Something I really loved about UO

I was just thinking that I really loved how UO had books. You could write stories. You could only fit maybe a page and a half of text in the longest available books, so that lead to very condensed writing when I was playing. I sold serial adventure stories on my vendors, and the RP community that I was a part of ate them up.

I think I might make a weekend project of a quickie gray shard system for collecting, rating, and spawning player-made books on the world's bookshelves. I doubt the tiny community on Alexandria will take advantage of it much, but there's always the chance that it'll enrich the shard for the better, and possibly draw in more RP-minded players.

I'll publish it here on Sunday night, if it's finished.

Game Design On Hold...

I'm sad to say that my game design ambitions have to be put on hold for some time. I've become possessed with the need to free myself of the 9-5, and that means either a) re-launching my web design site in earnest, or b) creating a bunch of profitable websites until I reach the critical mass where I can leave my day job. 

Either way, it doesn't leave a whole lot of time for game design & dev. I had a few ideas I was toying around with surrounding Flash (usually I haaaaate Flash, but I have found Actionscript 3 to be reasonable), but they'll have to wait. Ultima navigation DLL? On hold. Gray shard projects? Much to the frustration of my playerbase, on hold.

On the bright side, if this works, I can write an article or a small book on How To Free Yourself To Write Games.

Bye bye, blog. See you when I see you. Hopefully I'll be writing the next post in this blog from my laptop next to a pool.