Archive for the ‘design’ Category

Diary of a Browsergame: Planning out the templates

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Now that I've set up my database, it's time to settle on a templating system, and decide on how I want my templates to work. Working Title only has a few pages that will need to be displayed - according to Design 1.0, there are a total of 7 - Home, ...

Using the “on-view” method instead of cron

Friday, July 18th, 2008

bardic commented on the cron post from yesterday, and he said: While crons are a good way to do such a task, they aren’t the best solution. For a game with a large DB a cron can take too long to cycle through the DB. bardic is right, here - in any ...

Building Browsergames: Securing our hashes (Perl)

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

Yesterday, we worked on securing our hashes in PHP - and today, we're going to take a look at our Perl systems. According to tilly from perlmonks, crypt() is horribly insecure - which is definitely a big problem. We're going to need to update our login and registration system, so that ...

Building Browsergames: Securing our hashes (PHP)

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

John Munsch recently pointed out that there's a bit of a glaring security hole in our login and registration systems: at the moment, we're extremely vulnerable to Rainbow Table attacks. In John's words: The MD5 hash doesn’t actually protect you if someone were able to dump your table of users or ...

Diary of a Browsergame: Setting up the database

Monday, July 14th, 2008

One of the first things I do for any new project of mine is design the database - so that's what's going to happen to Working Title today. This design will probably change slowly over the course of development - it's just a good starting point for now. To begin with, ...

Building Browsergames: DRYing out our stats

Friday, July 11th, 2008

Over the course of developing our game, our database has sort of grown organically. As we added a new feature, we'd add the tables we needed to accomodate this feature. While this works(and has been working for us just fine), it's not neccessarily the best way to design your database ...

Building Browsergames: DRYing out our database connections (Perl)

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

One piece of our code that definitely needs a bit of DRYing out is our database connections - we keep copying and pasting the exact same code anytime we want to connect! We've been repeatedly writing out the exact same three lines, any time we want to connect to a database ...

Building Browsergames: DRYing out our database connections (PHP)

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

In the interest of DRYing out our code a bit, there's another change we can make: our database connection code. Every time that we want to work with the database, we need to connect to it in order to do anything - and so far, we've just been copying and pasting ...

Designing a flexible items system

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

When building an inventory system, there are a lot of different approaches that you can take. Some developers simply hard-code everything, while others make sure that nothing is hard-coded - and in between both of these two extremes is a comfortable middle point, where we have most of the flexibility ...

Monetizing Your Game

Friday, June 27th, 2008

One of the cooler aspects of building a browsergame is that there's a potential to make money off of it. While you won't make millions overnight, you can still make a little bit - at least enough to offset your costs and then some. And if your game does take ...