The idea of this engine is the usage of mode7 method, and many, many masks :D. Each mask contains a piece of terrain, and the further the mask is (upper position on the screen), terrain's scale is became smaller, thus creating a 3D effect.

The navigation of camera was done using a simple trigonometric function, though. There was no collision nor object at this moment. I'll upgrade this engine later...

Test this engine here!

http://www.geocities.com/vystrale/FPEngine.html

Sorry I haven't posted anything new in a while... Like a month I think. I've been mad busy with work and I can actually show ya's: http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/project-earth/game/game.html

Please note I had no hand in the play game design. I'm just a coder on this one. But this has given me quite a bit of experience working with a multiplayer server and as3 coding, which (hopefully) will translate into me eventually creating a flash mmo of some sort.

Taking a quick look at all the pbbg's I've tried in the last month: no new development. I've seen people boosting unique game play, and I have been let down. All I'm finding are clones and a bunch of games where you click fight, you fight, then you level and actually buy new weapons/armor/etc then do it all again.

Sorry for anyone with a game like that, but that's not new or inventive.

On the bright side, I have found a blog that I'd liek to share. This guy posts far more often than me and has some interesting stuff.

http://buildingbrowsergames.com/

And I leave ya with a question. Do you think that PBBGs are stagnating? There's a few really good ones but the majority are clones and poorly done clones at that. We aren't seeing a huge number of new features being thought of/used. And I've seen little to no advancement in gameplay. I may wrong and if I am, someone please show me a game that can prove me wrong ( I know of a few in alpha/betas that aren't open yet that look really cool.. I'm look at you Cameon).

]]> http://freetoplay.wordpress.com/?p=83 Thu, 07 Aug 2008 05:13:25 +0000 Adrian Crook http://f2p.biz/2008/08/06/freetoplaybiz-seeks-contributing-writer/ FreeToPlay.biz is looking for an insightful industry commentator to join our team. FreeToPlay.biz covers social games, online games and virtual worlds for industry insiders. For more info on who we are, see the "Who is" section of this site.

Our selected writer will be capable of creating news with analysis, crafting fact-supported feature articles and conducting insightful interviews. The job can be done from your laptop anywhere in the world, but some paid travel (i.e. to cover conferences) may be involved.

Application criteria:

• Please provide only one submission. Must be online game or core game business related, not a game review.
• If you don't have a submission directly related to the topic, submit your best piece of critical analysis and explain your background/knowledge of the online gaming or core game business.
• Must have passion for business side of the game industry, be professional and articulate and available to post with consistency and meet editorial deadlines.
• Regular online writing rates apply, with performance bonuses.

Please review some our most popular posts (here, here and here) to get an idea of what we're looking for before applying.

Express your interest by sending the aforementioned materials to:

F2Pwriter@gmail.com

Only qualified applicants will be contacted.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

+ Childhood Online
The website isn't up yet, but Childhood Online seems to be an rpg/adventure game with some platform elements. Information is really sketchy right now.

+ Secret Online
This game is from the same publisher as the previous. Secret Online seems to be a fantasy/historical rpg based around Chinese mythology.

+ Kiwi Heroes
Browser based game geared toward kids.

+ Twin Skies
Another browser based rpg.

+ Goon World
Game based in a world of organized crime.

+ S4 League
S4 League is a sports/shooter mmo.

+ FunFun
Another browser based game. This one focusing of minigames.

+ Q-World
Malaysian "cute" anime-style mmorpg.

+ Godswar Online
Greek based rpg, announced way back at the end of last year.

+ Project Powder
Racing/snowboard mmo.

+ LaTale
MapleStory-style rpg.

+ Operation 7
Army-style fps.

+ TalesRunner
Anime-style racer/adventure game.

+ ASDA Story
Anime-style rpg.

+ Sugar Rush
Comic-style fighting game.

+ Way of the Five
Monster collecting rpg based in a cartoony Chinese setting.

+ Hovorun
Racing game.

+ Stargate Worlds
Game based on the Stargate franchise.

+ AceOnline - NA
North American server for Ace Online from SubaGames. Supposedly, this should not cause IP blocks for other servers, as the owners of AceOnline (Yedang) have stated in the past that they do not plan on enforcing region restrictions.

