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Golemizer!

July 9th, 2008 (Visited 4371 times) Tags: golemizer, indie games

Blog regular Over00 writes,

Like many people, I always wanted to be able to bring some of my MMOs ideas to reality. Of course, ideas are cheap and everybody got THE good one. So I thought enough dreaming and more doing.
So about a year ago, I started to work on a framework with the same tools I’m using for my day job: .NET, SQL and Javascript. After a month of design/planning and another one of coding, I had a prototype ready.
From there, I knew I could bring this idea to reality. So I worked on it on my free time on weekends and evenings to this day. The result is Golemizer. It could be shortly described as a “free web MMORPG putting players in the shoes of mad scientists creating monsters”.
The game features crafting, pets, player housing, npc AI scripting system for GMs and admin (I was using LUA with LUAInterface before but had to switch to dynamically compiled .NET code to overcome a memory leak problem), skills system and players’ merchants. After about 6 months of alpha/closed beta helped by some people, the game is now ready to face a bigger crowd as open beta.
So if you think this might be of interest to your readers, a small link to the game would be greatly appreciated. I’m sure your readers would be able to give me some precious feedback on how to improve gameplay, now that the technical side is completed. There’s still improvements to do, content to add, but from now on, outside feedback is greatly needed.
To give credit where credit is due, some parts, like player housing, were heavily influenced by SWG while the skills system is inspired by EVE Online. While I’m nowhere near his success, Gene Endrody also has been an inspiration and a source of motivation to carry on this project for over a year. Most graphics are from free libraries completed by some freelancers work. Thanks for reading to end!

Excellent.

This is the sort of thing we hope springs up by the thousand once Metaplace is out…

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Gene Endrody said on July 9th, 2008 at 8:52 pm:

I was reading in “Dungeons & Dreamers” how Richard Garriot made his first game at home and sold it on a floppy disks in zip lock bags. His story reminded me of how it felt as a teenager making games on my Commodore 64, when “independant developer” meant one person and before a big team became a requirement. After working on yet another tight deadline, licenced sequel, the web seemed like the last remaining place to attempt to recapture that feeling.

Congrats on the game and thanks for the nod. You’ll notice that everything is more personal when you build this way and having even just a few people you don’t know wandering around your world is a rush. People like Raph, Richard Garriot and Andrew Gower were orginal sources of inspiration and influence. I’ve still only met one of them.

Gene Endrody said on July 9th, 2008 at 8:54 pm:

I meant – People like Raph, Richard Garriot and Andrew Gower were MY orginal sources of inspiration and influence.

Arrakiv said on July 9th, 2008 at 9:18 pm:

Spiffy. Its great to see stuff like this popping up on the good old ‘net.

Peter Harkins said on July 10th, 2008 at 6:15 am:

I played this game a few weeks ago; lots of good ideas but rough execution. There was a guest character class that was a couple clicks to log in with (no registration!) but none of the buttons or tutorial conversations worked. After quitting there was a “Hey, tell us what you think” contact form, but it didn’t work. Maybe I’m just boggling again at the lack of automated testing in games, but they were some pretty surprising bugs.

I’ll also join in wishing him the best of luck, though. It seems like a cool idea, I’m a big fan of web-based gaming.

Over00 said on July 10th, 2008 at 9:27 am:

About the guest account, it is limited to walking and chat. When logging as guest, a window should appear telling so. Might not have been there some weeks ago though.

Hopefully, with the recent wave of new visitors, I’ll be able to spot in a faster way remaining bugs that might prevent a smooth experience. There comes a time when you seem to unconsciously avoid potential bugs so you end up missing obvious things like the comments screen.

While it’s always better to catch bugs before users do, I did build a logging system that helped me a lot so far to quickly fix problems. Anyway, I guess the key here is to keep learning from past mistakes and keep working!

Thanks!

Michael W said on July 10th, 2008 at 12:05 pm:

Sounds awesome =D

Eolirin said on July 11th, 2008 at 12:19 pm:

Over00, you’re doing most/all of this all by yourself? On the technical end I mean. It certainly makes it very hard to bug test with resources that limited, especially when, as you say, you tend to overlook things because you know how they should be working rather than trying to break them.)

It’s really impressive that you’ve gotten that far by yourself though. Keep up the good work.

Over00 said on July 11th, 2008 at 2:17 pm:

Eolirin, yep, all development (client/server/database) has been done only by me.

One person helped me for AI scripting when I added the system (AI scripting wasn’t planned at first, it’s this person that suggested this huge and powerful addition) and he also gave me some precious feedback while in alpha/closed beta.

There were some rough times, like when I found the memory leak with LUAInterface that I wasn’t able to fix. All of this after having the AI run this way for about 6 months… But the ride is well worth it.

It does gets hard to control everything at the same time but it got me to learn a lot. It started with simple A* pathfinding and went to how to secure a server, knowing that a VPS can’t rely on virtual memory (basically freeze everything badly when you run out of memory) and other numerous things.

Oh and one important things that helped a lot is to have a girlfriend that doesn’t mind falling asleep alone on the couch while you’re adding just 1 more line of code… I feel I’ll have to pay back all of this someday…

Eolirin said on July 11th, 2008 at 2:46 pm:

Your girlfriend is a saint.

Seriously, that’s very impressive considering. Projects like these are always going to have a higher amount of issues too, at least early on, and people are going to have to come to terms with that. Keep plugging along though; we really do need more of this.

Slyfeind said on July 11th, 2008 at 4:29 pm:

Congrats, Over00! Like you say, everybody has great ideas, but it takes a special kind of dreamer to bring their ideas to life.

Morgan Ramsay said on July 11th, 2008 at 5:04 pm:

Over00 wrote:

Oh and one important things that helped a lot is to have a girlfriend that doesn’t mind falling asleep alone on the couch while you’re adding just 1 more line of code…

“Your ~~car~~ game is more important to you than me!”

Golemizer!

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