SWTOR - Me the fanboy but...

How are they able to put that much content online.

Either they have a big marketing team (well, it's Bioware after all) or they are not that far from release...

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Learning from Eve Online

Yep!

That made me thought of a new "unexploited market segment" for Golemizer: The only game you can play at work if your boss has cut Flash from your PC!

So if you're stuck in a cubicle with nothing to do, Golemizer is for you!

Seriously though (hmm, but I was serious!), it shows that if you believe in what you do and put a lot of work that there's some chances you'll be able to reach your goal.

There's no point cloning things you can't do as an indie developer. Instead, you should stop for a minute and think why you decided to go indie in the first place. You might found out that you decided to make games because you didn't find any game that was fitting what you were looking for.

Well guess what, you're not alone and not everyone will start to develop their own game! So there's a market for us. It's up to us to grab it.

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RMT

I spent some time reading the comments about that article on mmorpg.com about RMT.

The first thing I remembered is the reason why I don't spend much time on these forums... And then I remembered over 10 years ago playing Magic: The Gathering... Some were able to buy very expensive (and overpowered) cards while I was playing with an elf deck and still had fun.

Not sure there's more to say beside that Magic has probably been a true gold mine for Wizards of the Coast since 1993...

I played SWG for about 2 years. At $15 per months, that makes $360 (and at some point I had 2 accounts so let's say a bit over $400). I have never spent that much money on Magic cards, even when the online version came out, and always had fun playing it. And then I know of more than 1 player that paid way more than $400 for a jedi account (and even non-jedi accounts).

So I'm not quite sure why some are thinking RMT is so new and that "the majority of players are against it". Seems like some thousands and thousands of players didn't mind spending way too much money into a cards game. What would make MMOs any different?

Surely there's better ways to handle this than others, very much like anything in life...

edit: One funny fact about my experience in SWG. I never could get the best weapons because I wasn't spending enough time going after the big loot and was always counting the few credits I had until a friend of mine quit the game and gave me all his stuff and money.

That day I bought some very powerful weapons that I was never able to buy before. So you could say that I gained "an unfair advantage that I didn't worked for" yet nobody complained about it.

If SWG would have been a free game with RMT, I could have spent the $400 I spent on subscription to buy directly these big guns and the results would have been the same in the end.

Anyway, I was still bad at combat with my big guns so I guess that's why people didn't bother about me getting free stuff.

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World building - Avoid loose coupling

I'm currently working on a system that will be able to get directions from point A to point B wherever you are in Golemizer. Well, almost...

When I first started building the MMO framework, I had no real idea of what game I would build with it so I made some decisions that would give me more freedom. An example is that at first, zones reached through a "portal" had no idea to which portal they were attached.

I figured that I'd have many types of non-open-world zones like buildings, mines, dungeons but had no clear idea (maybe besides buildings). I wanted to keep my system as generic as possible to be able to create different type of zones without having to do specific coding for each. It all went well at first.

Then came the question what if I want to specify access rights to a building. I have no way to link the zones to the building.

Then dungeons came in. I had multiple zones with the same coordinates and no way to tell which one was the zone on the same current "level" when players were expanding their dungeons (because I need to detect if a zone already exists in X direction to link zones together).

So my initial plan wasn't that smart. I had to add a notion of link between zones and buildings and the same for zones and levels of dungeons. I guess that if I would have been even smarter, I would have built some generic system to track that so I wouldn't had to code 2 different things that do in the end quite the same thing...

One thing I haven't covered is mines... There's 3 mines in Golemizer and they were built before the dungeon system so they are just an item in the world leading to a zone linked to other zones. I can't tell which zones are part of a given mine.

Now of course I'll be able to fix that later as I still know the entrance zone so from there I can walk in each zones and link them back to the mine but that just create extra work. That shows that loose coupling was really a bad idea to begin with.

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Steampunk MMO

If you're intested in steampunk MMOs (beside Golemizer of course...), Gatheryn is now accepting beta registration here: http://www.mindfusegames.com/index.php?option=com_user&task=edit

It seems Steampunk is getting more love from MMOs recently. Of course, it's all coming from Golemizer... ;)

The one that is the most freaking me out is Neo Steam from... Atlus Online. Atlus... Dr. Altus... Of course, when you mess with the latin dictionary, there's some chances you come up with similar names... And I swear, when I decided of the name Dr. Altus for Golemizer I wasn't aware of Atlus Online.

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