Tell us a little about Wicked Dead.

Well, the game starts where life ends.

You are dead – and instead of going to heaven or hell, you’ve gone to a place called Wicked Dead. You are Wicked Dead! Here, you get a chance for a new life. You need to enter the gates and complete
objectives and battles. For every level you complete, a new one will open – but if you fail a level,
you’re bumped back 2 levels. The goal of the game is to complete level 100 – then you are given a new life!

In the levels you will need to do wicked stuff. If you die you die very painfully, but get reborn
and can improve your stats. Yeah, you read that right – you can only improve your stats by dying! So
deciding whether to complete a level or die is sometimes a hard decision.

Energy is your life-force – you need energy to enter a gate and complete the objective. No energy means no fun. You regain energy over time though, so don’t worry. You also have a stat called ‘pain’ – when you die, your pain goes up. If you have a pain rate higher than 90 you will be unable to access a gate because you are so scared and have so much pain that you can’t do anything (so don’t die too much!). Pain goes away over time.

One thing to remember while playing Wicked Dead: not everything is what it seems! There are many tricks in place, and you will also meet other people in the gates.

What gave you the initial idea for Wicked Dead?

I was playing a game with some friends and we were losing badly. I was
dying all the time and I thought, why don’t they make a game where death is
rewarding? And then I started with an idea to make a game which rewards
dying. My first idea was that you needed to try losing, the one who dies first
wins. When I read about the competition I started working on that idea and
then Wicked Dead was born. I changed it a bit, you get better when dying
and you sometimes need to win and sometimes need to lose. Also, luck
is something you will need. And lastly, I like to fool with people so thats also integrated into the game.

What language did you write Wicked Dead in? What are you hosting it on?

I used PHP, along with XHTML and MySQL for the database. I have a lot of experience with them,
so it was a logical choice. I’m using the same shared hosting provider I use for all of my sites.

What was something that went well during the contest? What was something
that didn’t?

Well the first 2 weeks went well, there is really nothing that went bad in
terms of programming. Only thing that took some time was balancing out the
stats and items. But thats something I always invest a lot of time in.

The thing that went bad was time! During the last two weeks of the contest, I almost
didn’t get time to work on the game! I even forgot to upload my last changes
before the competition ended. But it was no big deal – the basic idea was in place,
and the update only added pvp and more levels.

Do you have any plans for Wicked Dead, going into the future?

At the moment I dont have much time to work on it, but I’m working on it.
In the future more levels will be added and also a Minion minigame with
aura stones. There are only a few and people will fight for it with their
minions. Upgrading their base and creating minions or towers. The next gate
levels will get more complex, more paths to follow, more choices and more
tricks to fool people. I’m planning to make 100 levels, but at the moment there are only 18 ready to go – so there’s still a lot to do. I’m not planning to advertise it yet in
the near future, maybe somewhere in the summer. I first want more levels
ready. The problem is that I can’t make them as fast as people can play
them. And after all, I’m making it for fun.

Have you played Wicked Dead yet? What did you think of it? Let us know in the comments!

Here’s what we need alpha testers to do:

• Play the game.
• Diligently report any and all bugs/unexpected behavior using the built-in feedback form.

Interested? You can apply to join the closed alpha program by submitting your information at http://bbrowsergames.wufoo.com/forms/faction-wars-closed-alpha/.

PHudBase, a project built by John DeLancey for his upcoming PBBG, has
been released as open-source for the PBBG
community to try out, rip up, and improve upon.

PHudBase (or just PB) is a game engine written in PHP that’s broken up
into two parts — the server (game engine itself) and
a client that connects using HTML 5 WebSockets. The engine also
supports Telnet and Flash connections, but that’s not what it’s
really about.

The server runs on your webserver using the PHP CLI (command line
interface) module. It sets up a server that is meant to
run forever, listening for new connections, processing game actions,
and talking to and hearing from your users.

