[MUD-Dev] BBG's a link to the past

[ceo]

Corpheous Andrakin wrote:

> For those of you who don't know about them, BBG's are Browser
> Based Games, much like the old school MUD's but with a graphical
> overlay.  They are seperated from the title of "graphical mud" (or
> at least in my opinion and others) because they do not offer
> command line interfaces and many are turn based as opposed to real
> time.

> The question is, is this missing link so to speak, marketable?
> Currently there is of course, not enough media flying around about
> them to generate intrest from investors but if there were enough
> stir in the small community as it is now I personally think they
> could become popular enough to warrant investigation into them as
> a "new" field of game (they've been around in small numbers for a
> while).  To get a feel of what I'm talking about before reading
> further I suggest you glance over http://www.mpogd.com to pick up
> on some of them.  Having experimented with some of the games on
> that site and lurked through many a game I've found that the
> communities are MUD like in many aspects, usually forming small
> groups of friends or allies and a lot of dev interaction.  Many
> people at work usually run off a firewall or some such blocking
> tool, but these games can work around that unlike full featured
> MMORPGs.  These games could be a possible way to grab a bit of the
> action away from regular surfers, a bit of attention to possibly a
> larger game design (I'll talk about in a moment) or even a little
> bit of money (commonly called Pay to Play).

Kingdoms of War (http://abandonedcastle.com/faq.html) looks like
what I've been expecting to see happen to the BBG's for about 5
years (but hasn't yet) - moving the gameplay to more up-to-date
interfaces and architectures (e.g. client-server with animated
graphics and deeper gameplay).

It will be interesting to see how they get on.

In the meantime, a soccer-management game is about to launch as a
BBG using a cut-down version of our technology. It's an interesting
diversification for us, but I've no idea yet how well it will pan
out...watch this space. Research I've been doing for this project,
including predicted market, financial projections etc, suggest that
there is a lot of opportunity stretching ahead for BBG's - or at
least for anyone who does as KoW are and put a bit more effort in
than an entire game in PHP/MySQL written in only a small number of
weeks or less. My abiding memory is that I had a game written on my
calculator back in 97 that was more complex than many of the BBG's
of the time (and identical gameplay, save for inteface differences,
e.g. the lack of networking connectivity!).

Adam M
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