Building Browsergames

I would like to see a tutorial on a structured voting system with rewards. As i just made one, i have some material you can start with.

* In-Game chat setup
* Creating an invitation system (or invite-only)
* Using Facebook Connect or OpenSocial Friend Connect as login services
* Defining, editing, tracking quests for a player
* Methods of pushing content to the browser (Ajax, Orbited, Flash, etc.)
* Scaling games
* Using document-oriented databases for storage (MongoDB, CouchDB, etc.)

Sure....it's a wishlist.

Wishlists are okay :)

I am a little curious about your request for a tutorial on using a
document-oriented database; can you point me to anything that suggests using
one would be a better option for a PBBG than a traditional relational
database? I'm happy to write the tutorial, but I'd like to do it knowing
that it will actually be useful, and not just a "look, this technology is
neat" sort of deal.

In the little work with them that I've done -- they seem to offer an "ease-of-use" that traditional RDB's can't. Particularly with specialized bits of data for say... items. This item needs this bit of data but no other item does *(granted this is contrived) -- something like MongoDB allows you to store this with the item easily without having to special-case anything.

I've built a prototype of my map-based game (Tooth & Claw - on Facebook) and found a considerable performance boost when storing each location as it's own document. A single query returns you all the information about your model. I haven't put this into production as it's still only a proof of concept, but it did seem worth the effort. (It's normally on mySQL)

They lend themselves to unstructured data -- something that games often have to deal with. So, it makes them "neat" in this problem space.

Not to mention some of the super-"neat" scaling features that appear to be inherent in MongoDB and CouchDB (auto-replication, sharding, etc).

Fair enough, thanks for the explanation - I'll do my best to research this
and get a tutorial up in the future.

Hello Luke,

at first, sorry for my bad english.
I´m from Germany and i read all your tutorials.
Thank you for your great Work !

My Wishlist:

- Character Stats Edit, so with every Level up, we can push the char stats.
An example: i got 2 lvls and for this 2 lvls i got for each lvl 5 skillpoints. So i can choose how i give my char the Skills, to attack deffence or something else.

- Maybe an Quest System connect with an Achivment System.
An Example, you have a list with 5 quests in your lvl range. You startet a quest you can fail oder win. if you win you´ll get exp & gold. After finishing 10 quests you got at example an Achivment wich says you´ve got 10 Quests or anythin else.

- An PVP System LVL based which also gives you achivment points like the Online Game World of Warcraft.

An example for you, what an achivment system is
http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-achievements....

more i don´t now at the moment.

Thank you for reading my posting.

I hope you will understand something i have wrote ^^

Greats

Robert

woah, i had so many idea's when i first was going to post... but ill have to get back to you, good to see this website might have some new content!

Hi,

I was browsing the site when I was searching to find an example/tutorial for a game engine. So I would prefer to see a tutorial for creating the game engine.

thanks in advanced.

I'm sorry; I'm not sure I quite understand what you mean by 'the game engine'. What are you looking for a tutorial on - the basic underpinnings of a game, or something else?

I was thinking about some example of code on how to 'update' the game database on events that should be time triggered. this wouldn't be really necessary with direct action such as runescape. I was looking for an alternative for cronjobs... and not really conjobs. It would be a little background process that updates the database on actions that the players has started. For example the sending of troops with some sort of traveling time...

This has actually already been covered, in the post "Using the 'on-view'
method instead of cron". Essentially, you just keep track of timestamps on
all of your actions, and only perform the processing required for them when
a user actually visits something that would require those calculations to
have been performed. That way, you aren't tying up your server with any more
work than it has to do.

You can read the actual write-up at
http://buildingbrowsergames.com/2008/07/18/usin...
.

Considering that the last tutorial was for a text-based game, how about a 2D game tutorial?

Mini-tutorials
- backend administration center for a game
- authorization module (how to prevent one user not viewing another user's details)
- alliances (seen in a lot of RPG games)

When I think at building a browser game I have in mind the entire process of getting it big, including marketing efforts to get players. What I would like is an article about online marketing for browser games

When I think at building a browser game I have in mind the entire process of getting it big, including marketing efforts to get players. What I would like is an article about online marketing for browser games

hiya, can you please make some tutorials, on ways to prevent cheating in a pbbg, to stop cheating, thats the main one,

i would also like to see some tutorials on implementing regex into a pbbg XD

i would also like to chat to you on msn or something, just about afew things

this is just me dreaming, but a tutorial on making a dynamic game, that new features can be easily implemented in would be nice XD

cheers

Where exactly would you want to put regex into a PBBG? Regex is useful, but
I'm not sure I understand where you'd put it.

to secure the data, as at the moment i have profiles for my users, the problem is.. even with escaping the data, my mate managed to hack into it (with my premission) so he said that his website used regex, to secure itself, sadly he hasnt been online for the last month or so, so i coudnt get him to explain to me. i was thinking he used it before the imput was put into the database.

hi luke,
I would like to hear some hints about how to create a territory map (coasts,woods,lakes,and other stuff), not a square map (like in travian).

best regards,

hiya,aaron again ^,^ can you please show us how to players rewards for voting for our games, on top lists, ect, or how to automaticly give them gold, (if they pay for it through paypal)

thanks

As i am testing the reward system on my topsite i had to make a reward system on the game BS RPG, so i wrote a kind of tutorial. It can be a start and can be of course enhanced and reposted here.

http://www.topwebgames.it/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f...

I along with my some friends wish to create a game for the net. We are still working on it. We need your support. I will forward you our problems after I discuss with them.

Hello,

I'm particularly curious on how a world map system without refreshing works in a browser game using just Javascript and AJAX. Like SergiuGothic said, it would be nice to view a tutorial on creating a dynamically expanding image (the world map) in your browser.

Thank you!

I could be wrong here and just me being stupid, but there are a set of really good tutorials but they sort of need to be linked they are a great series of individual tutorials but need to be linked

Lawrence,

Are you talking about the Building Browsergames tutorials, or a different
set? The Building Browsergames tutorials actually *are* linked, and you can
see the progression on the tutorials page at
http://buildingbrowsergames.com/tutorials/.

I'd like to see a tutorial for security to prevent cheaters and hackers from getting an easy picking. And I support a tutorial for a map that updates without refreshing the page.

I've been tiped that a map in a browser game could be done by CSS sprites (all the different map variations are put into a single sprite image with equal size) and z-index for layering.

Say you have dedicated one CSS layer for terrain, usually this would only be set once and never change.
And then you have one layer for various details you'd like to add to the map (cities, structures, items etc)
And one last for players and creatures.

When a creature moves, you could say that the image displayed in layer 3 should now be swapped...

This would make it possible to update the image without refreshing. I've just started to look into this, but my web programming skills are very basic, so I haven't quite figured out how to make this work as a map for a game. Examples I've seen have used mouse over to swap images, which is far from what functionality we'd like in a game map :(

I'd like to put in my vote for a quest or mission system.