The client is — really — just an example of what WebSockets and HTML
5 are going to do for us (Google Chrome is the only
browser that currently supports WebSockets). It connects to the
server as you’d expect, with just a few lines of javascript
and no plugins at all.

The codebase — hosted at Google Code — contains a very, very basic
game that you can build on top of or completely discard.
You can use anything you want to store your data, and MySQL is
certainly a great choice. It also supports caching via APC or
memcached (or anything else) with “hooks” that you can replace with
the appropriate store/get/delete function calls (it currently stores
every
object in the game in an array in the Game object, itself).

The project’s homepage is http://www.phudbase.com, where there’s a
demo for you to try out and links to the Google Code and
Google Groups pages for you to download and discuss the project.

Do you have a press release that you’d like us to publish? Get in touch by e-mailing buildingbrowsergames@gmail.com, leaving a comment below, or following us on Twitter.

• Qorporate Quest
• Wicked Dead
• Demons
• ModularGaming
• Duel Arena

Due to unforeseen circumstances, all of the other entrants were forced to drop out (including yours truly). Better luck next time!

If you were interested in participating in the contest, there’s a new contest on to build a small game within 24 hours (spread over up to two weeks) – can view view the thread on bbgamezone if you’re interested.

If you were one of the participants in the contest (whether you finished or not), get in touch! I’d like to talk to some of the other participants about their thoughts on the contest and their entries.

NoSQL databases provide a different approach than traditional relational databases by being ’schema-less’ – allowing you to quickly and easily add arbitrary data to whatever you need to. This is a feature that’s extremely well-suited to browsergames – if you need a certain item to have a specific attribute that no other item has, it’s easy: you just add it, and move on. In a traditional SQL-based database setup, you’d need to add a column and make sure it was null or defaulted for all of your other items – which would be a major hassle if you had a large number of items.

Both the CouchDB and MongoDB sites have quickstart guides – if you haven’t tried one of the two out already, I highly encourage you to do so.

• CouchDB Quickstart
• MongoDB Quickstart

If you still need some convincing, here are a few areas in a game where a NoSQL database like Couch or Mongo will be better-suited than a traditional database like MySQL or PostgreSQL:

• Items

  So you have a potion, and potions usually heal people. But for this one super-rare potion, you want to heal the player and teleport them to a secret location. How?

  In a traditional SQL-based system, you’d add a column to your items table to track what the potion did, and then add the extra code and handlers so that when a potion of the one super-rare type was used, the player was both healed and teleported. This works, but it’s a bit of a pain – you need to create/track a new item type, along with writing the code to handle it.

  In a schema-less situation (when you’re using something like Couch or Mongo), all you have to do is add an attribute ‘teleports_player_to’ to your item – and then in your code, check if the item has a ‘teleports_player_to’ attribute. If it does, teleport the player there after running your item handling code. All done!

• Quests

  Quests are one area where schema-less storage really shines. You want to keep track of quests a player is on – but each quest is different! One quest involves killing a certain number of enemies, while another requires you to talk to two different NPC’s, while yet another needs you to move Important Package A to Secret Location B. How do you track all of that data?

  In a relational database, you do it by keeping track of what ‘type’ each quest is, along with a small amount of arbitrary information related to that quest. For a “kill 10 ogres” quest, you need to track that it’s a killing quest, you need 10 things killed, and those ‘things’ are, in this case, ogres. For a “delivery” quest, you need to track which item the player has to have, and which location they need to take it to.

  In situations like this, using a relational database to track information for your quests starts to break down very rapidly. What if you wanted to have a quest that required a player to kill 10 ogres, and then deliver a package to the town mayor? How would you do that?

  With a schema-less database, this is easy. All you have to do is check which attributes you quest has, and write your code to work around them – so if you wanted to have a quest where users had to kill 28 goblins, talk to the goblin herder and the shepherd, and then deliver the goblin herder’s letter of surrender to the shepherd, you could – all you’d have to do is check the quest attributes.

