coding

I have always been a big fan of the guys running Vendetta Online. They are one of the only indie teams I'm aware of that have successfully built an MMO game and turned a profit. What's more, they seem to use the right tools for the job, know what they are doing, built a solid game and interact very well with the user community. I guess those are the keys to success for an indie MMO.

I'm at the stage where really I just need to use the right tools for the job. In most respects, I believe that good games are timeless (1 2) - I'm not concerned about a decade of development time. So I can take all the time I want and I've spent the last few years researching the right tools for scalable game development. Like the developers of Vendetta discovered, all roads lead to Erlang. It seems to have become the de-facto standard for highly-available, scalable, reliable applications. Engineers building an MMO would be foolish to not strongly consider Erlang for their backend. And all of Erlang's strengths are based on a single premise: components should be simple, well separated and communicate through messages.   read more >>

I've been dabbling with computer game design for half a decade (I had crazy dreams about making games way before that, but didn't write code back then). It's been strictly a part-time hobby, but for the amount of time I've spent I don't have much visual evidence of my work.

Compared to coders who churn out games in a couple weeks, it's fairly embarrassing. This seems to be a common joke among game creators, as everyone on the net claims to have the "best" idea for their game and none are ever produced. I'd bet most game ideas don't even turn into a single line of code, and those that do are soon abandoned. I'm trying to rationalize how this doesn't apply to me...   read more >>