Worlds Apart Development Diary (part 1)

Welcome to the first installment of my development diary for "Worlds Apart" - a science fiction MMO I'm hoping to release later this year. I'm writing this diary mostly to keep myself motivated, but also to share the development process with you. Watch this space over the next few months for updates and sneak peeks, along with perhaps insights into the way I write applications and the technologies I use.

Keep reading for an introduction to Worlds Apart!

Worlds Apart is a massively multiplayer browser game along the lines of popular space empire-building games such as Planetarion and Hyperiums. I've wanted to pick up a long-term project for a while to teach myself new technologies (especially the new features in .NET 3.5) and I chose the genre because I had played other similar games in the past and often thought "I could do better than that."

In Worlds Apart, players will assume the role of the leader of a civilisation making its first tentative forays into space. Players will direct the industry of their world to manufacture a mighty fleet of ships to trade with or make war on other players, or to interact with various NPC "quest" fleets.

I'm going to keep you updated on progress weekly. There's not an awful lot to report yet, so I'll start you off with a set of development principles I'm going to try to keep to:-

• Never sacrifice quality - I won't cut corners to save effort. If a feature is worth including, it's worth the effort to do it properly.
• Prioritise user experience - If a feature sounds cool on paper, but the UI is kind of messy, I'll either put the effort in to clean up the UI, or leave the feature out.
• Minimise the barrier to entry - Especially in competitive variants, games in this genre tend to favour long-term players over skilled players - the time invested by veteran players (along with feature-creep) presents an insurmountable barrier to new players. I intend to make the game fun for new players no matter how mature the universe is.
• Avoid repetitiveness - While all browser games involve a certain amount of repetition, I intend to produce new and varied content, and foster a dynamic universe to keep veteran players interested.

And with that, I'm going to sign off and get coding - I've got a lot of work to do!

Work done this week:

• Basic data model + ORM
• User session management
• Hosting (for development + beta)
• Working on a logo + look and feel framework
• Working on a feature list for closed beta