Archive for July, 2004

In the beginning there were 4 volumes of Dungeons & Dragons rpg books circa 1985. Small volumes, each one of those books where you read a passage, choose an option, and turn to the page it points to. Simple yet very irritating to a 6 year old who was trying to figure out why the character seemed doomed to end his life plummeting from the clouds. (And yes, I could read at that age )

That was probably my very first introduction to the fascinating world of Fantasy Fiction and RPGs. Together with an healthy appetite for my native Irish folklore and mythology, it evolved into a major time consumer. Reading Tolkien, Brooks and Gemmell melded into my more literary reading of Irish Mythology volumes from W.B Yeats, Lady Gregory and anything else I could lay my hand on, inspiring a mixed bag of ideas and characters which later came to life on the FFW RPG “The Talisman War” I had moderated along with a number of others since 1999.

It was in 2000 when I first though of creating an interactive RPG game for the internet. It led me to PHP, and from there to the first PHP game I got hooked on, Solar Empire. I played SE for about a year, and finally left to concentrate in my studies at University. However SE stayed in my mind, and in 2002, I finally returned, now with time to burn, and an RPG game running in circles in my head begging to be let out. But first I needed to learn PHP – and what better place to start than to try developing SE?

Nowadays, I am joint lead developer on an SE fork, Quantum Star SE, with a release candidate for version 2.2.0 almost ready to be released. It’s the first PHP game I’ve ever gone it alone on, and I think it has worked out rather well.

Now to the point of this post – that RPG that refused to lie down. Earlier this year I finally decided to take a stab at it. In May I founded Shadows Rising RPG, registered the domain (shadowsrising.net) before anyone with ideas grabbed it, registered the project on Sourceforge and put out an appeal for developers.

I also did some research, and was more than a little surprised. There only appear to be a handful, literally, of open source RPG games written in PHP. There’s the most obvious phpRPG, and of course Legend of the Green Dragon (though it denies being an RPG realistically). But other than these two, there is a smattering of proprietary coded RPG’s, many of which are highly popular but few (if any) of which support a single character levelling and party system. Many seem obsessed more with “Empires” than a single adventuring character. So where are the big single character RPG’s in PHP? Answer: Either invisible, or non-existant.

This came as a shock – PHP games are generally straightforward; store your data on a database, present output of game to players, process player input, output results, and back to square one… They take time and effort, but any newbie to PHP could have a stab – and indeed this is exactly what I found. Sourceforge is a graveyard for dozens of dead RPG efforts. Unlike Space games (Quantum Star SE, TKI, BNT, AATraders, Open Merchant Empires, Solar Empire, etc., etc.), the RPG genre of PHP games is sparse, very sparse. The majority never released any files, or only made one release before fading into oblivian.

So where does this leave Shadows Rising RPG? In a big open space with lots of expansion room? Perhaps. More remarkably, such a lack of alternatives only strengthens SR. If we’re the only OS project doing something on such a vast scale – it makes becoming a successful project very likely. On the downside, there are few examples already existing, from whose mistakes we may learn. All, in all, however. SR’s future looks surprisingly bright and secure – if we get that playable code released in time for Christmas…