What other situations can you come up with when a NoSQL database might be superior to using a relational database to track data in your game, or when a relational database is a better option? Let us know in the comments!

• The contest runs for one month this time (instead of 2 last time) – it starts today, and ends on the 18th of february.
• Competitors are allowed to enter the contest in the middle, although they may start at a slight disadvantage.
• You must start with a new game – the only exceptions are old/ancient games that you haven’t worked on in a long time (subject to judge approval), or games that were entered in the last contest and placed lower than 5th when it came time for judging.

Right now, there are no prizes for the contest, as it’s solely for fun and reputation building – but that’s not to say that by the end of the month, there won’t be any.

Interested? Take a look at the forum thread for more information, and good luck!

The overwhelming response to the question What would you like to see on Building Browsergames primarily? was tutorials — while I know I’ve kept you all waiting, I’m hoping to be able to begin publishing some of the tutorials on the tutorial list very soon.

One of the readers who responded to the survey mentioned that they’d like to see some more “architecture” oriented tutorials – but forgot to provide their e-mail! If that was you, please get in touch with me at buildingbrowsergames@gmail.com, and I’ll see what I can do.

Based on the number of survey respondents who indicated that they were interested in writing for
Building Browsergames, it looks like we should have a lot more updates coming down the pipe – I also have a few changes in mind for the site that should make it easier for new (and old) visitors to find things on the site that they haven’t already, going into the new year. There are big plans for The PBBG Network and PBBG Snippets in the works as well — but I’m keeping those under wraps for now.

Once again, thanks to everyone who responded – I hope that everyone had a safe and happy new year.

If you’d like to provide some feedback, please take some time to fill out the Building Browsergames Christmas Survey, and give me your opinions.

Want to leave more feedback? Get in touch with a comment, or send an e-mail to buildingbrowsergames@gmail.com.

Well, it took me four years, but I believe I have finally proven that you don’t need Flash to make great web games. I have just launched a new website called “Effect Games”, which allows developers to create professional quality JavaScript games for free, and publish and share the games just like they would a YouTube video.

There are several game demos up on the site, so you can see what the engine can do. All modern browsers and platforms are supported, including IE 6+, Firefox 3+, Safari 3+, Chrome 1+, and Opera 9+.
Games are powered by the “Effect Engine”, my JavaScript / DHTML library that provides the framework for displaying and animating all the graphics, playing all the sounds & music, handling the keyboard & mouse, and sprite collision detection. It can smoothly render multiple layers of parallax scrolling tiles and sprites using pure DHTML (no Canvas or SVG, so it plays nice with all browsers).

HTML 5 Audio is used where supported (currently Safari on Mac OS X 10.5 only, 10.6 and Firefox coming soon), and 3rd party extensions used elsewhere. But developers don’t have to worry about the underlying implementation. The engine provides a single API, which is the same no matter what tech is used under the covers. Write your game code once, and it’ll run everywhere. Everything is documented online, including a side-scrolling platformer tutorial.

We have an integrated web app which allows developers to prepare and design their game online. It comes with an Asset Manager for uploading and organizing game graphics and audio, a Level Editor for laying out sprites and tiles into levels, and lots of tools for manipulating graphics in real-time using non-destructive filters (scaling, rotation, and a number of other transforms).

Users can develop their games locally on their Macs or PCs, and don’t have to upload any code until they are ready to publish. The game publisher can compile their code automatically using Google Closure, and provides them with a unique URL and embed code to share the game on their own site, blog, or anywhere they want.

The engine also has a Plugin architecture to bring in 3rd party libraries to add new features. For example, we just released a Box2D Physics Plugin, bringing realistic physics simulations into the engine.

We’re getting ready to launch a slew of new features in the coming months, including video support, achievements, leaderboards, more social network integration, and the ability to save & load games in progress.

After taking a look at some of the demos, it looks like there are a lot of cool things to be made with EffectGames – it will be interesting to see what the community creates with the service.