it onto a server.

Good luck.

You don't have to apologise to us. We've all been there :)

As Elv said, breaking your world into areas/zones is a good way of keeping things running smoothly. Once you have players, people might take it in turns to run a server on their local machines, or they might have connections that can get you a server for less. Get it out there, and then worry about the rest :)