One of the first rules of game development is that you do not talk about game development. On most large game projects, all public information will usually come from one of the official spokespersons, typically the producer, the lead designer and the external producer (the external producer works for the publisher, not the studio, so may or may not have up-to-date information on the game). The rank and file developers are forbidden from talking to anyone in the press or public about the project. Failure to comply results in embarrassing warning emails or an uncomfortable meeting with someone’s legal department. There are occasional companies with slightly more permissive policies. At one place I worked, we were highly encouraged to post about the game on message boards and build hype, however all posts had to be approved first. You can image how often people felt the need to go out and hype that game.
So here I am at Thinglefin, master of my own destiny at last, and finally in a great position to talk about what it is I work on, and I find myself still conditioned against it. There’s still that voice screaming “No! Don’t expose your precious ideas to the bad internet! They’ll come for you!” Which is a shame because I’m getting super-excited about this project! So what am I excited about, exactly?
Our project is at the same time very simple and yet uniquely ambitious. At its core is a unique multiplayer game and online world aimed at a very broad audience. That audience? Anyone who surfs the web. Perhaps you or someone you know are a member of this audience? We’d like to think so. In order to make our game appealing to you, the web-surfing public, we’re setting our game in a setting you may already be familiar with, a webpage. Yes, our entire multiplayer online graphical game will be playable in the browser, from any computer with a recent Flash plugin. We think this is fucking brilliant. Who wouldn’t play a game that’s as easy to start as browsing over to a website?
That’s where the ambitious part comes in. Though the game itself is small compared to the big MMO powerhouses of our time, presenting it completely in-browser makes for some interesting challenges. In some ways it’s like writing a modern-looking game on an Apple IIgs. Since we’re delivering it all over the web, resources can’t be huge, and since Flash is not hardware accelerated in any way, drawing to the screen is slow. It’s a great opportunity to trot out a bunch of retro game programming techniques that have not been needed in years and update them for the Internets age.
We’re currently wrapping up the “infrastructure” phase of development, and just coming into the cusp of the “funfrastructure” phase, in which we can see our creations take shape before our very eyes. I’ll talk more about it again soon! Gotta shake those old habits.
