Since a couple of days, we started to work on a new game engine, when I say we, I could say mainly I, but lucky me, some good people on the Make Web Games forums seems to jump on the train too.

This game engine will be GNU licensed, which means, it will be free to use and run. However some modules as well as the support may be offered for some fee later on.

What will do this engine? Well basically the engine already does or will do what you may expect from a text game:
- Allows to customize the look & feel, even players will be able to choose which look & feel they want to use if the game offers more than one.
- Allows changing language (and being able to edit the languages file via the web interface).
- Have background events like restoring health or energy, and this without the need of any crons.
- Easy to develop new “locations” or “tools” without the need of modifying each and every file for it.
- Comes with a premade generic game, to demonstrate how things work.
- Unlimited stats.
- Self installing engine (on the database and configuration side).
- Self installing modules (on the database side or any other needs the module may have).

But don’t just believe on my words, go to the website http://www.zapengine.com, and download it to see how it goes by yourself! Of course, currently it’s not a full game, and I cannot promise you will not need to change the database and/or lose data if you upgrades later on. Be prepared also to see code like you never saw while working with other game engines. All is cleanly separated in different directories; each with it’s on function. Modules are within their own directory and defined by a file called “part.def” which the core code will check and use as “hook” to use the module. The current status is more than promising, and I highly encourage everyone here to test it and comment it out.

What I can promise is, that as long as there is some interest in it, I will continue to contribute.

About the author:
Alain Bertrand is a game creator and owner/creator of “Nowhere Else and Beyond” (NEaB) since March 2005. From 2005 until 2009 more than 110,000 players registered, all of this was achieved using most of the strategies mentioned here. It proves that constant work pays off, even in the current hard times.

123Ticket.com is an online alternative payment provider, headquartered out of Barcelona, Spain. The company provides a popular micropayment system that allows customers to make purchases online without a credit card. The billing solution is for merchants who wish to sell digital content (video, music, applications, etc…) through (short message service) and micropayment mobile billing. 123Ticket has the world’s largest telecom network with 26 web and telecom platforms across the world and over 6 million daily hits on their billing platform.

Instalation  is a piece of a cake, you are fully guided how to install it inside your game or website without much troubles.

Info:

While chatting with some of the well known moders in MakeWebGames forums and chat, I discovered that even if all have some knowledge of SQL (as it is required to be able to store and retrieve all the information in a standard web site setup), most fails when we go to something yet a bit more special, like, using sub-queries, join or grouping functions. This couple of articles will be toward this group of people which could gain something by doing yet more complex queries. I will explain the what and why of all those, and hopefully you will be all up and running to do yourself more complex queries and dig into the tables with some stronger tools.

Before we start digging into complex queries we will have to setup a couple of tables where which will help us to build our examples. I will also store those in a SQL file so you can directly download them and run them inside your PHPMyAdmin.

http://engine.nowhere-else.org/article4_tables.txt

This should create a table PLAYER with about 60 entries inside.

Now that we have the table and the data, we can start to check a few things. The simplest query that everyone should know is retrieve a row given an ID:

SELECT * FROM PLAYER WHERE ID=1;

If we read this query, we can decode it like that, “take all the data from the table PLAYER where the column ID contains the value 1″;

Of course this was an easy one, now if we want instead to retrieve all the rows where the username starts with the letter B the query will use a keyword “LIKE” instead of the equal sign:

SELECT * FROM PLAYER WHERE USERNAME LIKE ‘b%’;

If you run this query you will see it returns more than one row, and that the uppercase or lowercase doesn’t matter to the condition. Again this is not a very complex query, the only interesting thing here is the use of % which is a wild character when you use the “LIKE” keyword. The underscore “_” match any single character and the percent “%” match any number of any characters. You can also do a “NOT LIKE” operation to reverse your query. Keep in mind that “LIKE” is not a fast operation as MySQL needs to go inside the field an analyze it.

Now what if we want to count how many players reached at least level 20?

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM PLAYER WHERE LEVEL >= 20;

And here you see your first “GROUPING” function, as instead of returning rows MySQL will start to do some work with the result as it needs to count the number of rows.

We can work further in this direction and ask to count the number of players grouped by the first letter of their username:

SELECT LEFT(USERNAME,1), COUNT(*) FROM PLAYER GROUP BY LEFT(USERNAME,1);

As you see, we use a string function here, to read the first character out of the username (LEFT) then the now known COUNT(*) to count the number of rows and suddenly at the end we find a “GROUP BY” instruction. This is needed if you don’t use ALL grouping functions in the SELECT statement. As LEFT is not a grouping function we need to give the instruction to MySQL to say how it must be grouped.

