Building Browsergames

Ryland’s Reviews: Kingdom of Loathing

I’m a relative newcomer to the world of PBBGs. That said, I’m going to be exercising my right to free speech with the magic of the internet and reviewing some of these. Being a newcomer, I asked for some advice on where a good place to start would be, a place to really sink my teeth into. I was suggested to a couple of games, but the one that stuck out the most was Kingdom of Loathing. Since I’d heard of KoL before, I went with the familiar name. I was greeted by a rather sparse page: stickmen with swords and martini glasses, white background, some tables. Fairly standard. No problems registering. Then, without warning, I was introduced headfirst into the madness of this game.

KoL is a class-based game, like most MMORPGs and whatnot. You’ll get new equipment, get new stats, level up, all industry-standard, tried and true boring stuff. Yet KoL is about as unique experience from an RPG as you can get. Replacing wizards? Pastamancers. Replacing thieves? Disco bandits. Awesome. There are 6 classes in KoL, based on the three main statistics of levelling up: Muscle (your attack damage and health stat), Mysticality (the magic stat, increasing MP and magic attack power), and Moxie (your luck stat, determining dodges). The 6 classes are divvied up into the three stats, with 2 classes making use of each stat primarily. It’s a very simple RPG system that lends itself well to the nature of the game; there’s nothing overtly confusing about it. It’s not much deeper than the 3 stats, sadly, but it’s a minor grievance and it barely distracts from the fun of the game.

KoL introduces you to the game in good fashion, establishing the basics through a series of quests. You’re introduced to combat, simple turn-based action, nothing particularly flashy and new about it aside from the fact that you’ll be battling bunny rabbits, cooking trolls, and “bars” which might look like bears but no, it’s just a bar. Grinding involves questing in various areas of the game that you’ll visit, engaging in either a battle, event, or a “choose-your-own-adventure” game where you’ll choose multiple outcomes to arrive at either of the former two ends. Each time you click on an area to grind on, you’ll use one of your “Adventures”, of which are limited (you’ll receive 40 Adventures daily). You can also accumulate Adventures by eating food or drinking booze, until you get too full or too drunk. Choosing where to Adventure is important, as picking a place too high level for you will result in death, giving you a debuff that you’ll likely have to spend some Adventures sleeping at your campground to wear off. Buffs work similarly, in that they last for a certain amount of adventures before wearing off. It’s a rather ingenious system that both penalizes death and promotes strategic gameplay without being too involving.

Which, to be honest, is the main focus point of Kingdom of Loathing. It’s ridiculously laid back. Look at the graphic scheme: stick men, black and white. What’s there is fun to look at not because it’s visually engaging, but because it’s hilarious. It satirizes all the RPG stereotypes while being a rather fun RPG itself. It’s the kind of game that takes a step back from games and just wants to be nothing other than fun. It’s a great game to kick back for a half-hour and just waste some time laughing at the witty dialogue and improving your Seal Clubber’s stats. Really, if you find yourself loathing all the RPG clichés that plague games nowadays, you might fit in playing Kingdom of Loathing.

Tags: kingdom, loathing, of, pbbg, review

Hosting Review: Slicehost

As you may or may not know, Building Browsergames was offline for a short while this weekend. I was transferring Building Browsergames from running off of my own, dedicated server to a Virtual Private Server from Slicehost.

Now, you may be wondering exactly why I made the switch - and it’s a fair question to ask. Previously, I was running Building Browsergames off of a single Linux server, affectionately referred to as “Max”.

While dedicated hosting allows you to find everything you need in a webhost, it also introduces a few things that you need to worry about - namely, supporting your hardware. If a hard-drive fails, or a system goes down and won’t come back up, or your website gets slashdotted/dugg and your server starts to melt, that’s your webhost’s problem - except for when you’re running your own dedicated server. In that situation, anything that goes wrong with your system is your responsibility.

I’m not ready for that responsibility. I have better things to do with my time than work out optimal RAID configurations to make sure there is 0 downtime in the event of a drive failure. But at the same time, I like the flexibility that’s afforded to me by running a dedicated server - if I ever need something non-standard, or I want to install a piece of software, I don’t need to ask anyone - I simply log in to my server, and install the software. Piece of cake.

Slicehost provides the best of both worlds; I get the reliability of having a company managing my server so that I don’t need to worry about drive failures or server meltdowns or anything, but I also get the freedom of having a dedicated system - only virtualized.

The ‘virtualized’ part is a pretty big deal. It means that from Slicehost’s handy web interface, I can do a lot of mundane(but still useful) things - things like backing up my slice(their word for ’server’), rebooting it, dynamically scaling it up or down, and even giving it a handy name to remember it by(my slice is named ‘Max’, just like the server it’s replacing).

There are lots of neat (and handy) things that you can do with Slicehost - but one of the biggest ones is that you can dynamically scale your slices.

What does that mean? For a developer who’s building a game on the cheap, it means Great Things. You can start your game with their basic slice, for $20/month - and run as many websites as you want to off of that single slice. You can even have a single slice for a single website, if you want to. At least to begin with, the starter slice will probably be more than enough for a fledgling browsergame - and with the ability to size it up as you need to, it’s the perfect way to expand without any of the hassle of re-configuring servers.

Want to know about some other cool features? With all but Slicehost’s biggest slice size, you can get a backups plan - for a little bit extra every month, you can keep 3 exact images of your slice. You get one daily backup, one weekly backup, and the ability to create ’snapshots’ of your slice - essentially allowing you to roll-back to any time that you want to(I took one just after I finished the server migration, as an insurance policy in case anything went wrong afterwards).

