While parenthood is keeping the personal side of life busier than ever, professionally things have been rolling but not, you know, exciting. Last summer I was struck by the urge to combine my two loves, programming and gaming. However for someone with limited artistic skills, most types of games would require major money for a graphic designer. That’s when I stumbled onto a popular genre – browser text games. Ok, ok, most of these games are hideous to look at, commonly whipped up by university computer science students making a game for kicks. But after playing a couple of the most popular ones I thought… I could do this! I could do it even better!
After a quick proof-of-concept I was hooked. I starting falling into one of the most rewarding and fun programming projects of my life. Roboid Incorporated is a free browser MMORPG. Unlike many of these types of games, it’s 100% mobile-friendly. It’s lightweight and has a rich and growing story and missions. While mostly classified as a text game, I’ve made things as graphical and 2D image based as possible, so it does have nice look to it.
With an assortment of mini-games like a hacking puzzle, a scavenging minesweeper style game, training, combat and item shop the game is now well into a full-fledged version with over 120 registered players at the time of this blog post! It’s definitely taking off – just added a forum last week. Check it out – it’s totally free with no ads.