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
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. ...
I just got this tubmail: Hey Trout, On building forumwarz the past 1-2 years, would you say that you’ve learned more about web technologies and web business than you would have if you were to work in a typical 9-5 IT company? thanks - udo I liked the question a lot so I decided to post my answer here on the blog. Yes. Absolutely yes. First a bit of history for those unfamiliar, which I think qualifies me to answer this question. Feel free to skip to the next section if you just want to know my answer and don’t care about how we got to where we are. ...
Ever wonder what happens behind the scenes when you click on an action on your toolbar in Forumwarz? The action might perform an attack. It might heal you. It might even do both! Some attacks are stronger when you’re weaker, others spawn buffs that protect (or harm you) for multiple turns. How does the game know what to do? Putting Effects in the Database When I was first prototyping Forumwarz, I stored the information for each action as rows in a database table. An Action would have multiple Effects. ...
Note: The article is about the code behind Forumwarz for those who are interested in such things. If people like it I might write more like it! Flooding is what happens when a user submits data repeatedly to your server. A good example would be a user who repeatedly posts comments on your message board. Sometimes it’s done innocently: a user hits the submit button 5 times impatiently during a bit of server lag, only to find their post went through 5 times. ...