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 [email protected].