Browsergame Tutorial - Part I

Well, I decided to write a tutorial how to make a browsergame. This tutorial will be primary for beginners, but I guess some experts out there will have fun, too and maybe learn a few things they have not thought about. 

The tutorial requires that you use your brain and turn your own ideas into script code. This is not a copy&paste tutorial to build the ass kicking browsergame you ever dreamed of.

Please do not repost this tutorial on other webpages, forums, on DVDs or in printed form. Please contact me if you like to publish the whole tutorial or parts of it.

Here we go...

Browsergame Tutorial - Part I

Some thoughts what we will do

First of all, I know we all have thousands of good ideas, how the best browsergame ever should look like. Have we? Sure, we have ;-)

Then let's start with a document. Yes, we are not going to start working on cool graphics or with an editor for script code, we must transform our ideas on a piece of paper. Sounds boring but it helps to keep the focus on the project and will show us if it's really a good idea.

I prefer Excel or any other table calculation application, for the first document - the Pitch Doc.

The Pitch Document is very popular in the game business and if you are a good writer, you can use it as reference when you knock at the door in the games industry. 

Ok, back to our browsergame. The dokument should contain at least six paragraphs you should think about:

1. Management Summery
2. Story
3. Audience Analysis
4. Market Analysis
5. Gameplay
6. Costs and Timeline

Let me explain all parts of our document in a few words:
The Management Summary is - as it says - for the management. If you give your document to someone who should produce your idea, this first part should give a detailed and easy to read overview of your idea. Keep in mind that these few sentences could open doors for you. 
The Story paragraph explains what the (browser)game is about and the Audience Analysis for what kind of players the game is focused on. The Market Analysis compares your idea with existing projects. What is outstanding in your idea, what does your browsergame have, that other games don't have? If you're planing a commercial (payed) browsergame, why do you think you will have success with your idea?
The next important part is the gameplay. Descripe what the player of your game can do, explain the movement/controlls, all look and feel.
With the Costs and Timeline you calculate how much money and time you and maybe some friends, business partners or co-workers must spend in realizing your idea.

The Pitch Doc should be one or two pages long. I prefer a one page document to have all facts in a view. 

One thing I havn't wrote about (yet) is the title. Because the title is very important for your game, take time to think about it more than two times. I always use a project title in the Pitch Document, that could be another than the final title. Best example was my last project. In the pitch doc I called it Orcs vs Elfs, but the final game was released under the title




You see, don't blow your mind with details you can think about later.

But now the tutorial example for a pitch doc. As I said in one of my first sentences, we have thousands of good ideas. Well...my idea...(15 Minutes later)...is a Rocker (Motorcycle) game:

Hell on Roads

Management Summery

The browsergame Hell on Roads is about the fictional life in the motorcyle scene. The goal is to be stronger, faster and cooler than other players. The game will be free to play with payable premium features.

Story

The player starts as a poor guy with a rusty, boring motorcycle. The goal is to get rich and cool and if the player likes, he can become a member of a motorcycle club. There are different ways to get money: legal or illegal. The player can deal with drugs and weapons or controll prostitution. The legal ways are working as a mechanic or building custom parts for motorcycles. All players can build their own motorcycles and drive drag races against each others. With raising experience of the players, they can build better cycles.

Audience Analysis

The main audience for the game are boys and men, ages from 15 to 35.

Market Analysis

Due to a lag of time I leave this part blank. Make a list of similar games you can find and list all major features of your game and the games you found in a table. It's perfect when your game has all major features of the other games and some features the other games don't have.

Gameplay
The game is controlled by mouse. All events and actions can be activated by mouse clicks.
List of actions the player can do:
- buy custom parts for the bike
- build and customize the bike
- go to work
- view highscore

Costs and Timeline
Resources needed:
1 php programmer
1 3D artist
1 web designer
The project can be realized in 10 weeks, with a minimum budget of 200$ for 3D content. Payment for the artists not included.

Ok, it's not perfect, but we have a doc we can work on...

Now let's talk about the programming language. Because we have the idea and also are the producer, we decide what the best way is to realize the project.

Flash seems to be the best solution for a biker game. You can add cool sounds and animations that let your game look cool and realistic.

But...yes there's a big but. Think about what kind of players play browsergames and where browsergames are played. Browsergames are very popular, because you can play them everywhere on any device with browser/internet connection and with any bandwidth. 

Sounds are sometimes cool, but in the case of a browsergame not a good choice. Think about the players who want to make a few clicks during work or while driving bus.

The more importent argument is that a browsergame is for many players the only solution to play a MMOG with a crappy modem or GPRS connection. You don't believe it? Let's make a short analysis of a similar example in the games world: World of Warcraft.

Since years, WoW is the leading online RPG with millions of players and billions of Dollars for Blizzard. In the past years, many online RPG titles came up, with much better graphics. But none of these games had the success of WoW. One of the main reasons for this is: the new titles need better and newer PCs with strong graphic cards and highspeed internet connections. The WoW engine runs on older PCs and even with a laggy 180ms pingtime internet connection. This is one reason (not the only one, but an important one), why many players keep on playing WoW.

If Flash is not the right solution, what else?

We need a HTML output and some skript language like php or Perl for the calculating stuff in the background. A database like MySQL or Oracle to store our values.

I decided to use php/MySQL for this project, cause MySQL is free and I don't have a snowboard - so no need to use Perl ;-)

For all beginners (our experts can skip these section):

We need an editor that supports SQL and php (the Windows Notepad Editor is a very bad choice) and a webserver with php support. If you don't have a webserver, Windows user can try http://www.apachefriends.org

For Linux, install the Apache2 Webserver that comes with most distributions.

Now, let's start with the most important part of any application. We call and praise the gods of php. Open your editor and save the following programm as hello.php in the htdocs folder of your webserver:

<?PHP

echo("Hello World");

?>

Open your browser, make sure your webserver is running and type http://127.0.0.1/hello.php

Your browser should now show Hello World.

Now you are prepared to realize your dream of your own browsergame.