Following mail template can be used as DMCA notice, adjust to your needs.

Subject: DMCA/Copyright Infringement Notice

Dear Sir or Madam:

A website hosted by your company on publishing system having the host name ?OFFENDING SITES HOSTNAME (eg. vps.sh.servebyte.com)? and the IP address OFFENDING WEBSITE IP ADDRESS, infringes upon our exclusive rights in a number of copyrighted works. The copyrighted work at issue are the scripts that appear where you publish and have been published without authorization at the URL and IP address indicated.

OFFENDING WEBSITE URL

The above referenced URLs provide, without authorization, the ability to download copyrighted works produced and owned by me, YOUR NAME. Below, please find details regarding the infringing URL, and original URL for each of these copyrighted works.

Offending URLs:
Put URLS of where your mods are available here

Owner?s (my) URLs:
Put URLS of where your mods are available for sale by you here in order respective to offending URLS

All of the listed infringements were observed on May 24, 2009, 15:09:10

Please remove the referenced material from your service at once, and take other appropriate action against the account holder to prevent future infringement.

Pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this letter serves as actual notice of infringement in the event of legal proceedings. I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted material described above on the allegedly infringing web pages is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Please contact me promptly to confirm the action you have taken.

Regards,
Your Name
Your Email Address
Your Street Address
Your City, State Zip
Your Daytime Phone #

You should modify this NDA to fit your own needs.

NON DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT

This Non-Disclosure Agreement (hereinafter “Agreement”) by and between ____________________________residing at___________________________________________ (hereinafter_________) and _____________________________ residing at _________________________ ________________________________________(hereinafter_________), is entered into to provide for the confidentiality, protection and handling of Proprietary Information related to a browser game to be known as _______________________________________ for the purpose of examination, printing, reproduction, editing, playtesting, or consideration for publication (hereinafter “Purpose”).

_______________and ______________are also hereinafter individually referred to as the “Party” or “the disclosing party” or the “recipient” or collectively as the “Parties”.

1. The term “Proprietary Information” means any and all information, in any form, whether of a technical or commercial nature, relating to the Purpose which is disclosed prior or subsequent to the date of this Agreement by the disclosing party to the recipient and identified by the disclosing party at the time of disclosure as being proprietary. Information disclosed in a form other than writing shall be confirmed in writing by the disclosing party as being proprietary within thirty (30) days of disclosure.

2. Proprietary Information shall not include information which, at the date of signature hereof, or thereafter becomes public domain, is known to the recipient prior to being disclosed by the disclosing party, in which case the recipient will notify to the disclosing party within 7 days that the information was already known prior to disclosure, is developed independently by the recipient, or is legally obtained by the recipient at any time from other sources who are not subject to proprietary restrictions. The recipient shall have the burden of proof in establishing any of the above mentioned exceptions.

3. The recipient agrees to use the Proprietary Information solely for the mutual benefit of parties in furtherance of the above stated Purpose, as specifically approved by the disclosing party, and agrees not to disclose the Proprietary Information to any third party or to any of its affiliates, employees or agents except as may be required to conduct the above mentioned Purpose. Any such disclosure to third parties shall be subject to the prior written consent of the disclosing party and shall be conditioned upon obtaining in advance a non-disclosure Agreement substantially in the form of this Agreement.

4. The recipient agrees to retain the Proprietary Information of the disclosing party in confidence and to exercise towards it at least the same degree of care and protection that it takes to safeguard its own Proprietary Information.

5. The Proprietary Information of each party, or any part thereof, whether capable of being copyrighted, patented, or otherwise registered at law, or not, is for the purposes of this Agreement acknowledged by the recipient as being the sole property of the disclosing party.

6. Nothing in this Agreement shall be construed as granting to the recipient any rights by license or otherwise, express or implied, to or in any of the disclosing party’s patents, non-patented inventions or other intellectual property. No representation or warranty is made by the disclosing party with respect to information disclosed.

7. This Agreement shall remain in force and effect throughout the period in which the recipient is actively engaged in the execution of the Purpose and for a period of Ten (10) years thereafter.