+ Priston Tale I - NA
No website from SubaGames yet. Does anyone even play this game anymore?

+ Priston Tale II - NA
My understanding was this game was originally pay-to-play, but it seems SubaGames will be rolling it out for free. I might be wrong.

+ Free Realms
A largely hyped game from Sony. The current droll worthy feature is the possibility of gameplay focusing on mechanics other than combat.

yang mau main bisa klik disini

You may remember this space on 139 Norfolk Street for its former role as a mock movie drive-in. Well, today marks the official recreation of the space for the grand re-opening of Pong 2.0. The space daylights as a design studio owned and operated by two brothers who decided to do something innovative with their extra space. Enter ping pong table.

The Table

For a mere $80, you too can add your name to one of the ping pong paddles on the wall and visit anytime (during open hours) for two months of play. The mini paddles at the end are reserved for the pros. If you’re not ready for membership, 20 minutes of play costs $10. Yah, that is pretty freakin’ expensive especially when you consider that its $10 PER PERSON. Whoa. For more reasonable prices, head to Fat Cat in the West Village which will only cost $5 for an hour of play.

The Match

I brought my own paddle to intimidate the competition but. . .[sigh] I lost.

The Digital

I was initially drawn based on the chameleon nature of the space and the digital backdrop for the pong. A live twitter feed chronicles the ‘action’ and official games are recorded for upload on YouTube.

Here’s a game from the last edition of Pong:

The Live Feed

If you’re really obsessive, you can check in on the table at all hours to study your competition.

The Low Down

In one word, overrated. It was fun to drop in and play a little but the space is tiny (only 1 table), the air conditioner struggles to keep up in this heat wave, and the price is far too expensive. I’ll go play some cheaper games and record them myself if I need to, thank you.

The power of the web no longer has to be proven. The web architecture has become one of the strongest standards in the history of technology, together with the underlying IP infrastructure architecture which has been so open and robust that it enabled the integration of  other networks like voice, and now mobile networks. Reasons for the strength of the web standard are its openness, its thinness, its simplicity, and the hyperlink concept enabling navigation.

This is why web3D developers are looking for open, thin, simple 3D spaces that can be hyperlinked to each other and customized with standard web tools such as html, javascript and PHP, and consequently are looking for browser-based technologies to satisfy these criteria.

In the past few months several browser-based technologies have been either newly introduced or repackaged from older technologies. This is good progress, as it standardizes the user interface, but it’s not enough, especially if the technology still requires the user to download and install proprietary software, which can sometimes be 50MB or more. In most cases, for more advanced tools and applications, the installation of an Active-X control is required. Some installation processes are presented particularly well, and for a standalone Windows user with Internet Explorer the installation process can be smooth, however, the reality is that the proprietary software (i.e., plug-in) has been installed on the computer for good! This type of installation is a problem in most business environments where it is common for IT managers in mid-size or large corporations to prevent the installation of software from external sources for obvious reasons (i.e., security, reliability, quality. etc.). Thus, since offices cannot access 3D worlds and applications based on technologies that require the installation of proprietary software, they do not satisfy the need for widespread accessibility that is a requirement for much wider adoption of web3D. Moreover, Active-X plug-ins do not support Mac or Linux machines whose market shares are growing every day.

Browser based technologies are to be considered in two categories:

* Those requiring installation of a plug-in, with the following issues:
    o Difficulty installing in a corporate environment due to IT policies and firewall incompatibilities
    o Rarely cross-platform
    o Need for the end-user’s action for regular update of the application
    o Less market penetration due to the end-user’s lack of trust to unknown plug-ins
* Those thin “plug-in-less” technologies enabling web-native applications that are fully compliant with standard web navigation. These technologies are necessarily based on one of the following underlying web technologies:
    o Flash: not offering any immersive walkthrough possibility
    o Silverlight: seems promising, although likely not ready for prime time for quite a while, as well as not being multi-platform
    o Java: The only viable technology available , enabling plug-in-less web3D

3DXplorer is one of the rare technologies from this last category that is available today, offering immersive 3D worlds, web sites and applications all in a browser-based and plug-in-less environment, enabling web3D in the exact same architecture as the web itself.

