Mint Berry Crunch

It looks great but just please don't use comic sans!

Free advertising exists?

very helpful

Good point on the scammers, I will probably implement in an inbuilt mechanic for arranged directed trade. I will limit it somehow to prevent abuse though (multiple account abuse etc). Yeah option 4 is a bit of a weird one, it probably suits the 3D MMO more, but I mentioned it because I played Remanum which is a trading game. Players sell their goods off to each other at the auction house with an inherent risk of making lots of money or little. Alternatively they can sell to the NPC market where they can set a price and get a guaranteed sale. The drawback is that the rate of which the NPC buys the stuff off you is exponentially reduced as you raise the price above the auction house selling price average, and vice versa. A bit funky, and probably only exists because the game is essentially about trade and economy. Not going into my game but might be some food for thought if I make an economy/business game later.

Interesting you say that, I would have said the complete opposite :D IMO Auction house is suitable for the whole medieval bourgeois culture; strategy is more for the grander scale of things, so auction doesn't make too much sense.

Just curious which medium for player-player trading developers use in their game for player-player trading and why. I ask because I still haven't decided which method to use for my own game and whether there are alternatives I cannot think of (my game context is medieval strategy). The ones I can think of:   Direct Trade/Barter - player contacts other player and arranges a trade. Easy to implement, not much to code. Marketplace - big list of people offering things to sell or buy for currency. Still easy to implement. Can add market sales tax as an effective money sink in the game. Auction House- players compete to bid on offers. More complex code. I can imagine that this is more geared towards games where there are high level loot and stuff like that - I don't know if people would implement this in a game where only basic commodities exist. NPC Vendor combined with above - an algorithm in place where players can buy from NPCs but at some sort of restriction based on the average auction sales or market sales. Difficult to implement.   Personally I would only throw in options 1 and 2 for now, but I'm sure 3 and 4 have been pulled off elsewhere. What are your thoughts?

Exactly, I don't see why people believe it's necessary to have several people with fixed roles working as a team with equal share in a company. This is something I see a lot of in browser game forums and what not. I don't see why you can't centralise it by doing the bulk of the work yourself and then contracting out specialist requirements. Much cheaper and less hassle to outsource work than having employees or partners in a business.

Works for me

The layout feels a bit disproportionate; look up stuff like this for some guidance. Pick a nicer font, there's tons out there and search for website templates for some inspiration on colours etc.

Cheers bud

May this year be productive for all of us.

Yes, it was largely the bit about storage of data and database conenction. Cheers.

Interesting, some game devs display what they're using HTML5 for, using this badge http://www.w3.org/html/logo/ , it appears to be mostly used for CSS3, graphics and multimedia. I can rest easy that it hasn't replaced PHP :)

Sorry for the necromancy but this looks like a very neat thing to share :)

Lately I have seen several games stating powered by HTML5; am I right in saying this is merely a more convenient and nicer way of integrating javascript, images and sounds onto your page? From my understanding you would still need a lot of PHP for all the server-side work.

You will have to wait several months; I need to finish my studies first.

I think you should go for more of an 'eve online' or 'e-republik' theme than a gangster/dodgy executive look. Make it an overly-liberal market paradise where everyone works in corporations, but the difference between legitimate business and crime is a fine line. I only say this because I am critical of gangster games. You should use the title logo in the first post. Just my thoughts, obviously I can't comment on the gameplay.

All very good points, I think it's quite clear that gameplay >> graphics, however from our general discussions I think it's a common assumption that every game we attempt to make will have the best gameplay we can come up with as developers (or at least, sufficient for interest from our audience). Graphics could be considered purely as polish, but I think it's important to take into account the fact that aesthetics can significantly affect the amount of people who are drawn into your game - we all know how important graphic design are for websites in conveying professionalism, and a browser game is just a website in the tangible sense. Then again, that is just basic graphics and not graphics that is inherent in the gameplay. For my own project that I am planning, I will have a interactive map that shouldn't require too much client-side scripting but will probably require a decent designer that I would need to contract out to create, along with a whole bunch of small icons and logos. Detailed artwork and backgrounds probably won't be spent on until full release, if that time should come.

It's reassuring to hear that but in this day and age with mobile and tablet apps many graphically-intensive games are being churned out and possibly raising the expected standard of the consumer. As I say this pure speculation and it may well be that the maturer audience still favour rich gameplay with text based.