8. Promptly upon the termination of this Agreement, unless otherwise agreed in writing by both parties, each party shall return to the other all Proprietary Information of the other party that it has received or that is in its possession, together with all copies thereof, and will immediately cease to make further use or disclosure of such Proprietary Information.

9. Nothing herein (including the exchange of Proprietary Information hereunder) shall be deemed as obligating the parties to enter into any business relationship with respect to the Project or otherwise.

10. Each Party shall fully indemnify the other against any and all actions, claims, liability, costs, damages, charges and expenses suffered or incurred in connection with or arising out of any breach by a Party of any of the provisions of this Agreement or by any unauthorized disclosure or use of Proprietary Information by a third party or by any employee of any party to whom Proprietary Information has been disclosed or who has been allowed access thereto and acknowledges and confirms that a breach of its obligations hereunder cannot be compensated adequately by an award of damages or indemnity or other pecuniary remedy but the other Party shall also be entitled in the event of any such breach to the remedies of injunction specific performance or other equitable relief in respect of any such breach. Nothing in this Clause 10 shall be construed as a waiver by either Party of any of its rights including rights to damages or indemnity or other pecuniary remedy.

11. This Agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of _______________ and The United States and any dispute arising under or in connection herewith shall be presented in and determined by these courts exclusively.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF: this Agreement has been signed by each of the Parties hereto.

For and on behalf of__________________________

Name : …………………………. Date:

Signature:

For and on behalf of __________________________

Name: …………………………. Date:

Signature:

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??:

1. Don?t start a collaborative adventure: it will certainly fail. So do something you can do all by your own.
2. Have a goal which can be reached within 6 month. More you will quiet certainly stop.
3. Try to avoid duplicating another game, and hoping to improve it by simply changing 1 or 2 things. Generally it doesn?t work well.
4. 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.
5. Read a lot: tutorials, existing codes.
6. 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).

Cheating in browser games is very common, especially when you can get free accounts that have resources or anything else which might be helpful to a primary account.

The elements needed in an Admin Control Panel (ACP) vary a lot based on the game type and how you choose to run it.

If you go on multi hunting you would need to have tools available to help you in this task, possible tools can be:

• Player info which would hold e-mail, IP, login name if different than player nickname, player nickname, password , browser session, cookie, …
• A wildcard search on the above info in your database, eg on username John search on John* so it will give all usernames that start with John. 
• Logging player interactions eg, item transfers, cash transfers, attacks whatever suits for your game .
• Staff notepad, so that game staff can place a note on the players account (non visable for players)
• Staff tools to suspend, penalize the account(s)
• Staff logs, yes you need to track also the actions of your staff. Especially if they play the game on the same server as where they have staff powers

You can also have a large part of the above automated, a machine can weed through it a lot faster than a human, yet a human still needs to oversee the actions of the machine.

With the above we made once a NPC in a game , the NPC main goal was to discourage the creation of multi accounts.

examples of the NPC named The Bailiff actions

• If player A has interaction with player B and it’s same IP a msg will show that the account(s) get flagged as multi and that staff will be informed
• If player A has interaction with player B and same browser session, confiscate the items/cash that gets traded
• If player A attacks player B and again similar info, no experience gain

The players that got annoyed by the NPC could still contact staff to look into the issue, but that was a minority that did. Overall the discouraging of creating multi accounts (as there is no gain possible) reduced the amount of multi accounts created. And it reduced also the workload for staff to go on multi hunting.

Another method instead of banning a player account for multi creation is called public execution.

Public execution is actually letting the community suffer for the actions of a player. The player in question gets placed eg in a hospital or jail. Other players can bail out the player in jail/hosp yet this will cost them a lot, a single player wouldn’t be able to bail the ‘hidden way of banned’ player out on it’s own so it will be a community effort.

The banned player would still have access ingame to contact friends, but most of the possible features would be locked. eg Just contact the players that are in the same guild / clan / faction / …

You can also let the community inform you about possible multi accounts, but note that you can get fake reports. Some players take the competition in a game very far….

In part II we will look deeper into it how to track players

An important aspect for a game is getting new players.

