Building Browsergames

Diary a Browsergame: building prototypes

As discussed in Working Title’s design document, we are going to be using Ajax to dynamically update the screen. Ideally, it will look as if a user has entered an IRC chat-room – except instead of chatting, they’ll be playing a game.

I always like to prototype my projects before I start them – I start with the template, and then start building quick mockups of functionality I plan to have. Usually, the code that I used to build my prototype can be cleaned up and used to build whatever I’m building anyways, so I’m still writing code towards my goal – with the benefit of having something to show for it a little faster.

With that in mind, I set out to build a simple tester page that shows off some of the Javascript that will be behind Working Title’s ‘play’ page – while it doesn’t do any posting back, it demonstrates what the functionality is supposed to look and feel like(albeit a little faster than it would be in the actual game). Here’s the Working Title test page, which will let you see how I’m planning on having the game behave.

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.