You can also dynamically add slices to your slicehost account - although each slice does have a monthly cost associated with it. And if you’ve also purchased the backups option, you can create slices based off of your other slices - which means that should I ever want a slice with the exact same configuration as my “Max” slice has, all I need to do is go to “Add a Slice”, and select a snapshot of Max to use as the system Image(If you don’t have a snapshot or want a fresh system, you can choose from a few Linux distributions - Ubuntu 6/7/8, Arch 2007.08, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, and Gentoo).

I had Slicehost recommended to me by someone I respect very much, who justified his choice by saying “if your core competency isn’t hosting, why are you focusing on it?” - and he’s right. And if your core competency is building browsergames, you should be focusing on that - not on getting niggling hardware details in place for your servers. I will warn you that you need at least some experience with the command line in Linux to get started - but if you’re really stuck, there are some great tutorials on HowToForge that will get you up and running in no time.

If you’re thinking about signing up for Slicehost, consider using my referrer link - while it (unfortunately) won’t result in any discounts for you, it will get me a slight reduction in the costs for my slice. If you’d rather register without giving me anything, you can use this non-referral link - or just visit their website to learn more.

Dragon Tavern: First Impressions

Dragon Tavern is a new browsergame that’s been created by a company called Trident Games. For all intents and purposes, it’s your standard browser-based RPG; you make a character, choose a class, and kill monsters in order to get money with which to buy yourself equipment. I was recently e-mailed by Thomas Rice, the Overseer of Trident Games, and given a heads-up that I should take a look at Dragon Tavern. Here’s what I thought of it:

The Good

Every game gets some things right, and some things wrong. The Good categorizes all of the things that I liked about the game, and the things that I got right. The bad, well…you get the idea.

• Auto-banking

  When you visit the tavern, your gold is auto-banked - although I haven’t died yet, I assume that this means I won’t lose any of my gold when I do. Which is always a plus.

• Auto-healing

  Healing your character has been something that bothers me in a lot of RPGs, whether it’s browsergames or otherwise. Why would a game developer make it cost money to get healed? Your character is going to do it thousands of times - and what about those rare situations where you’re too injured to earn enough gold to heal yourself, and yet you don’t have enough gold to heal yourself? Dragon Tavern solves this problem by simply healing you whenever you return to the Tavern - and from what I can tell, it’s Free*.

• Rankings

  I’m a bit of a statistics junkie; that’s why when I created the code to build a login system, it also kept track of the last date that the user logged in. So I like the ranking system that Dragon Tavern has built into it - it uses your total experience for the character you’re playing to show you where you stack up both overall, and against other players of the same class as you are.

• Purchasables are cheap

  Dragon Tavern has something called ‘Credits’ built into it, which players can buy and then spend on things called ‘Advantages’. Credits cost real-world money - but they’re wicked cheap. The cheapest option available is 20 credits, which will cost you $1.99 - working out to roughly $0.10/credit. When you start buying more credits, the prices go down - the biggest package currently is 620 credits, for $29.99 - or 4.8 cents/credit.

• Purchasables don’t ruin the game

  One thing that’s always bothered me about browsergames that decide to go the route of having purchasable ‘credits’ is that things tend to be way overpowered for users who are willing to fork over some cash. With Dragon Tavern, I find that most(if not all) of the purchasables, while definitely able to make your game play a little bit smoother, don’t overpower a character with credits behind them - for example, you could get a Bag of Holding and increase your inventory size, or a Banner of Exploration(which increases your chance to find sub-locations by 20%), but you don’t have to - the game is easily playable without spending a dime.

The Bad

• Auto-selling

  Dragon Tavern follows a tried-and-true game playing procedure: go kill monsters to get loot to sell to get gold to buy gear so you can kill harder monsters. Rinse, lather, and repeat. The problem with this is, Dragon Tavern goes one step further, and completely removes the importance of loot; all it’s good for is selling! As far as I can tell, there’s no way to find a cool piece of armor or weapon, because every item is just a name, a weight, and a sell value. Items are classified into three categories, which are Common, Rare, and Exotic. However, this doesn’t make them particularly ‘cool’ in any way - it just makes them sell for more.

The Maybes

• The Feed

  When you visit the tavern, you’ll see a pseudo-feed of your most recent exploits. There’s also a public feed on the homepage, which shows you the activities of all players within the game(the Tavern version only shows you what you did). While I think this is a cool feature with a lot of potential, while I was playing I didn’t really use it much - most of what it was showing me was ‘you killed <foo>’, which, while interesting, doesn’t really add any value to the game for me. I think it’d be neat to see something like each level-up, and how long it took me in played time to get to that level from the one before it. That’s just me though - I’m sure for some people, the feed is really cool just how it is.

All in all, Dragon Tavern’s a pretty neat game - and fairly well-executed to boot. I didn’t notice any glaring problems at all, and I have to confess that I just about pulled out my credit card to buy some credits when I first ran out of Action Points - a sure sign that I’m hooked.

* ‘Free’, in this case, means that it doesn’t cost any gold. It will still cost you an action point.

Want to get your new browsergame reviewed? Send an e-mail to buildingbrowsergames@gmail.com with the name and URL of your game along with a quick summary of what it’s about, and we’ll be sure to take a look at it - along with sending you an e-mail when we put up the review of your game!