A new game usually lacks the funds for advertising campaigns, yet there are methods to get players without spending any money. Just some of your time.

Part 1 will give a list of  Top Game Lists, aka game voting sites.

Game voting sites are important as it is one of the free ways to gain new players, the people that visit game voting sites are players and that’s what you are looking for. Marketing your game to the right audience.

http://www.cetopwebgames.com
http://www.cegamesdirectory.com
http://eternalgamelist.com
http://apexwebgaming.com
http://www.topwebgames.com
http://www.galaxy-news.net
http://www.mpogd.com
http://www.onrpg.com
http://www.gamesites200.com
http://www.mmorpg50.net/
http://www.onlinegamesgallery.com/
http://www.omgspider.com/
http://www.bbguniverse.com
http://www.pbbgwarp.com/

This list isn’t complete and will be updated from time to time, you can always post a comment with top game sites to be added.

Deploying your Game

So, your game is complete and ready for the masses, but how do you get it to them? That’s where deployment comes in.

The first step in deployment is hosting your game, later we will focus on exposure in other words advertising your game (free and paid methods).

Hosting Your Game

Cost
Cost is, as it is in most things, the nine-hundred pound gorilla of the matter. What you are willing to pay for hosting determines how good your hosting is. It’s as plain as that. No matter what they tell you, you get what you pay for, especially in web hosting. Prices range from nothing to hundreds of dollars (USD) for dedicated servers.
Free Hosting
You can get a free web host, which are pretty easy to find on the internet. Most of these automatically inject their own advertising into your web pages, which varies in obtrusiveness depending upon the host. Other free hosts have no advertising, but they generally provide much worse features, webspace, service, etc… Free hosts are the best choice for someone who doesn’t have the money for better options.
Shared Hosting
The next step up from free hosting is shared hosting. This can cost anywhere from around two or three dollars USD per month, to maybe 30 to 50 dollars USD per month. Most webhosts will offer more than one plan fitting within this category. A shared host is basically just like a free host, but without ads, and many more features and more space and bandwidth. They just cost money. This would probably be the best choice for most people’s needs, assuming they are able to pay. Just remember that even though you have no way of telling, you are sharing a server with many, many other websites. This could mean that the server’s processing power and network transfer capacity might be occupied by serving other websites. Also, sometimes other hosts can interfere with things like SQL databases, and potentially create errors on your website that are not your fault.
Virtual Hosting
Virtual hosting is a bit different than the others and isn’t offered by many hosts. It is sort of a cross between shared and dedicated hosting. In virtual hosting, the server machine is set up to have several independent systems running on it, each set up to host websites. When you pay for virtual hosting, you are given control over one of those independent systems. This means that you have the control you get with a dedicated host, but much less cost. Also, since you are still sharing one computer with others, your space and bandwidth will be limited as such.
Dedicated Hosting
Dedicated hosting is when an entire server is used to host your website exclusively, without any other websites on the server to use its processing power, hard drive space, bandwidth, etc. Obviously, this means a major increase in cost. Dedicated hosts can cost from 80 USD to maybe 900 USD per month. It should definitely be noted that dedicated hosting is overkill for anything other than sites for major games. 
Co-Location
This option is a bit different from the others. Co-location, also called colocation, is when a company, sometimes an ISP, sometimes a normal webhost, allows you to bring them a server that you own and connect it to their network and their power, in exchange for a fee. The server can be sent in the mail, or sometimes if the data center is close enough to you, it can be brought there personally. Colocation fees are usually a bit less than dedicated hosting fees. The biggest advantage to colocation, is that you own the server, and thus are able to install on it whatever you want. The only limitation is the bandwidth provided by the colocator.

In part V of “I want To Make A PHP Game” we will discuss the features of hosting and getting closer to the exposure of your game.

You can’t really run a game online these days without having a long Terms of Service section. Even though almost nobody will ever read it, you have to put one there to cover yourself legally.

