Payment, donations or whatever ya wanna call ‘em
So ya wanna make money for your hard work, eh? Who doesn’t? I sure as hell do which is why I will have a donation button. Heck, I may have several just to get the point across that I want your money.
But am I going to offer game extra’s or charge to no? Notta chance. You many want to charge people to play or maybe just charge them to get the full experience, but (I won’t say never will) intend on it. I may charge to have perks like no ads, friends list, crap like that but I am going to avoid game advantages like the plague.
And here is why: I make games not to make money. Money is nice and all but I view what I do more as an art than a job. Continue with the notation that what I do (design and code) is art, I want to have people enjoy my work equally. I would rather be popular and make no cash than have 1000 people play my game and make 500$ a month. But here’s another thing. Popular = more players = more donations.
So if I offer a truly enjoyable game, not one where people play to pass time, but one where you WANT to play, one where you are excited to log on to, then I will be happy. Plus to boot if I have a game like that (some) people will want to donate.
Now, if I choose to ignore those reasons, and played with the idea of charging for bonuses this is what I come up with; You will have a situation where the donors will always be stronger than the non-donors, which means a lot of the non-donors won’t want to play after a while. This I believe would hurt the community too much to be worth it. I think players left would either play just to do something or will be super competitive ruining the game for non-donor new comers.
Then we have pay to play. Sorry, I won’t pay to play standard MMORPG’s (Eve, WoW) why in the name of god would I pay to play a browser based game? “My game is that good” or “Pay to play makes the players think it must be good”. Whatever. I have yet to play a web game that has blown me away. I have paid for a few, I have donated to a few. The have been fun for… a week, maybe two. Come on. You think your game is the game to end all other games. It’s not. Sorry.
It may be damn good, but too many developers SUCK about game design. They can code but know shit about gameplay, or even their community.
So, if you are DEAD set on making money with your game, please do the perks, and not pay to play, because no one will play. I personally believe donations (without game perks) are the best not to make money, but to have a strong, happy community, which very likely in the end may pay more than a pissed of donation-game perk based community
Research
Wow, it has been a while since I have last posted.. Sorry all, I have been busy with work. They have me writing actionscript and coldfusion all day.
Anyways, this is a pretty simple idea that is it seems always over looked by those that design games. Go out and research the style of game you want to make before you start making it. Makes sense, eh? That you could go out, join a few games similar to what you want to create and get a feel for the community.
But surprisingly most of the people that are out there developing games have played 2 maybe 3 webgames before. And these games half the time aren’t even related to the genre they want to create! Why in the name of God would you try to create something that already exists without looking at the pre-existing version?
Study the similar games. Find there flaws. Find out what the community wants. Then go design. For instance, my friend and I were going to create a space strategy game. After doing a little research we found a game EXACTLY like the one we designed on paper. Simple, basic game. There was nothing we could really change to make it different so we went back to the drawing board. It was good anyways because I have a few good ideas to create 
So there ya have it. RESEARCH! Do it! Save us and yourself time. I hate seeing coders create a clone of other games without realizing it.
PS: I will try to post more often. I just have trouble thinking of topics to write about. If you have any ideas, please email them or post them in the comments
~BardicK.
Ticks/Timed Events/Crons etc
This post is going to be sweet and simple. When you design a game, say you want to give a player 5 more energy every 15 minutes or that you want to give them a ‘tick’, turn, round whatever every 3 minutes.
Well for this you would use a cron job. A cron job is pretty simple. You simply need to write a script that is constantly checking the time and running it against a equation or database or something. After you have the script written, this is the trickiest part: Ensuring that your server supports crons. It will state somewhere in the describe whether they are supported. Most web hosts don’t support them and that is why you need a server.
Anyways, what the cron on the server does is allow you to set how you want your script ran. So I can set it to run every minute, every 5 minutes or every 10 minutes.
And here’s a tip*
* When getting a server and you need say 5 crons and the server you’re looking at say it only supports one, don’t worry! What you do is turn you crons into functions and put them all in one script that runs, say every minute. This way you still have all your crons running without managing 3 or 4 or even 5 separately.
Now, I have a question for all the scripters out there: What other ways do you have for doing ticks/events, whatever? I would be interested in seeing what other ways a cron can be simulated/done.
Single Player Experience
Well like I said I would write a post soon and I believe this is soon 
So, as I’m sure you can tell by the title this post is about ensuring that your players can enjoy the game if they choose not to be a part of a faction/gang/team or whatever you call it. I even have a personal example I’m going to use! But this post is not meant to be a rival way to doing things as I wrote about in my Player Interaction post. No, this is meant to be the other half of that post. You will need both of these things to have a truly successful game where players not just play to enjoy one part but play because the on a whole the game is enjoyable.
So lets set up the example: I have a friend that I design games with (board mainly) but I told him to design a web game and that I would help him after he gets his core ideas down. Now a little note on this friend is that he’s not a big web game player and doesn’t know really anything about web. Anyways, he had his idea down and the basic premise went something like this: 2 types of units, 4 or 5 types of researches that don’t unlock, give, change the gameplay for you. They simply were mods for numbers, and the main focus was on single player politics.
I have no problem with the focus being on relations but if you are going to put a lot of emphasis on one section you still have to make the other part is enjoyable. So I told him his single play was too weak. That the players don’t have goals and can’t develop in different ways. After a while of arguing and explaining he finally seen my way so just to let you all know now, you can kick and scream and fight what I write, but this will honestly make your designs better. Yes can take the route he wanted but your game will never have 10,000’s or even 1000’s of players. It may be a blast to play but it doesn’t appeal to a broad enough market.
So anyways, this is the way I put it. Everyone wants their game to popular and have several 1000 players. If you put a HUGE emphasis on single player relations the game quickly becomes over whelming for players when you need to deal with 200 people that all think they are right. Then we moved onto group politics. Not everyone in a group can be the political leader apparently, so what are those players supposed to do? What goals do they have? There is no meat to the single player part of the game he had planned on.
My suggestion after he realized that I was right, players that aren’t leaders or don’t want to be leaders would have nothing to do, was this: Have more units each with strengths and weaknesses. This allows players to choose the way they want to develop their military (his was a war game). Have more researches that allow players to again develop in different ways. And have these researches unlock other researches/units. This too allows players to develop differently from each other and allow for multiple styls of game play, which is always a great thing.
Hopefully this beam of light has lit the way for you. Despite the fact we are developing multiplayer games, we need to remember that not everyone is political leader and not everyone is a warrior. We need to keep this is mind when developing. A good way to find out if you game is balanced is to ask yourself this :
Can players develop without interacting with others?
Can players develop in new ways through interacting?
Is there a point to personal development?
Is there a point to player interaction?
Can players development in multiple ways to better suit their style of play?
Do/Can these different styles benefit each other?
Those questions should ensure that you game is pretty balanced. Only playing will truly reveal but these are good guide questions to ask while developing.
As always, comments and input are more than welcomed!
