My Online Game

I'm in the infant stages of developing an online game. This is the sort of thing that every new game developer immediately decides to pursue and almost as quickly decides is much, much too hard. Of course, there are those who don't manage to figure this out and who decide to bring down game development communities with them when their ideas don't strike home. Just take a look at the GameDev.net Help Wanted forums and count how many [MMO] tags you see on the first page. Then, of course, there a surprising number of these projects that actually make it off the ground, and seeing posts of success months or even years after I remember seeing their Help Wanted post always gives me a warm tingly feeling inside.

Anyway, I've decided to go for an online game.

When I'm in design mode (as opposed to develop mode), my creativity tends to be driven by artwork. I don't think of game elements, then try to imagine what they might look like. Instead, I create random doodles and widgets and things and try to imagine how they might fit into a design. I personally feel like this opens a different part of the mind to innovation in game mechanics and design, less limited by logic and "the norm." Of course, this method does tend to lead to quite a bit of unused artwork that doesn't manage to find itself in the design. But hey, the more practice drawing game art, the better one gets, right?

So my online game project began with some graphics. I felt that, as an individual developer, I had to decide between being innovative in art, or innovative in gameplay. I settled for neither. I'll copy art from popular games, and I'll implement well-worn MMO game mechanics that I know and love. If I'm lucky, I'll mix them in just the right way, and I'll try to make it fun, but I'm not going to maintain any delusions about "changing the industry" or the other crap that one tends to hear quite often over on GameDev.

Here's the first revision of a character that I put together. I'm not totally satisfied with the position of the head during the running animation. When switching quickly between running and standing, it looks a bit like some Egyptian head-bob dance.

Now imagine running around a decently-sized platformer universe, slashing mobs with swords and hitting them with fireballs, collecting armor, weapons, experience, etc. Well, I'm pretty excited about it. I'm using XNA (just Windows. I can't do the networking stuff I want on the Xbox), and I'm leaning towards Photon to help out on the server side, though quite honestly, the only thing I have to go on is the front page "BUY PHOTON NOW SUCKERS" information. I'll take a closer look when the time comes.

Until next time, in the Land of Dinosaurs,

-Isaac

P.S. I used GraphicsGale to make that pixel art. It's definitely one of my favorite art packages geared towards pixel art out there and is worth a look if you're interested.