We have met A. Bertrand as a member of our browser game development community CE. He is a frequent visitor and helps several of our inexperienced members. A. Bertrand is also the developer of the successful game engine NEaB - Nowhere Else and Beyond.
As a provider of browser game related sites for developers as players I’ll scavenge the net for game engines that suit for our community. I was quite impressed when I discovered NEaB. Alain has accomplished a stable game with production value way beyond its scope. And offers the engine behind the game to aspiring game owners/developers. There is a FREE lite edition of the game engine as full versions that off course cost some money. But you get a high value package in return for the small price it costs.
But as everyone I had questions and A. Bertrand had the answers….
Q. As a game developer, how do you feel about games as a storytelling medium? How does the storytelling language of games differ from that of other media, like movies?
A. The advantage of games over movies or traditional books is that first of all you can interact with the story, which means, if the game is well done, you could change at least a bit the story. Now we all knows that most of the games have a limited number of options (due to well known reasons), but still it gives you an interaction you cannot have with a movie. Second thing is that we are going into more and more multi-player games, where you are not anymore alone in this story, which means its ads yet more dimensions to the story. There is however a drawback with those multiplayer online games, as many fails delivering true complete stories, and just offers small things to do. Here we would have also more work to do for our own game.
Q. What were your goals and why did you create NEaB?
A. Some month before I started my own web game project, I discovered the mythical ?Kingdom of Loathing? (http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/) while reading Toms Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/us/) web site. KoL (Kingdom of Loathing) is a unique web game in many ways; first of all, the art seems to be done by a 6 year old. Then you see the texts which always contain something funny (even during the battles) and also you want to discover all those hidden features like the possible mix of objects to build something. What amazed me was the quantity of people playing it. Now on the bad side of the game, it was lacking what I always loved in RPG (role playing game): walking around discovering new locations, true NPC (Non Playing Character) discussions and quests. KoL do have quests, but they are basically always the same. I then started to search for a true web based RPG and I ended up with plain text RPG or games written in Java like RuneScape (http://www.runescape.com/). At this point I thought: how hard could it be to create a true RPG which runs on the browser? Without yet thinking of having all the features now NEaB offers.
To make it short my first initial goals was simply to have a virtual world which you could explore (without yet having the 2D interactive map every players of NEaB knows), and offers true old fashioned quests.
Q. Where did you spend the most time in the making of NEaB as game and as distributable game engine?
A. Well, this is somewhat a difficult question to answer, as now it?s more than 4 years spent on development basically. However I can tell you that I spent a huge piece of my time making the 2D map work as fast as possible (I tried lot of different ways), increase the speed of loading time, and offer multi player interactions (like seeing each others on the map, and being able to chat basically everywhere). I tend to work like that: think of something fun to add to the game, and then try to implement a first version in less than 1 month. Then fix the bugs of this new feature and leave it like it is. If I see players enjoying this feature, and maybe they ask for yet some change, then I will come back later on reworking it. So many pieces of the game had different iterations. For example our ?Post Office? which is basically an in game offline messaging system (like emails), is now in his 3rd version.
Q. What is the most challenging part of developing a game, technically?
A. There is 2 areas which are really difficult (at least for me). Player interactions (like allowing players to trade directly or play cards in real time, or multi player battles), and game balancing. Maybe because I?m not a true game designer, game balancing is for me a bit of alchemy. We try to setup something (like for example with the help of excel tables), see how it goes, and then tweak it to make it somehow work.
Q. Where should someone start who is interested in learning how to program games?
A. First of all this someone should have an idea, more or less unique, and with a SHORT TERM feasibility. Which means, if you never programmed, don?t start an MMO! So, simple games like guess a number, or some word game is a short term goal for me. Then you should always do experiments first, to see if you are able to solve some of the areas you will need in your game. If we do for example a platform game, learn how to blit sprites and how to have parallax scrolling (with a good frame rate) before actually thinking of the full game itself. This allows stopping the project if you discover you cannot do it. Of course to help, there are a lot of web pages out there with nearly all what you could need to start such projects.
Q. From your experience, do you enjoy collaborating on game projects? How do you motivate other people to work on your games or do you do it all by yourself?
A. If I continue to work on my (M)MORPG it?s simply because I do have interactions with others, and/or collaborations. However I never count on them (beside when I pay somebody for a given job). So I?m more a ?do it all yourself, and be happy if somebody wrote one line? guy. The reason is simple, I tried many times to collaborate with others, and ended up with projects which died because the other side either had too much different opinions, or simply stopped the collaboration.
Q. How are you marketing your game as the game engine? What avenues are there for independent game developers to get an audience or customers for their games/game engines?
A. This is somewhat a mystery for me. Maybe because I?m a pure developer and not a marketing guy, but marketing is still something I?m way not confident with. We tried commercial advertisements (with poor results), we tried free banner exchanges (with poor or no results at all), and we tried collaborations with bigger companies like Bigpoint without success due to either our technology (where we don?t use Flash for example nor any other plug-ins), or because our game is too much unique. So what remains? Forum posts, referrals, top web game lists, directories like dmoz (http://www.dmoz.org/) etc? This is an area where we would require some help, anybody out there to help us?
