FreeGameDev

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Sourcecode: http://jerniwerks.angelfire.com/mia.rar

This is a shockwave program for doing multiplayer text based games. People often compare books to movies, and I feel the same way about adventure games; that no state-of-the-art graphics will ever compare to the feeling your imagination can produce. You can be shown an octopus with nunchucks, but when you're not shown, you imagine so much more.

Unfortunately, not many people code for shockwave anymore, which is a shame. The software, Director, is great, and you can publish both as an executable or in the shockwaves format. Flash is to Illustrator as Shockwave is to Photoshop, plain and simple. The problem is that shockwave doesn't come preinstalled in browsers, which looses a big audience, and also that the peer to peer connectivity doesn't account for our routers...pretty lame. It might be a conspiracy.

But for anyone who does play with Director and produce shockwave content, you can use this engine to either create your own text games, or adapt this into a more graphical something, making use of the object oriented architecture. It comes with a few example rooms, weapons, armor, races, monsters, etc that you can duplicate and expand upon. Zlib license information. Don't worry about the few included images, such as the monty-python-like clouds that were done with the paint tool in Photoshop. You could do much better.

If you are adventurous I'm also needing beta testing for the game I've been working on.

Maia - Revenge of the End of the Line.

Explore, and hopefully stop the end of the world, which will destroy your game after a few hours (although you can play over again and continue the same character). There is an executable version to download, or you can play on the web by going through an animated loader program in shockwave. My apology about the free hosting. Please don't mind the advertising.

Download: http://jerniwerks.angelfire.com/maia.rar
Browser: http://jerniwerks.angelfire.com/arcade.html

I've tested it to death recently and fixed several bugs. I'm interested to know the balance for someone who's never played, or any way to cheat in leveling up, if you have any suggestions or get bored someplace, etc. Let me know what you think.

Thanks for sharing, enjoy the day, and cheers.

Is the code zlib licensed? You linked to that although in a confusing way (in the middle of a paragraph about content).

Why don't you use a code repository sourceforge/github etc?

It is a shame that you use a proprietary platform (shockware) for this.

I'm not very familiar with licensing. This project was mostly at random, and I wanted to find a license that said, "use this however you like, not worried at all," which zlib seems too, I think.

I agree about shame, but here it is, for any shockwave people. If I had time I wanted to make a more normal MUD server with specialized clients but I'm usually homeless and time sucks (not that public library's aren't nice).

On the other hand there are normal MUD servers already, and for any kid who wants to let loose their fantasy without buff programming syntax, shockwave is super easy to understand and code for.

Have you tried to run your project on Gnash or Lightspark?

That would solve the proprietary platform problem.

That's pretty cool. If it could also run on a web page without needing shockwave, that would solve the issue of loosing audiance. I'll try it out when I get a chance. Feel free of course if you or anyone would like to try it and maybe post about it.

I'm going to update a few spelling uups in maia and try adding an alias command. Tomorrow I have to head out again. Thanks a bunch, Charlie. Cheers.

Majorly updated. Bugs have been fixed, overhauled as well as additional game mechanics, more templates and examples to work with. The game Maia has been updated as well, and a fat ton of new content has been added. Can be played via shockwave or downloadable executable, Mia source code on this same page: http://eternalcity.netai.net/arcade.html

If you want to express some kind of creation, text is a pretty easy way to accomplish that, especially if you're just one person. With text you can create a gigantic snail with mace-like tentacles in a matter of minutes, and the file size stays extremely small. You can bring huge ideas to life, and unlock the imagination of people just like reading a book, yet it is still interactive.

Have fun if you play the game, and cheers if the code behooves you.

After taking a quick look at the source code, I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to try to port your engine to Javacript.
That would definitely solve the proprietary platform problem.

However it's hard to extract the source code from the .dir file for anyone who don't have the tool you are using. Can't you export the source code as a bunch of text files?