john.

Well, for starters you should hire a designer. Personally I think 30 % (not sure how you actually calculated that) is too early. In my opinion a more reasonable percentage would be 70-80% before a public beta release. It's all about the first impressions and mine was disappointment. However, I look forward taking another look (hopefully a more positive one) when you progressed further. Just keep us updated.

Just hahahaha

Depends entirely on you and your needs. What should your engine contain? Why do you even need to make your own? Learning purposes? You should divide your application in different layers. Some MVC-inspired architecture is usually a good approach. One of the important rules in writing good code is separation, and presentation logic and application logic should always be separated, below is a simple but yet flexible way to approach:   app/ config.php bootstrap.php modules/ home/ home.php login/ login.php templates/ home.html index.html login.html index.php   config.php - would contain configuration such as database details, base url, smtp for email, etc. bootstrap.php - would be responsible for bootstrapping the application, setting up error handling, database, some container to pass dependencies to modules, autoloading, etc. modules/ - would contain modules, modules would contain the application logic and busniess logic (a simple, but less separation of concerned application structure) here you would have database queries and loading templates depending on a user's request (etc, show a login form). a module would typically contain a game feature for simplicity, example you could have a module being responsible for logging in a user (setting a session). templates - contains presentation logic, html... You would pass data from your modules to the templates that can be displayed, etc if a user is logged in you would show a logged in template if not a login template, if you would list members of your "game", you could have a moudle "memberlist", that would pass an array of members to a memberlist.html template that would foreach the array and showing them in some nice table...

Congratulations on your release The Indentation looks bad If you look at: https://github.com/ChristopherDay/Gangster-Legends-V2/blob/master/class/page.php (Do you use tabs?) There are some features lacking that I find essential that you should consider implementing sometime: Proper error handling & logging What happens if the database cannot connect? Depending on the server it may throw an exception or warning, this need to be handled accordingly, If I am in a debug mode (writing features to the game) I would like to have as much information as possible, however during production (when players are playing the game) I wouldn't want any potential harmful information to be shown. You should add a Error handler that logs appropriately, taking the criteria of development or production in consideration and act there after.

I could definitely play a game with a good flat design but it has to compensate lacking the art, say some interesting lore, game play or how unique the game is.

Yeah, it's definitely not bulletproof. Here's a pretty good question that covers http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5741187/sql-injection-that-gets-around-mysql-real-escape-string my thoughts on the matters. Well, there is nothing wrong that it's procedural, however it still sucks because it lacks an object-oriented interface.

MySQL is like already mentioned a deprecated API as of PHP 5.5.0 and will be removed in a future version. Why? Well, it's insecure, lacking implementations of great features and is procedural.

All the button variables and functions are hard to interpret by just looking at the code.

Have a look at Sublime Text 3. I have to agree with you as well, the tutorial takes too many concepts together and it's simply too much for a beginner to understand .

Modular Gaming is built on Kohana and uses the HMVC pattern. was never addressed to you, I think I should have placed a quote in between.

Commenting code and having properly naming conventions on variables, functions also applies when writing code in C#.

Sounds awfully complicated. Why do you even use a remote web server when developing your projects?   Modular Gaming is built on Kohana and uses the HMVC pattern.