Quote:
Originally Posted by Emera
You seem so confident and your plan is so thoroughly thought out. I really do feel that anything you produce for your server will be fantastic and I can't wait to see what you have in store for us!
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I've had a while to plan things, waiting for the right middle-ware to come along.
Along the way, I narrowed things down quite a bit:
1. Any game concept that would largely replicate existing gaming options went out the window. If I'm going to sink in a large portion of my leisure hours into game design, it had better be to create something novel... I've got a wife, a career (where my video game design background weirdly comes in handy), my life is stable, and generally speaking, I have a consistent yet limited amount of free time.
2. At the same time, although I wanted to try something new with structure/world design, I wanted the underlying core gameplay to be tried-and-true. I ended up basing my game concept around 16-bit Zelda-style gameplay, because it's comparatively easy to implement in a variety of contexts and quite naturally fun.
3. I knew the game had to be 2D, rather than 3D. My taking on a 3D project just isn't feasible... 2D is easier to work with for coding/scripting/implementation, there are infinitely more high-quality free art assets available, a narrower range of skill-sets required to bring a project to completion, etc.
4. I knew I'd consider anything upwards of 50 regular players to be a success. I knew I'd need to be able to provide game hosting for those players at a cost of less than $1,000 a year.
5. I knew that I needed to be using a system with a well-established scripting language, rather than something that required me to directly touch the code every time I wanted to add something new. This way, there's an established base of players who could potentially contribute to my project in small ways when I needed them without needing to immerse themselves in my project. Let's say I want to add a Zelda:LttP-style Hookshot to my game... with a strong scripting community, someone with no knowledge of my project but a strong knowledge of Graal can possibly contribute that sort of code. If it's just straight coding, I either need to code it myself, have a coder on my project's permanent staff, or pay a freelance coder a substantial sum of money to first understand my code and then understand how to construct a hookshot object within it.
All of this has led me to Playerworlds/Xtremeworlds... though from what I hear, Xtremeworlds is more limited than Playerworlds? Is that correct?