From: John Joyce <dangerwillrobinsondanger@...>
Date: 2008-03-29T09:14:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Web-based games?


On Mar 28, 2008, at 8:40 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> Hal Fulton wrote:
>> Who's interested in developing a few web-based games?
>> I'll try to follow this thread, but please feel free
>> to email me...  rubyhacker@gmail.com
>> There are several kinds of games, of course...
>> 1. Solo -- cards (solitaire), puzzles, Sudoku, etc.
>> 2. One on one, realtime or not -- cards, chess, checkers,
>>    Hnefltafl, Othello, and so on. (Some of these would
>>    be deadly dull in non-realtime.)
>> 3. One against many -- trivia, etc.
>> 4. I'll probably avoid MMORPG and such for now.
>> 5. I also have a cool three-player game in mind -- a chess
>>    variant that I (thought I) made up (though someone else
>>    created something virtually identical ten years earlier).
>> Let's talk...
>> Cheers,
>> Hal
>
> 1. I've just started playing a web-based MMORPG called Ikariam ...  
> it's sort of a "Second Life" set in the ancient world. It's written  
> in PHP, though. I think something like that is a natural for a  
> Rails app.
>
> 2. Be careful about intellectual property, especially trademarks,  
> branding, etc. You'd be surprised how many ways you can get someone  
> to hire an attorney and sue you. :)
>
> I'm buried in a bunch of other projects at the moment, but since I  
> discovered Ikariam I've been toying with the idea of doing a space- 
> based MMORPG in Rails. Another thing I've looked at is a  
> "management simulation" game, where you get to build big  
> multinational corporations and compete with each other. That's  
> somewhat like Ikariam, actually.
>
I would not recommend Rails for a MMORPG. It's not going to scale to  
that well.