Q. Who, in the browser game land, do you get inspiration from?
A. In the browser game land? Not many? I?m pointing at audiences of the size of KoL or RuneScape (without really believing it ) but I?m not pointing to get a game like any others which runs on the browser. My goal is really to offer a web games which runs like you would play an old ?Ultima 6-8? game. So I?m not taking inspiration from browser games, instead I?m taking inspiration from standalone RPG. I know, this is something a bit odd.
Q. What should change in this browser game segment? Looking at our CE community it still seems not to be saturated even as it’s almost geared to a single game script.
A. I find difficult for good games to be visible out of the mass. So it would be good if there would be some sort of true well known online webzine which does game recensions, maybe talk about updates, and help new comer to be known. Also, banner marketing doesn?t work well due to the fact people are now nearly completely banner blinds (without talking about all the plug-ins which allows disabling banners). So, having ways to advertise your game, in an effective way, without having huge financial resources, would be good. Maybe having like web producers or web marketing companies focused on this segment, and which would be paid by a share of the benefit (even 70%), would be good.
Q. What advice can you give to aspiring game owners/developers?
A. I will change the question to ?What advices??:
- Don?t start a collaborative adventure: it will certainly fail. So do something you can do all by your own.
- Have a goal which can be reached within 6 month. More you will quiet certainly stop.
- Try to avoid duplicating another game, and hoping to improve it by simply changing 1 or 2 things. Generally it doesn?t work well.
- Ask for help on technical / administrative things, but only for concrete things: like how do you do backups? Not like, how do you write a game.
- Read a lot: tutorials, existing codes.
- Try and retry until you succeed.
Q. What are your future goals with NEaB?
A. I do have a lot of ideas still to implement, for example in a relatively short term I want to improve drastically the appearance of both the home page and the game interface. Like for example offer an in game GUI (at least on the 2D maps) which is more like a Diablo GUI than the current left sided menu. Beside that, there is a lot of things on my ?to-do? list, which has the tendency to grow instead of decreasing. Don?t know yet why.
Q. You started also on a different game from what we have heard? Can you tell us a bit about make-a-bot?
A. Make-a-bot is / was a side project of mine I had since? more than 10 years. When I was young, I played a programming game where you had to program tanks with something a bit similar than Basic. The goal was to kill another tank in some sort of arena simply by coding your own tank. Well, I kept this idea in mind, and yet added a few twist, first of all, I invented a language which you can program without writing a single line code. All what you have to do, is connect ?bubbles? and type some parameters. Second, instead of having a simple arena fight, my idea was to offer something more like a RTS (Real-time Strategic Game), where you have missions, and can build / harvest things. However, currently, this project is on hold. Due to my limited numbers of hours per day (24, right?), and the lack of stability of the environment (Silverlight).
Q. Why Silverlight if we may ask? What’s the reason of using silverlight lets say over Flash/Action script?
A. Silverlight allows me to develop with one language I do love and know: C#, and this in a familiar environment for me: Visual Studio. Also Silverlight let me program using true an object oriented language with all the tools needed for a developer (not for a designer). I was also hoping to see Silverlight take faster a big market share, but somehow for the moment it?s not the case.
Q. Do you have any other or future endeavors online besides game development?
A. Well, you know, game development is for me a hobby. And I don?t plan to make it my real life job (and would be really hard). So having mainly NEaB as game and some other small things on the side is what I have in my plans. Beside that I?m still programming all the day, as real life job, but for completely other goals.
Q. A final question then to close this first interview, is it really worth it to spend so much time in independent browser game development?
A. Money side? Definitively no. I?m already happy it pays itself (which is not cheap). But besides simple monetary thinking, I can tell you that I learned a lot of small tricks I can reuse in my real life job, and I meet some nice people out there, I would never meet otherwise. I take the opportunity to thanks (without any particular order) Croesy, Zorich, Iya and many others, which helped the game to be like it is, and which I consider now friends even if I never meet in the real life (yet).
This video shows the new controls in action. This is the 2.30 Dev build with the new post processing, terrains and grass in sight.
An online space war game in which each player starts with his own planet. The first important step which should then be taken is to build facilities including energy plants and mines to collect raw materials. This material can then develop new buildings, including shipyards for space vehicles, ships and weapons to develop defenses to attacking opponents to stop spying sata left, robots, atomic bombs, laboratories, and more technological developments. 
The Nowhere Else and Beyond (NEaB) engine is a fully customizable 2D game engine based on the hugely popular MMORPG of the same name. The distinctive, and unique, map system allows you to create a variety of different game situations and the art provided with the engine is both replaceable and genre-neutral. While our own game concentrates on a fantasy realm, the art would equally support other time-period/styles. The full engine supports a high level of interaction between the players, with the ability to see, chat and battle alongside other adventurers.
