So I've been away for the last 5 or 6 years. It's hard to believe my last post here was way back in 2009! I haven't been entirely away from gamedev though. In fact, a couple of years ago, I released a (to me at least) moderately successful multiplayer strategy game on Android, called "War Worlds". I say "moderately successful" because it never really made any money (it made enough to cover the cost of hosting and that's about it). But at it's peak, it had around 2,000 active players (around 400 of which logged on every day).

Here's some screenshots from the game, in no particular order:

There's a lot of stuff here that I'm quite proud of. I developed what I think is a pretty cool tool for rendering images of planets and stars:

I blogged about the implementation of this algorithm: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, appendix.

I'm also proud of some of the other blog posts I wrote which got a reasonable amount of attention in the "hacker" community. For example, this post complaining about App Engine got to the front page of Hacker News. Another one I wrote on the crappiness of MySQL was also quite popular (complaining about things seems to get a lot of attention!)

However, all things pass and a few months ago, I decided to move on from War Worlds. I open sourced the code, found a dedicated player to host the server, and basically ended my day-to-day involvement with the game. It still has around 60-80 players logging in every day, and I've not completely abandoned it, but I probably won't be doing any updates any more (unless someone else picks up the slack and wants to submit code changes!)

Now, I've started work on a new project. It's an online multiplayer RPG which runs entirely within the browser. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be revealing the work I've done on it so far (I want to start this journal here to basically document my progress on the game, mostly for my own benefit as I find seeing the progress to be quite rewarding) but for now here's a YouTube video I took of the "gameplay" (such as it is) as of a few weeks ago.

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