Decisions, Decisions
1) I’m a lazy SOB so I’m going to integrate the game’s login system with the SMF’s login system so I can login once and forget about it.
2) I’m realizing how massive this is going to be to do and I may end up cutting back on a few aspects I’ve kept to myself. My wish list of features is waaaaaaay to long for me to implement almost entirely by myself. (Ya I know I can recruit students on me via forums and such but…based on previous experience most people aren’t reliable. Including me, although I am getting better!).
3) Fitting in with my general theme of laziness, I’m probably going to use an IRC web-client of some kind to handle in-game chat. This will save me the time of rolling my own chat system (even if it would be one of the least time consuming features to implement). It’ll also allow people who like to just idle and/or chat in IRC to chat with people playing without having to actually log on. And I think anything that encourages people to spend time ‘around’ (if not actually in) Erth will help. That and it would be easier to hijack an IRC Bot to handle the automated chat messages (e.g. Nation X has declared on Nation Y) than it would be to my roll my own.
4) I’ll be using the jQuery stuff I mentioned earlier since it is clear to me I need to save as much time as I can with existing software that won’t poke me in the side.
Oh….and a prelim. skill list. =)
EDIT:
Good luck with your PBBG. I also develop/design games so I feel ya when ya talk about being lazy
Thanks. =)
I had to roll my own chat for my PBBG because it actually processes game commands in a MUD way. I am slowing working on a Silverlight interface though, I started using Flash but got tired of re-writing all of my classes in both C# and ActionScript. I’ll have to use a custom chat for that as well since it will probably still just send commands to the command handler so the AJAX and Silverlight versions can work side by side.
Ya…I’m going with a more visual/point ‘n click interface so chat commands are just ‘nice extra things’ rather than a key component of the game.
BTW I am waiting for your game to come out. =)