When you run this last query you will see that the column name of the result are basically generated out of the functions we use, however it may become odd to use such names in sub queries (something we will present here after), we need therefore to introduce column aliases:

SELECT LEFT(USERNAME,1) STARTWITH, COUNT(*) NB FROM PLAYER GROUP BY LEFT(USERNAME,1);

The names “STARTWITH” and “NB” will be used as columns name for the result table. Now, MySQL is not really strict on the syntax here, with some other databases you may need to use the keyword AS or put the alias name in double quotes.

Now what is a sub query? Well let’s start with this example, we want to know all the username of the players which are in a group of those username where more than 4 players uses the same starting letter. Make sense? Well basically we want to retrieve all users width start the very common starting letter. How useful it is in real life I honestly don’t know, but it gives you a first view of what a sub query can offer.

SELECT * FROM PLAYER
WHERE LEFT(USERNAME,1) IN
(SELECT STARTWITH FROM (SELECT LEFT(USERNAME,1) STARTWITH, COUNT(*) NB FROM PLAYER
GROUP BY LEFT(USERNAME,1)) SUMIT WHERE NB > 4);

Now you see it starts to get a bit more complex. What happens here is that we first need to extract which letters are mostly used, then select it in another query which are used by more than 4 players and finally retrieve all those which use those starting letters.

The syntax is the following: SELECT * FROM (SUBQUERY) LOGICALNAME
Where SUBQUERY is any kind of query and LOGICALNAME is a name you give to your pseudo table.

You see we used also the “IN” keyword, this tells to retrieve all rows where a column is within a given list. The list could be a coma separated list of values like (1,2,3,4) or defined by a sub query in which case the sub query MUST return only 1 column.

There is still something I want to explain before finishing with a nice query, and this is the JOIN feature. Normally when you want to “link” two tables together you do something like

SELECT A.*, B.* FROM A, B WHERE A.ID=B.A_ID;

Where the A_ID is the link between the two tables. This will work but will retrieve only the rows where there is a match. What if you want to retrieve also the rows of A, even if there is nothing in B? Then you must start to use the LEFT or RIGHT joins:

SELECT A.*, B.* FROM A LEFT JOIN B ON (A.ID=B.A_ID);

Now MySQL will retrieve all rows of A, with the data of B in case there is some.

With this knowledge we can now see the final mighty query of this tutorial:

SELECT PLAYER.USERNAME,S.NB NBTOT,A.NB NB10,B.NB NB30 FROM PLAYER,
(SELECT REFEREE REF, COUNT(*) NB FROM PLAYER WHERE REFEREE <> 0 GROUP BY REFEREE) AS S LEFT JOIN
(SELECT REFEREE REF, COUNT(*) NB FROM PLAYER WHERE REFEREE <> 0 AND LEVEL >= 10 GROUP BY REFEREE) AS A ON S.REF=A.REF LEFT JOIN
(SELECT REFEREE REF, COUNT(*) NB FROM PLAYER WHERE REFEREE <> 0 AND LEVEL >= 30 GROUP BY REFEREE) AS B ON A.REF = B.REF
WHERE S.REF=PLAYER.ID ORDER BY S.NB DESC

This query retrieve all players which have referred players, and count how many referred players they have, and the how many over level 10 and finally how many over level 30. This could be a nice report for you admin, and this is done with a single query.

The reason to do such complex queries is to avoid having multiple queries running to retrieve the data. Most of the time a single query even if a bit more complex is faster over a loop in PHP doing queries one after the other.

About the author:
Alain Bertrand is a game creator and owner/creator of “Nowhere Else and Beyond” (NEaB) since March 2005. From 2005 until 2009 more than 110,000 players registered, all of this was achieved using most of the strategies mentioned here. It proves that constant work pays off, even in the current hard times.

A good idea indeed! I would actively encourage it, as it will make you learn a lot of things in a lot of different areas. However, before attempting to pick a game engine, or to start coding your own, you should consider a few things:

Now you may ask why you should follow such a checklist and should not simply start right away with a code which is already a full game, or offers nearly all you need. Well the answer is simple enough. If you make a game just with the hope to make money without much effort, or simply want to be an admin because you think its fun then something is wrong. A game will work if you are unique enough, and offer something to the players that they could not find somewhere else. Why should players play your game, and not the one which has existed for more time? And don’t tell me, “Well I will have some nice look and will use a lot of mods”. Sorry, but that simply means you do not have a clear idea of what you want to offer. Instead, if you say “I want to make a game like XYZ, but instead of doing that I will offer this and make it run like that” then yes your game can indeed have some success. Games based purely on some existing code, with some mods, will have a hard time later on. You will be always classified as “Just another XYZ game”.