Is it a must to have graphics in your browser games? I speculate that most of the market has moved towards the Zynga and Travian style of games; heavy with graphics and client side scripting. Do people agree or do you think having a text based gameplay with supporting static graphics (maps, icons, logos etc) will suffice?

Very interesting game with graphics, although the front page took quite a while to load. Perhaps you should have a leaner front page with a trailer/cinematic embedded as a video?

The long-awaited tax break is back, I wonder how much the industry will prosper now. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17464478 I hope this qualifies for an ltd which runs a browser game!

Yes that's true, and it ties in with what I said about trivial resources. each resource should have some sort of function or usage somewhere otherwise it has little point of being in the game. in EVE online there is a vast amount of different ores and minerals you can mine, but each has a different abundance in different regions and has a purpose in the crafting system. With currency, is there any point in dividing up into platinum, gold, silver and bronze? Not much, unless in your game you have to mine precious metals in order to produce coins, then that's completely different.

Economics in games is something that fascinates me, including how much some game developers pay attention to it (EVE Online, Darkfall, Wurm Online) whilst others disregard it. I am trying to create a PHP game which has a strong element of economy, which will hopefully tie in with the military and political module I will create for it. Here are just some thoughts about in-game economy which I take into account when designing my game and maybe we can have a good discussion about it: Resource sources & sinks: Quite simply, if too much of a resource is being generated in a virtual world without there being anything to consume it, its value drops. If you have a game where every time you kill a sheep, it drops 3 coins of currency, then over time loads of currency is being easily pumped into the game and all your players are earning money, that currency is now no longer hard to earn, and where a chainmail helm would cost 300 coins it might as well sell for 3000. As a game dev, you could counteract this by making things cost more, such as travelling, skill training, levelling up etc etc, and by doing that you are adding function to that currency and giving it more value. This doesn't apply to currency only, but any resource really. Currency: The main function of currency is to have a medium where resources can be exchanged easily. An economy without currency would be a barter system, whereby if I was a farmer and I wanted a shovel, I would probably have to get a sack of grain, trade it in for a shovel, or if not, trade it in for some wood and iron and probably craft a shovel myself. Now this may sound like a bad thing in real life, but perhaps in your game you want there to be a barter system, that way you encourage players to be more reliant on your crafting system and develop a broader range of skills to make them more self-sufficient. If my history is correct, some areas of Northern Europe during the Dark Ages had a lack of precious metals, trade had collapsed and so society became dependent on sustenance through farming and mining and crafting; land had more value as a result, and so land grabbing happened more often. Whilst in the Middle East and Byzantine Empire, trade was still strong and so urban and sophisticated lifestyle could carry on. Trivial Resources: Some games seem to have this problem where they assign no distinct use to a resource, as a result it has little value, and the reward of conquering a country/player which has that resource is little. Supremacy1914 is an example where the resources are fairly balanced. In this game, all provinces have an energy requirement and that can be fulfilled by either coal, oil or gas. Coal can power railroads, oil can fuel tanks, but natural gas has no particular use. The demand for gas is then low, but the need to build industry and other resource boosters in natural gas-producing provinces is also low. As a result you'll find players selling their gas reserves at a similar price to oil and coal, but then never restocking them, making you wonder whether that resource is just trivial and not actually needed? Free Market vs Fixed Pricing Some games, mainly MMORPGs, have NPC vendors where resources or items are sold at fixed prices (or maybe proportional to your level/skill) and don't actually respond to economic demand. This has the problem of meaning the world's money sinks will remain quite constant and not adapt to any change in the money sources. In the sandbox world, like EVE Online, players dictate prices and are free to produce, trade and invest in resources or items in order to make money. Perhaps in your game you could follow a similar model; lets say in your game, iron is used to make weapons and armour. The net amount of iron consumed has increased over time, but the net amount of production of iron has dropped or stayed the same, or the big iron producers are stockpiling their iron or whatever. As a result, demand has increased and supply stayed constant, so the price in iron should increase. This would only happen if the iron producers recognise there is a growth in demand and can bump up their prices. If they do, those players who consume iron will have an increase in their costs, would have to compensate by selling other resources they have, or even better, go to war and grab some iron. This way you are using the economy as a driving force for certain modules of your game. As a dev, you can improve this process by giving your players trends and statistics to improve the chances of your players recognising where there are shortfalls or abundances in certain resources and items etc. What do you all think?