Building Browsergames

Building Browsergames: a brief design document

One important but often neglected part of building a browsergame is planning it - what you will be building, and how you will be building it.

So far, we’ve built a login and registration system for a browsergame - but not much else. In order to plan a little more out for our game, here’s a small sketch of what we’ll build(at least to start off):

• Town

There will be a town, where users can access all of the shops/etc. within the game. These shops are the bank(pays interest on each daily visit by the user), the armor shop, weapon shop, and healer(although there could be more shops later).

• Forest

There will also be a forest area, where users can get into fights with creatures and search for items(very low chance to find items). Users will be able to search for monsters, visit the spring(random 2% chance to have something cool happen), or search for items/go back to town.

• Monsters

To begin with, there will only be a few monsters. These are their names(they don’t have stats yet):

• Crazy Eric
• Psychotic Jeff
• Laid back Nick
• Lazy Russell
• Hard Hitting Louis

• Tracking

A count will be kept of how many of each particular monster a user has killed - eventually, this might be used for a quest or something.

• Administrator Control Panel

It would be nice to build an administrator control panel, so that administrator users can easily add items/monsters/etc. to the game, without having to interact with(and potentially screw up) the database directly.

And that’s what will be in the browsergame that we’ve been building - if there’s anything else that you think should be in it(or you’d like to learn how to implement - we can add it in), just send an e-mail to buildingbrowsergames@gmail.com.

Random Posts

• October 13, 2008 -- Buying Items (PHP)
• July 2, 2008 -- Designing a flexible items system
• May 26, 2008 -- Post-Mortem: Black Sword RPG Part I, “Getting There”
• May 18, 2008 -- Building Browsergames: Getting started with a templating system (Perl)
• May 12, 2008 -- Building Browsergames: Implementing an e-mail confirmation system (Perl)

Luke is the primary editor of Building Browsergames, and has written a large portion of the articles that you read here. He generally has no idea what to say when asked to write about himself in the third person.