The few times you do need it, you’ll be very glad to have one there. Terms of Service are generally linked from a number of places on your site, so be sure you have a separate page for them. eg a terms.htm or tos.htm 

The FREE way

Examine the Terms of Service of

• he major sites (they have the best lawyers, no doubt)
• the largest site in your competitive area
• sites relevant to what you are selling/doing

Then take out the best and most relevant terms and modify them to fit your site’s operations.

You might, after doing all of that, run it past a lawyer but most lawyers are largely clueless about operating an online enterprise.

Now note that you might need different Terms Of Services for different parts of your website each feature might require additional particular terms for your TOS or Disclaimer. For instance: A discussion forum, user uploadable content, images , …

The point is, look at sites with similar features to yours and learn from their legal work (or their painful experiences). 

The Basic Terms Of Service structure

Acceptance of Terms

1. Description of Service (for nonprofit/educational/government this is of termed “Acceptable Use”)
2. Registration Obligations (if accepting members)
3. Privacy Policy
4. Member, Account, and Password Security (if issuing member names and passwords)
5. Member Conduct (if members are accepted)
6. Payment Terms (if accepting payments)
7. Account Modification and Termination (if creating accounts)
8. Disclaimer
9. Trademark Information (if using proprietary logos)
10. Additional Terms (includes right to modify terms without notification)

The Expensive Way

Acquire a lawyer. While it’s certainly possible to write a common-sense Terms of Service by following the above, you might need a lawyer to be sure that your Terms of Service will be legally airtight.

Designing your game

Caution! Yes, caution is definitely called for when designing a game. Avoid newbie mistakes! Follow this advice:

• Start small. Most newbie game programmers dream of making the next hit game. If you’re just starting out, this is an impossible goal! It will only lead to frustration and defeat. You must start small; the only way to learn game programming is to be a game programmer. Try making a simple card game, a dice game, or something of that nature. You’ll run into enough trouble with a card game if you’re just starting out.
• Plan. If you have nothing more than some vague notion of making a “really cool RTS game” you are likely going to run into trouble about halfway through your project, when you realize that your initial assumptions were incorrect. Try to be as thorough as possible in the designing phase; it’ll save you countless hours in the end. Create a design document for your game, and include a structured version of all of your gameplay and technical design notes. Think through your game from beginning to end, and document every gameplay feature, and how you plan to implement it technically. Having said that, I’ll now suggest that no design document is perfect. Something unanticipated will always come up, no matter how thorough you’ve been. Just do your best!
• Wait. I’ve always found that my ideas seem brilliant to me when I first come up with them, but a few weeks down the road they don’t always seem quite so interesting. Be sure that you’ve given yourself ample time to mull an idea over, before committing yourself to it. You don’t want to get bored with your game after investing hours in its development!
• Get feedback. Find a group of gamers and pitch your idea to them. If they’re not excited and interested by your idea when you’re enthusiastically describing it to them, they’ll surely not be excited and interested by the end result. Get feedback, and re-work your idea. Ask input for instance at http://www.criminalexistence.com

Creating Game Media

For many game developers, this is the hardest part! After scavenging the internet and deciding on a set of tools, it’s time to get down to the business of creating your game’s media. If you aren’t an artist, you may need to search around for partners who are skilled in this area. For beginner games, there isn’t anything at all wrong with so-called “programmer art,” however. You can also try some of the freely available art resources that can be found on the Internet.

Coding your game

• Code flexibly. Changes happen, no matter how well you plan. If your game’s structure is too rigid, you may find that a single oversight in the design phase could necessitate a re-write of some of your game’s engine.

• Prototype. Try to get your game to a quick-and-dirty playable state as soon as possible. The graphics need not be complete, and the bells-and-whistles need not be implemented, but it is important to get an early idea of how your game will play. It’s possible that you’ll try it and say, “Wow, this is no fun at all.” Thankfully, if you’ve made this discovery early enough, you’ll be able to re-work the gameplay and try again without much trouble. Seeing your game in action, even if in a rudimentary state, could also motivate you very effectively.

• Don’t optimize early. Spending your time optimizing code before you even know how the game as a whole will perform is pointless. Code flexibly, yes, such that future optimization will be possible, but early optimization can be a big time waster. You won’t know where your bottlenecks will be until the game approaches its final state. If you spend days honing your blitting routines, only to find out later that your pathfinding routines are the bottleneck, you’ve wasted your time!

