Barchok Blog

Game X, as I will call it, was an online web game that I made nearly three years ago, as a supplemental game to keep people occupied while I worked on another game in RPG Maker. While I eventually finished the game made in RPG Maker, it was an exercise in learning that I really didn’t do plot writing very well, and making it up as I go along can cause problems. Anyway, since the game was an online game that lasted for six months, and topped out at 300 registered players (and a top record of 10 online at a single time), this postmortem is going to be a bit different from my previous ones, consisting mostly of my rambling about how the entire thing failed.

First, the game itself was just a clone of the much funnier, and better made Kingdom of Loathing. It was also made for an obscure online community, with a pretty low population average. These two facts were probably the biggest problem, and the reason everything failed after six months. I was also brand new to SQL, and generally new to PHP, and the code I wrote would make me shudder with the amount of security holes and other problems. Amount other things, the inventory list was a single character delimited string consisting of an item’s ID, and a “how many they have” number. This nightmare of a system was further worsened by the fact that I had little to no error checking, and it was possible to put in a random alphabetical character in most of the boxes dealing with item management. This would result in a corrupted inventory string, and would cause a problem for that player. I eventually coded a page to allow me to edit the raw string, making fixes possible, but not always easy.

I also learned how important it was to have content for an online game ready to go to launch. Now, this seems obvious, but at the same time, players will go through all your carefully crafted quests fairly fast (or if you don’t have any actual quests, they’ll just fight monsters all day). There’s ways to limit how much content a player can go through, but often times, players will attempt to find a way around that, or simply get annoyed by everything, and give up.

The last thing I learned is you need to have an economy that works. This is mostly true for RPGs, or similar game types, since it’s dealing with item usage, and crafting. A good economy is incredibly hard to achieve, but a few general rules consist of having items that are consumed, making sure there’s a reason to trade between players, and keeping excessively powerful items from existing, or limiting their use by level.

While most of what I’ve mentioned is common sense, it’s important to realize to anyone wanting to make an online game. The failure of Game X has prevented me from finishing other online projects due to a worry of another repeat of a failed game.