the-inbetween.com

On Previously Mentioned Unfinished Games

The Shockwave FPS alpha demo Phosphor, which I linked in my linklog, has spread like wildfire without any context to it other than "damn, that's cool!" So I feel that some context might be in order. The link to the demo was originally posted in the dirGames mailing list (original post). The original post has more info on debugging it, if you run into problems.

After posting that, the author, Nick Kang, further elaborated on his plans and decisions:

Time:
This so far has taken almost 3 months full-time, 3 months part-time, spread over a year. I spent a lot of time learning to texture, rig, and crudely animate in 3dsmax, so probably 4 months of coding total.

[...]

Originality (lack of):
At this stage, replicating a 5 year-old game is the whole point, so I'll take that as a positive comment ;-). If all goes well, I hope to get a little mileage out of this framework, so maybe the first game will be a small-arena-deathmatch, but hopefully I'll have a chance to build other games on top of it afterwards, before it becomes obsolete. The way I look at it, the success of Quake and Unreal wasn't just the games, but the amount of other games that was built with the tech. For an independent developer, I agree it's pointless to compete with the commercial giants on production level, so my entire selling point is "deathmatch-in-a-browser", and I'm hoping there's an audience for just that. But you bring up an interesting point, about not exercising the creative freedoms accorded to indie developers. I'm just trying to make the kind of game I would like to play myself. But good point, something to think about.

[..]

Multiplayer:
I'm hoping to use the MultiUser xtra in a peer-to-peer arrangement, I'm planning on not using the MU server application. One instance of the Shockwave app will act as the server, listening for connections, and be playable locally, or at least running as a spectator. Once that's working, then a centralized server might be set up so that game servers can publish their IPs for internet connections. Basically, the same way most PC shooters do it.

So there you go. Multiplayer is planned.

I also have more clarification about the other game that I mentioned last week, Zam Beezee. If you thought that the game was unfinished and possibly still in beta, as I did, then you'd be correct!

They are currently debugging it and the version that I, and possibly you, downloaded will time out after a couple of weeks. Why this isn't advertised, I don't know, but there you have it. It's a public beta (alpha?), so that explains the bugs. It will go for-pay later.

Edit. Got more clarification. This version will time out on March 15th. They will probably post another free timed version after that, before going to market.