So I have been playing several games online and they are pretty good. Nothing spectacular, but they are enjoyable. Anyways, there flaws are starting to show, particularly in the multiplayer departments. THESE ARE MULITPLAYER GAMES! You think they would put a lot of effort into actually playing and communicating with others. But like most games, these ones drop the ball.

Now here is a game theory question for ya's. Do you 'force'/strongly encourage the player to perform an action, or do you wait until they decide?

Let me elaborate. If you are playing a strategy game online, why attack another player? You steal some resources. But then you are likely to be attacked in return. And you are surely losing resources for attacking/maintaining an army.

But what if you were to give the players a reason to attack the other players. Such as the only way for anyone to get military experience is to do so through attacking, and that experience is needed to develop new, better weapons.

There also needs to be more thought into the point of the game. Too many games I have played where your sole goal is to be the best player in the game, which pretty much equals "whoever spends the most time ingame wins" style gameplay.

Do I have any better idea's of the top of my head? Not relly, but an example would be give the players several different paths to play and allow them to try and reach the top in their now paths (Military, research, Political, etc). Make these paths balanced some how and make it advantageous for players of different paths to work together.

You're still striving to be the best, but it's just cut the gamae population in third and given you a chance to play the way you want to play and would hopefully be worked in such a way that just because you have no life and spend 12 hours a day playing the game doesn't mean you're going to be the best.

So, what are you guys think? Encourage/force cooperation, interaction, conflict, or just wait for the players to decide to do something

David Perry, Chief Creative Officer of Acclaim (in that company's new, F2P-only format) and Kyra Reppen, SVP of Nickelodeon, send word of very compelling vacancies in their respective companies. Nickelodeon's posting is based in LA whereas Acclaim seems open to remote-work scenarios. Kudos to Acclaim!

I promised I'd post their opps on freetoplay.biz. Click through for the full text of each posting.

Company: ACCLAIM GAMES, Inc.

Job Title: DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTION

Description: This is a very important Director role at Acclaim, which is now the biggest free-to-play American games publisher.

Note: We accept resumes for other levels of production also.

Skills we value (the more on the list below, the better):
- Experienced producing large scale multiplayer games.
- Experienced producing MMOG, MMORPG games.
- Experienced producing Flash / casual / mass market based games.
- Experienced producing Social / Facebook / MySpace Games.
- Experienced producing Avatar based games.
- Experienced with free to play / micro-transactions / virtual item sales.
- Experience with in-game advertising techniques.
- Experience working with both domestic & foreign development teams.
- Experience reporting to and strategizing with the top levels of management.
- Experience pitching and presenting projects & plans
- Understanding of Web marketing techniques (SEO, Viral etc.)
- Experience managing staff that directly report.
- Educational accolades add value also.
- Must be willing to travel globally to represent the company.

Salary:
Salary is based on experience.
Minimum Package contains stock options, bonus, full medical, dental, vision etc.

Location.
Los Angeles is definitely preferred (our headquarters are in Hollywood), however Acclaim is an extremely forward-thinking company with staff all over the world, and we have no issue with you working from any location in the world. (So moving is not required.)

----------------------------------

Company: MTV Networks
Job Title: VP, Production, Nickelodeon Kids & Family Virtual Worlds Group
Nickelodeon Kids & Family Virtual Worlds Group

Nickelodeon Kids & Family Virtual Worlds Group which oversees an exciting pipeline of virtual world and casual MMOG development, based in Los Angeles, seeks a Vice President to manage production across multiple titles.

The recently announced Nickelodeon Kids & Family Virtual Worlds Group manages all company virtual world initiatives for kids, tweens, teens and families, including the original youth-oriented virtual community of Neopets, Nickelodeon’s online playground for kids, Nicktropolis and all new initiatives. The group will focus on the innovation of the company’s existing worlds with projects like World of Neopia (working title) and of the expansion of Nicktropolis with a premium layer. It will also develop original properties like the recently announced Monkey World and others based on Nickelodeon properties.

