Online poker is a very popular game. It’s also a huge industry, due to the fact that poker is played for real money and poker rooms can take a provision from the players, much in the same way as a derivatives trading exchange.

However, poker has not taken the same position within the free browser games segment, which is a bit surprising and should entice programmers looking for new niches.

Of course many people are reluctant to invest real money in a poker game with a bunch of strangers, to say the least. But playing for fun in the realm of a friendly online gaming site should definitely appeal to people, and poker is a really good game.

Let’s take a quick look at some of the challenges awaiting him or her who wants to step into a browser poker game effort.

Design

Obviously, the design should appeal to the target group – people who don’t necessarily like to gamble with large sums of money. Maybe something friendly, something with a happy feeling about it. Online flash game style.

Players will probably want to design their avatar, or at least pick it from a list, the longer the better. And the display of money needs to be very clear, so that it’s easy to see how much is in the pot and how much money the opponents have in their stacks. Even if it’s a fun money game, this will be important.

Playability

For a browser poker game to gain popularity, it definitely needs to achieve a high degree of playability. Just as with any other game, players will run away if they have to spend energy figuring out how to work the game controls.

Also, if the poker game is to be multiplayer, player interaction needs to be made really easy and smooth. Any glitches and freezes in the game flow would risk mass defection, not to speak of outright errors in counting the money owed between players.

Stability

Online poker rooms spent the first years of the poker boom struggling to build game server software with really good stability, rather than perfecting the look and feel of the poker clients (which at the time was almost exclusively a download poker game.)

They knew that players would leave really fast if they got the impression that games couldn’t be trusted. Of course, in fun money games the problem isn’t quite as acute, but stability is important.

Game lobby with waiting list feature

When setting up online games for multiple players, you have to come up with a solution to the problem of starting and joining games. Online poker rooms and backgammon sites often feature pretty advanced game lobbies, with active games being listed and sorted in various categories.

Enabling players to join waiting lists for games that are full is very useful, even when the player is currently seated in another game – or several.

It saves a lot of manual reloading in the chase of an open seat. It also reduces the risk of failure when several players try to join a game simultaneously.

A good game lobby prevents a lot of frustration among players and works as a lubricant for the game machine.

One of the most important things to do after launching your game is to keep it going; a lot of the bigger games out there(Kingdom of Loathing, UrbanDead, etc.) have been running for years – and the fact that they’ve been running for so long is part of their staying power. After over 5 years of building content, Kingdom of Loathing is extremely well established; it would be difficult for a new game to compete with them without providing a different gameplay format to entice players with.

With that being said, there are a few small, easy things that you can do to make sure that your game never seems ‘dead’:

• Update your game

  Just like Evil Trout said in his post-mortem for Forumwarz, “the job is never quite done”. There will always be a part of your game that needs work; maybe the design needs cleaning up, or there are bugs to be fixed, or there’s a new feature that you’d like to add. Whatever it is, there’s always something you can do with your game – so do it! If you can commit to updating even just once a week, it will show players that you’re dedicated to your game – and their confidence in your game’s staying power will grow.

• Tell people you updated your game

  Updates are good, but they’re not going to show users that you’re actually working on your game if they have no idea they’re happening. If most of your updates are content additions and features, you may want to start up a development blog – if the changes and tweaks you’re making to your game are primarily smaller(like balance adjustments and bugfixes), you may want to stick with something like Twitter. Whatever you do, you need to come up with a way to show users that your game is still actively growing and changing.

• Advertise

  This suggestion might sound a little weird, but think about it: when have you ever seen a dead game in an ad? By keeping your game ‘out there’, you’ll keep attracting new players – and it’s the community that will keep you motivated to work on your game, even when you don’t really want to.

• Respond to all e-mails promptly

  This is something that I’ve been neglecting with Building Browsergames lately – but an important(and easy) way to keep players from thinking that your game has died. Have you ever e-mailed someone, waited two weeks, and still not gotten a response? It’s hard to tell whether they even got your e-mail!

  When an e-mail comes to you, respond to it as promptly as possible. If a user e-mails you with a question(or a bug report) and gets a response within half an hour, they know that your game isn’t dead – and they know that you’re listening.

What do you do, to make sure your game doesn’t die? Is there anything on this list you’re not doing?

Google Apps

Google Apps allows you to set up your own suite of Google-driven applications, for free – giving you shared documents, e-mail, calendars, and wikis. If you have control of your domain’s DNS records and haven’t already set up any MX records for another service, I would highly recommend Google Apps for your e-mail – I’ve been using the service for the last 6 months on a number of side projects, and haven’t had to deal with any headaches or downtime. Also, a 99.9% uptime guarantee is great if(like me) your core competency is development instead of e-mail.

Google Ajax APIs

Google also makes available a large number of Ajax APIs for developers – which lets you build things like Google Maps into your game, for free. One of the more useful APIs that they make available is their Ajax Libraries API – which means that you no longer have to worry about hosting your own copy of the core libraries for the javascript framework you’re using. The benefit of using Google’s Ajax Libraries API comes from caching, primarily – if users have visited a page that used the Google Ajax Libraries API before they visit your site, the javascript will be cached – which means that’s one piece of code their browser won’t need to fetch again when they visit your page. In the end, this results in a speed boost for your site – and even if the user doesn’t have the library cached yet, Google’s servers are configured with optimal performance and cachability in mind, so you don’t need to worry about doing that yourself.

Those are just two of the services Google offers that are useful to browsergames and not every developer knows about; are there any other Google tools your game is using?

It’s time to realize that unless you want it to have an eight to ten year gestation like RSS did then we need to either have a “PBBG Council” like the Beef Council that can promote awareness and adoption of the game and the term to refer to them or we need to pick a name that’s just a wee bit more end user friendly for the category as a whole. And maybe this time it can be one that you can say aloud without sounding like an idiot (or maybe that’s just me).

The Browser-Based Game Zone’s PBBG contest has finished its judging period; you can check out the winners here. I’m hoping that we will be able to post reviews and interviews with the entrants sometime during this new year.

Building Browsergames would like to wish you and yours a happy new year – here’s hoping your 2008 was as good as ours was.