This post is a random rant of my passion for building online games, and a discussion with myself about the development of Rags to Riches Game – a PHP, mySQL, AJAX, Java game I’ve been building for the past 4 years.

So I’ve been building online games for that past 10 years. It started as a hobby, and quickly became an obsession! I’ve stuck to mainly building web games using PHP, mySQL, AJAX – and stayed away from Flash (even though I’ve touched on it a bit).

I built Create or Conquer in 2006, which was an online game system to allow players to not only play the game, but to contribute content to it. I set up a Fantasy game world called Malmon, and built the initial game content. I wanted to keep the interface relatively simple and fast loading, so I used a number of small sections (called Sectors) for my game.

I wanted to model my game after the games I grew up playing in the 80s (I’m not that old), so I wanted a good old fantasy rpg like Dungeons and Dragons. Pretty standard stuff like stats – health, fatigue, strength, mind, luck, battling with weapons like swords, bows etc, and using spells.

But I also wanted to add the new era of gaming to my game – crafting. I love the ability to make new items, armor, weapons, spells, tools to advance my character. I’ve always been in love with crafting, even though so many of my friends find it bores them to death. Sometimes I find killing endless monsters boring as well. So I invented a building in my game world called – a crafthouse. I also created special items called ‘recipes’ that players can find and each recipe requires specific items, resource or tools in order to make the item.

I wanted to also combine the ‘auction house’ concept to my game. I first got the ‘consigner’ idea from another online game. So players can sell their items, for a fee, and other players can shop the consigner and buy the items. I eventually took out the fee, because I felt the game didn’t need to take money away from the players. So the ‘merchant’ building was born, and players could list items for sale – either quest items, or crafted items.

Now that my game world has an economy and a means to buy and sell items – I felt it would be helpful for players to have a bank to store extra money. Not a bank like some games where you can store extra items (I created a building called a Vault for that) – but a bank would pay you daily interest for money you leave in your bank account. So for every 1000 gold piece you leave in the bank, you would earn 0.01% interest. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but put 50,000 gold in the bank, and you would earn 50g per day. All this is relative to the cost of equipment etc in the game, but I felt it would help casual players earn some money without having to login daily to play.

As I mentioned, I created a vault building where players can store extra items. These vaults exist all through the game world and you can stop in anytime to add items. There is a limited number of spots available in your vault, to a max of 50 items. So cities have crafthouses near vaults, so it’s easy to put all your resources in the vault, travel to the city and then you’re close range for crafting.

Movement has been the biggest issue. So many players want games like Everquest and WOW to play – but the technology is just so advanced – that a small time game builder like myself just can’t do it. This is a hobby, even though I have 1000s of hours of development into Create or Conquer. I found a great opensource game engine (written in Java) called GTGE (thanks PauPau!). GTGE allowed me to use a java applet for my map interface, and I know enough about Java to code a bit of custom working into it to connect it to Create or Conquer.

I created a multi-map system where players could walk to the edge of one map and start on another using ‘map exits’. These points are just x/y coordinates on the game map. I also took this ability and make ‘doormats’ for buildings, caves and random encounters. If a player steps onto one of these doormats, they can click a button in the game interface and go into the area.

So this took the Create or Conquer concept and broadened the horizon of what the game could look like, hence Rags to Riches game.

R2RG was 4 months in development. I planned a ton of the game content prior to even starting to gather resources. I researched monsters (over 300 of them), spells (over 100), weapons (over 100), and then started to build my races and towns/villages.

The initial content is complete. Players are able to roam through the main starter village (Village Grodo), fight monsters, craft items, perform quests, and more.

I’ve built a game wiki so players can better understand how to play the game

R2RG Wiki
wiki.ragstorichesgame.info

Just by looking at the categories in the wiki, you can see all the functionality R2RG has!

Create a free account
www.ragstorichesgame.info

I hope you enjoy playing the game. I like feedback, so please contact me if you want to say something nice Until you start building your own online game, you don’t really understand how much time and effort it takes.