S2P

2D GUI HUD Creator v1.01 is now available - more artwork has been added..  weapon silhouettes (modern), sci-fi panels, misc shapes and iPhone/iPad thumb controller artwork.  See our blog for more info + screenshots.

You'd probably need to look at using SmartFox server. It's quite easy to implement. This should save you some time.

looking good. why not create the engine tools so that you can create more than one game afterwards? It will take you a bit longer but then your next game will take less time, and keeping the core base for the engine the same.

You may be well into developing your game by now, but worth creating everything with modules, making it easier to bug fix and expand on.

Start with the core, and build everything connected into it, for example: shop, inventory, player creation, environment, save game, score system.

Character creation, stick to only a handful of races, too many and the player is spoilt for choice. Plus it will make it difficult to manage and blanace everything out. You may need to tweak how races evolve in a game otherwise you may have one race having a major advantage over the other, and your users will notice this. Keeping things balanced at the start will help the game progress for much longer. Then based on the number of users per race it will determine the outcome based on their actions. I'd suggest maybe prevent users from selecting a race that has far too many people, so if one race is 5-10 players ahead of any other race, block it out and only allow the other races to be selected.