Just an update to the previous post. I had a chance to walk through a little bit of Golemizer, the AJAX/JavaScript-based MMO where you craft golems of ever-increasing deadliness to wreak your will upon the world — if all the other mad scientists don’t beat you to it.
Everything you see, can be crafted. Even some of the animals are mechanical copies. The tutorial teaches you to build your first golem, a cute little clockwork gnome, and along the way you end up with a house, building a forge to put in the house, making a shopping-list full of parts for your gnome, and setting your gnome free to make a dent in the bunny problem.
If you can find him. Most of the time, I’d set my gnome running and it would just hide somewhere. He was so cute though, and I loved him to death, before someone else’s clockwork gnome walked up and bit me to death.
BAD GNOME! BAD!
So anyway, I guess it’s full-on PvP.
Since everyone has the ability to make buildings, and with a little time spent studying and harvesting, HUGE buildings, the very first thing you notice is how crowded the place is. To find a free spot for your own home means going a couple of screens away. And then, the houses look identical, so it’s a chore to remember which is yours. Not that it’s totally vital — most of the houses there will be like one another, an empty 10×10 house with nothing in it but a forge.
The concept is cool — build golems and battle them — but I wonder if an MMO, especially a JavaScript-based one, was the best genre for the game. One that focused purely on making your unique golem and then battling them one-on-one or in an arena of some sort could really be quite fun. As an MMO, though — if I want to construct and fight golems, I wonder if I am really going to be all that thrilled about building houses.
Wow, that game looks like crap.
Given that it’s almost certainly one guy’s labor of love, I think you have to cut him some slack for this first release.
Hi,
I’m glad that you seemed to like your gaming time in Golemizer. I’m the creator of the game and it’s always nice to receive feedback.
I’ll just specify that it’s not a Flash game. I’m using only AJAX to run the client which is pure Javascript that runs inside most browsers without the need to install a plug-in. I’ll agree though that it can be hard to make the difference. AJAX isn’t as smooth as Flash but making that choice was only a matter of using a technology I could already handle.
The multiple houses around are, well, a bit overwhelming. This is mostly because I decided to give every new account a small house to start with. From time to time, I’m sending back to characters’ inventories old houses from players that haven’t played for some weeks which helps to clean the place a bit.
The answer to this messy houses problem is the city system which takes the houses away from the open world and allow a mayor to have a better setting than the screenshot in this post. However, I might as well remove the free house and remove the need for a forge to go through the tutorial which would help a lot to keep the open world clean.
Golems combat is currently the main focus of the game though more aspects are coming. There’s already the housing/city system for people that just like to decorate and there’s the player made dungeon coming too. This will allow players to set their golems in digged dungeons as permanent (meaning they will respawn instead of dying) so they can create their own content.
As for the “look” of the game… Most of the graphics are from free libraries completed by some freelancers work. I know that people won’t make any difference between an AAA studio and a single developer like me with an unrelated day job and almost no budget, but that was expected. Can’t please everyone. Even big games like Warhammer have been criticized for their graphics (and WoW too is I remember well, people were complaining about the cartoonish look), which is part of the reality when you decide to make a game. You will receive negative feedback and you need to make sure you can deal with it.
What people don’t always realise though is that even negative feedback is useful. Depending on the kind of feedback received, you can figure out if this person is part of your targeted crowd or not. If the first comment is about the quality of the graphics, then I know that I can do little to turn this person into a player. But if it’s a comment about a system of the game, you can already tell there’s some interest in the game so you’re better to concentrate on this point.
Dave
Knowing that it was done purely in JavaScript and Ajax just makes it even more astounding!
Just wondering, though — have you looked into Metaplace? I think Golemizer would be a perfect fit for that platform, which gives you all the multiplayer stuff for free, a lot of the world building tools, again for free, leaving you only having to make your unique features great.
Thanks Tipa
Actually, I learned about Metaplace just some months after starting to work on Golemizer (started work June 2007 and learned about Metaplace around September). But since work was already started on my side, I decided to carry on with it. But it’s true that Metaplace would have been the perfect tool for me.
While it’s been much more work to start from scratch, I’ve learn quite a lot. And the good things is now that I have the framework, it makes it easier to start building another game which might happen some day.