Responsibilities:
• Manage ‘studio’ across resources, budgets, scheduling and outside vendors
• Directly manage producers and resource managers (both development and live teams)
• Ensure on time and on budget delivery of multiple concurrent products
• Work closely with Creative Director and head of Marketing to ensure products meet their objectives
• Partner with technology team to ensure collaborative and efficient working environment
• Foster collaboration and cross-functional team building
• Lead and adapt production processes across the organization
• Identify, hire and manage outside vendors and contract resources and budgets
• Manage development, milestone and release schedules

Requirements:
• 5-10 years of games industry experience, with MMOG experience a plus
• Experience managing producers and leading / motivating cross-functional teams
• Successful track record for launching games on time, on budget and meeting creative and marketing objectives
• Exceptional verbal / written communication and interpersonal skills
• Strong technical and business acumen

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Diferente dos outros jogos, os browser-based não possuem gráficos normais. Tudo é feito por meio de descrições que você lê, desde itens até localizações e outras pessoas. Por isso, os jogadores precisam de um pouco de imaginação na hora de jogar para "ver" as cenas e o que está acontecendo. Mas isso não deixa o jogo pior ou mais chato. É preciso entender que os jogos via browser acabam se tornando mais um estilo de jogo próprio, mesmo havendo jogos de quase todos os estilos na sua lista. Lista que hoje é bem extensa, contando com mais de 50 títulos perdidos na internet.

Uma característica interessante é que alguns desses jogo ganham legiões de fãs fervorosos ao redor do mundo, que mantém comunidades inteiras atualizadas com base nos acontecimentos, criando histórias e evoluções dos mundos onde estão. Esta característica agrada principalmente aos fãs de RPG, onde a história é parte fundamental no jogo. Para quem se interessou seguem abaixo alguns jogos que podem fazer você passar o tempo. Depois, é só fazer o cadastro e ir em frente.

Urban Dead - www.urbandead.com
UrbanDead é bem simples, mas bastante famoso. Nele, você vive dentro de Malton, uma cidade em quarentena onde uma empresa conseguiu dar vida a pessoas já mortas, transformando-as em zumbis. Você pode escolher entre uma das 3 classes de sobreviventes ou começar simplesmente como zumbi. Escolhendo um dos lados, você toma parte na batalha pelo território da cidade, tentando sobreviver em meio ao caos.
Comunidade.

Nation States - www.nationstates.net
Esse é um jogo político, onde você cria uma nação e a comanda da maneira que quer. Todo dia surgem novas questão políticas para você resolver, tais como: se os uniformes escolares deveriam ser obrigatórios; para onde vai a verba militar; ou se uma empresa de mineração pode entrar em alguma reserva. Além disso, você ainda pode se filiar à World Assembly (Assembléia Mundial) e se juntar a outros países para formar uma região, que possui mais poder que as simples nações isoladas.
Comunidade.

Hat Trick - www93.hattrick.org
Em hattrick, você gerencia e treina seu próprio time de futebol. Compra jogadores, arruma a formação para os jogos e pode jogar contra times do mundo. Possui estatísticas avançadas, com notas para os jogadores, suspensões, treinos e contusões. É um jogo em tempo real, onde as partidas duram 90 minutos e os jogos são feitos nos mesmos dias das competições reais. Tem um modo pago, onde você tem acesso a ainda mais opções e informações do seu time. O único ponto negativo é que a quantidade de times é limitada, então às vezes é preciso esperar alguns dias para receber o seu time e partir para o jogo.
Comunidade.

Ps. Muita gente considera os jogos em flash como browser-based, mas eles não podem ser vistos dessa forma, porque você ainda precisa fazer o download no início do jogo.

]]> http://freetoplay.wordpress.com/?p=81 Tue, 17 Jun 2008 04:24:03 +0000 Adrian Crook http://f2p.biz/2008/06/16/f2p-jobs-orange-telecom-ops-manager/ Been very busy on the consulting front lately... apologies for the lack of content. But I promised Nicolo I would post this job for him, so here goes:

At this year's GDC, I met Michael Ivvora and Nicolo Laurent from GOA, the videogame subsidiary of France Telecom/Orange. Besides handling the European side of US online games – launch, localization, QA, support etc – for games like Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot, Orange also runs a free to play portal at goa.com. They've recently launched localized free to play games in Europe like Gunbound and Pangya, and they've got plans to expand their game selection.