• Try not to throw away well tested code. The principle of code reuse is very important for large projects. You may think throwing away all of your code and starting from scratch is a good idea, but it may not be. Think of the weeks, months, and even years you have spent writing and testing that code.

In part IV of “I Want To Make A PHP Game” we will talk about publishing your game, how to, requirements, etc.

I want to be a Game Designer

So you want to be the Idea Man? The fact of the matter is that everyone developing games has their own ideas and they have limited time, so the chance of you finding quality coders, and artiss to make your game is miniscule. Unless, of course, you pay them ;).

Sometimes development teams will ask for suggestions, so feel free to give your opinions on various forums. You can also find “Game Design” forums eg http://www.criminalexistence.com where people just like you discuss their ideas. Don’t be afraid to tell other people your idea, chances are it is not as revolutionary as you think. Make sure if you post your idea that it is well thought out, because other posters may ask you questions and look for faults in your idea.

I want to be a Game Programmer (coder)

So you want to be the person who makes everything run? There are many, many choices of how to make the computer do what you want. Your decision is based upon many factors. In the following articles we will present a few different recommended paths for beginners. Ultimately your decision is “what software will I use to help me develop a game?” which boils down to the PHP and MySQL programming language for the most part.

I want to be a Game Artist

So you want to create amazing worlds, characters, and special effects? Here is a list of the tools you might need, check also out part 2 of that list. The type of art a game requires is very dependent on the way the game is designed. For 2D art, it might have to have a certain “color key”, dimension, number of colors, or an alpha channel. For 3D art, it can be even more complicated to make 3D models, animate them, texture them, and “export” to a file the game can use.

What does Indie mean ?

Indie does not mean India, although maybe you thought that because there are a lot of programmers in India now. Indie is short for independent and is akin to independent films, which you probably have heard of. Independent films might be artsy, low-budget, different, and sometimes weird and all these adjectives can be applied to indie games. These games may not have the latest special effects and largest budgets, but they have heart and are created by people who love what they do. And these games may take more risks, instead of sticking to tried-and-true money-making formulas.

See http://www.igf.com/ and http://www.gametunnel.com/

In part III of “I Want To Make A PHP Game” we will discuss the first steps of creating a game.

How do I get Started ?

The answer to this question can depend on many things, one of them being your personality.

• Are you the type of self-motivated person that can flow through difficult and even frustrating puzzles and problems to reach a goal? If so and you have a game idea that you dream about every night, then it would be wise (and you probably have the determination) to begin with the information given in the following sections.

• Or are you the type of person that would like to see results quickly and are perhaps interested in avoiding as many complicated and frustrating scenarios as possible (they will always be there) at least for now? If so it could be ideal for you to take up programming by working with a pre-made game engine, as you would likely get faster results that way.

• Perhaps it would be best to find a development environment and begin programming as many small games (paper-scisor-rock, dice game, card game, etc…) as you can just to get a feel for how they are done. Perhaps pick your favorite and really flesh it out with all the bells and whistles and fantastic features you can think of.

Whatever you do, don’t get overwhelmed, or frustrated. Scope out some of this information, then roll up your sleeves and try some of it out, there’s certainly something here that will fit your needs and your personality.

What do I need ?

Game development necessitates 3 things: motivation, time, and talent. Without motivation you won’t make time for game development. And without time, talent is meaningless. But without any talent you might as well be a carrot.

Beyond the obvious, you need:

• Game Logic
• Art Assets
• Game Content

Game logic (usually source code) is the most crucial to a complete game, after all, you can have a game without art  (text-based games). The visuals of the game entice people to play your game and also increase the “fun factor” of the game. The importance of game content (levels, dialogue, quests) is obvious.

In commercial game development, there are lots of people and they each have different roles. But if you are doing game development as a hobby, you can create everything or you can “mod” a game or you can join a small team.

In part II of “I want to make a PHP Game” we will focus on the different types (designer, programmer, artist, …)