To make this last idea yet clearer, you should avoid using any engine even if it would allow you to “startup” a game quickly. Anyhow there is no quick ways to do things right. So, think, re-think, and take the time to learn how to do things right. If you feel it’s a huge job, then you are starting indeed to understand it. I don’t want to stop you with your ideas, understand me well, but still, you need to come up with your ideas and not just put online somebody else work and then declare it yours. That generally don’t work, and if you will ever get some players, you may even get hacked just because you don’t understand what’s under.

So what to do? Start with YOUR OWN idea, and try to think what you want to offer. In future articles we will offer advice on how to advertise your game, and how to pay at least the game bills.

About the author:

Alain Bertrand is a game creator and owner/creator of “Nowhere Else and Beyond” (NEaB) since March 2005. From 2005 until 2009 more than 110,000 players registered. All of this was achieved using most of the strategies mentioned here. It proves that constant work pays off, even in the current hard times.

For new players in the field, and especially for young people, having your own game seems a real achievement and look like something fun. In this article I want to talk about my own experience and point out the good and the bad side of it.

I personally started my own experience as game owner / creator after playing a web game and being unsatisfied by the lack of depth of the game world. I then started to think how a real game world, like those of the old 2d RPG, could be implemented, and slowly started to build it. Now after more than 4 years of work I can look at it and say that I indeed succeeded in creating a virtual world. But it wasn’t all easy, and it is certainly never really finished. As a side effect of creating this virtual world, new players talk to me like they would talk to somebody really important or a semi god. Honestly I don’t like that, even if for some it would be a dream. Why? Simply because I don’t feel special, and also because I do see the responsibilities linked to the task more than the privileges. Indeed, having to act like a god and change / introduce rules is not an easy task as any change needs to be as balanced and as smooth as possible. Oddly enough, the older the game is, the more complaints you get every time you touch it, even if you just add new features. Another really annoying side effect, if we avoid talking about those players that just want to chat with you to feel a bit special as well, is the huge amount of requests / suggestions I (as well as the other admins) get. Some are actually good ideas but somehow the majority are just useless or actually impossible to implement. Generally, the more useless the request is the more annoying the players are and say things like “if you don’t do it your game will die”; odd then that we survived for more than 4 years without it, isn’t it?

Now, don’t get me wrong, I still have pleasure to work on my game, especially when I see where we are now and what we can offer to the old and new players. I still have a lot of ideas and a lot of areas which require more work to be up to par. Basically, what makes me happy is when I’m able to materialize an idea, and let then the players try it. This concretization of my ideas is my “drug”, and what pushes me again and again to continue. On top of that, the contact with a few people, which now I consider good friends, is the icing of the cake, and I’m quite sure I would have stopped if I wouldn’t have those contacts and the huge help they offered, and still offer. I again take the occasion here to thank Croesy, for example, as well as Iya, Zorich. I stop here before the list grows too much, even if many other helped a lot too.

So exactly what are the jobs of a game owner? Well the jobs are multiple, and in completely different areas. The main tasks are; to monitor the game to avoid abuse, and keep the community on track (e.g. avoid bad mood, flaming wars); fix bugs; implement new features and here we finish with the obvious one. Now, for the one which you may not imagine; there are all the emails and private messages to answer (even those which are just annoying); close non-existent bugs explaining what the player did wrong; manage the forums; try to fill the documentation, such as wiki; research new innovative ideas; try to make contacts with other game owners to get support, or more traffic to your site; do the system administrator work (e.g. apply patches, handle the domains, the hosting); do all the administrative work (e.g. pay the bills, find the hosting); and finally do all the marketing work to make your game known to the biggest number of potential players. If you think this is a small job, well you maybe don’t really realize how time consuming any of those tasks are. However, don’t get depressed even before starting, as you may delegate one or more tasks to somebody else. Crucially, the time you spend depends on 2 factors: the size of your game, and your own goal. If you don’t want to grow too much, then it will certainly not require too much time.

In conclusion, yes being a game owner is like being a god for that particular virtual world. With the power of the god, which let’s you modify the world as you want, there is also the responsibilities to make it work, and the drawback to hear (if not listen to) the huge amount of requests / wishes. Think of it this way: the more wishes you get, the more players you have and the better your game is.

About the author:

Alain Bertrand is a game creator and owner/creator of “Nowhere Else and Beyond” (NEaB) since March 2005. From 2005 until 2009 more than 110,000 players registered. All of this was achieved using most of the strategies mentioned here. It proves that constant work pays off, even in the current hard times.