My roguelike game Caverns of Underkeep is coming along rather swimmingly and I’m confident I’ll get the game to version 1.0 before March 2008 - Which is when I’m due back at University.

I’ve been taking a bit of time to think about the next game I want to make. A week ago I made a list of 5 or so game designs and then ranked them according to difficulty, which ran along the lines of how much content, ie how many art assets would be needed. And how complicated it would be to program, ie was there anything that I didn’t know how to do or hadn’t implemented in the past?

At that time I was planning on doing a shareware style downloadable game. But now I’ve decided my next title is going to be another browser based game. And like Caverns of Underkeep, the next game will be also be free*

The reason for doing another free browser based game was two-fold.

1. I think people expect less from a browser game (or any free game for that matter) the corollary to this is that if you can make a really good browser game, people will notice. It also means I can focus on a smaller scoped title. And theres none of that having to get people to download and install the game stuff, just click on the link and the game automatically loads.
2. Having unique online content drives webtraffic, and in a web 2.0 world, there are many vendors competing for attention. Creating games that people care about will help enormously in the long term. And when I do get around to making downloadable games, hopefully there will already be a sense of community around the free games I have made.

I still think that Java as a technology could be improved for creating browser based games. When I first started on Caverns of Underkeep, I was cursing Sun Microsystems at least once a day. Now however, I’ve kinda worked around what I perceive as the kinks in Java Applet programming.

Unfortunately the alternatives to Java are not that clear. Flash looks kinda bulky to work with, and whats up with not being able to right click? I haven’t used flash first hand so I don’t want to speculate too much as to what it can/and can’t do, but most flash games I’ve played seem to run like a dog, which is unfortunate because vector graphics are just so cool.

Microsoft’s Silverlight looks rather interesting, But I’m just not sure if the technology is going to be mature enough - Thats always the risk with new technologies. But having the .net framework and an awesome programming language like C# in the browser is pretty exciting.

If Sun Microsystems would just allow me to poll the keyboard and mouse I would be a much happier man!

Edit : It just occured to me that I forgot about php, mySQL and DHTML to make browser based games. These types of games tend to me more stats and text based than arcade-like, so that’s probably why I forgot about them.

* I reserve the right to change my mind at any time :)