Today I’m delighted to announce the launch of itembuildr, our latest system for players to create content in the Forumwarz world. Whereas forumbuildr allowed players to create forums, itembuildr allows you to create items that your player can actually equip! Here’s how it works: Step 1. The itembuildr gnomes come up with an item type and stats. This is done automatically, and is mostly random. The item will either be an equippable item or a junk item. It can be anything from a .moar file (in fact, our first build is a video .moar file) to a tattoo or even a special item. Pretty much anything that can be equipped can be designed by our players. ...

Thanks to a recent ad campaign, Forumwarz recently passed the 150,000th registered account mark. When we launched Forumwarz nearly a year and a half ago, we had no idea if people would enjoy it or not, so hitting this milestone is quite meaningful. Attracting that many eyeballs doesn’t come without a cost, though. When Forumwarz had 150 users, I would personally respond to every piece of correspondence I received, whether it was a bug report, game feedback or just people saying ‘hi!’ ...

Today we’ve added scullyangel to our moderator team. I think having a woman on our team will ensure that Flamebate remains the most intelligent and respectful forum on the Internet for many years to come.

Fan Service! For those who have finished Episode 2, we have partnered together with Celerysteve to build you a new mission that parodies one of our infamous forum members. The quest is only available for a limited time, so be sure it check it out sooner rather than later. You can access it on top of your character’s page. New Epeen(tm)! We’ve also added some new E-Peen(tm) to the game: I’ll BINGE to that ...

A bunch of people showed interest in the conversation editor I showed off in the screenshots of our admin section. I decided to record a screencast that shows off how the tool works. It’s un-rehearsed and rough around the edges but it’ll give you an idea of how we write the conversations that you play out in sTalk. View the Screencast

I wrote up this article for Building Browsergames, a cool site for people who are interested in building games like Forumwarz. I’m cross-posting it here. For most retail computer and video games, once your game gets shipped into stores, the job is done. Sure, there may be bug fixes or future downloadable content, but those require a skeleton staff and minuscule budgets compared to the development of the initial game. On a browser game, the process is a bit different. Since there is no physical product shipping out in flashy boxes, you can deliver new content with virtually no deployment costs. However, in this sense, it means the job is never quite done. It becomes a constant effort to continuously improve the product. It also becomes trickier to try to sell it. ...

There’s a short interview with me up on Building Browsergames. I think it’s a promising site that’s geared towards helping out develoepers who are interested in building their own games like Forumwarz. (I’ve also agreed to do a Forumwarz “Post-Mortem” for them. It should be live shortly and I’ll probably cross-post/link it on this blog too.)

While it’s not as obvious when you’re going through quests and having fun playing, underneath the scenes, Forumwarz is just a database. Every forum, attack, conversation and cinematic is represented in the database somewhere so we can keep track of it and modify it as we need. In order to maintain all this data, we have quite a large admin section. Only a handful of people have access to it, so it’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it’s functional and allows us to build new content and episodes. ...

So Kyoubai has been quite the success! Since it launched just over two weeks ago, we’ve hosted over 40,000 auctions with 150,000 bids. At any given time, there seems to be over 1,000 auctions to peruse for stuff like rare .moar files. Thanks to all our users who offered input and helped us tweak the system so that it’s easier to use and less prone to exploits. Up Next: ItemBuildr ...

Greetings, The wait is over and with the Domination round starting Wednesday January 28th a slew of changes will be implemented to improve Domination and provide better balance for all players. The major changes drastically affect Klan Raiding so if that’s your thing, please review the flamebate post for all the details! We will be monitoring the effects of the changes closely, so please TubMail BINGEBOT 2015 if there are any issues. We want to ensure that the changes work for the majority of players and enhance the game. ...