Right now they're looking for an Operational Manager for their free to play business, which is based out of Dublin, Ireland. This is a lead managerial position, which means leading the vision for their free to play business, managing project managers and organizing work flow between game teams. It also means working closely with the marketing team to develop strategies for customer acquisition, conversion, retention and monetization, along with managing the alignment of development and marketing goals.

If this sounds like your dream job, send an email to nicolas.laurent@goa.com.

A full job description after the jump.

TYPE OF CONTRACT
Permanent role – To start as soon as possible.

LOCATION
Dublin, Ireland

MISSION:
Working within GOA, the games department of France Telecom (Content Division), the operational Manager is in charge of the day to day operations for the Free to Play online business.

FIELDS OF ACTIVITY
Free to play online games (from casual to hardcore)

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Lead, determine and maintain the vision and direction of our free to play business
- Manage project managers associated to free to play games. Review, comment and approve milestone submissions
- Organize workflows between game teams and shared resources and facilitate frequent dialogs between teams
- Establish a creative and productive environment through effective team coaching

In addition, you will work closely with the marketing team in order to:
- Develop strategy for customer acquisition, conversion, retention and monetization
- Manage the alignment of development goals with marketing objectives, and the alignment of product goals with strategic development objectives
- Achieve sales goals through quality execution and by meeting market requirements.
- Analyze trends and research new business opportunities with the business development team

REQUIREMENTS
EXPERIENCE
- Minimum of 5 years of working experience
- Significant experience in the online game industry, understanding of the free to play universe
- Must have successfully developed and managed people, resources and schedules with a world renowned software entertainment company.

EDUCATION
- College degree or equivalent preferred
- Professional or advanced degree is a bonus.

SKILLS
- Strong ability to lead, manage and drive projects
- Strong problem-solving skills.
- Data driven personality
- Strong understanding of marketing strategies and online business models
- Enthusiastic, positive, team oriented, and organized
- Excellent written, oral and email communication skills, ability communicate effectively with different audiences on a broad range of topics and cultures, e.g. technical, business and creative
- Strong organizational, analytical, and presentation skills;
- Passion for online games.

OTHER
- Fluent English
- Ability to travel to our different offices (Dublin and Paris) and to our partner’s offices (Worldwide)
- Good computer skills and knowledge of MS Office suite of products. Basic understanding of online game technical structure is a plus.
- Strong network of contacts within the game industry would be a plus

CONTACT
If you meet the requirements and want to be part of the rapidly growing European Free-To-Play online gaming market, please send an email with resume attached to nicolo (nicolas.laurent@goa.com)

All projects need an achievable goal and some sort of road map to get there.  Without these, a project is going to descend into chaos with the feature list ever growing and the expectations and technology required constantly increasing.

As a silly analogy, imagine if someone said 'paint me a picture' and that was the only instruction you received.  What would you paint? how? in what style? how large? how detailed? and so on.  If instead, someone said, 'paint me a picture of a red roofed house on a green hill with some clouds and a sun in the sky'.  You'd have a much better idea of what you were to paint and could start thinking about how to paint it.  Granted, it is still open to interpretation and there are many ways to paint such a picture ranging from a child-like version to something by one of the great masters.  You would probably go back to the person and ask some more detailed questions about what they wanted and you would make notes, forming the rest of the design document for your painting.

The amorphous project issue is bad enough in a badly organised group project, but it is even worse in a solo project.  When you work solo you only have yourself to report to, to direct you, to praise you, and to bring you back when you steer away from the plan on some sidetrack.

And yes, I've fallen foul of that recently, but I've only just realised the true impact it is having on my game project.  Projects that you do in your free time (and by yourself) are hard enough to plan time for, but with an amorphous state, you have no chance of ever completing it, let alone 'on time'.

The thing is, I was trying to make the game as versatile as possible with plenty of customisation options.  This is okay and very achievable, but I failed to draw a line and decide where it should stop.  This meant that I was constantly reworking an interface and design that was perfectly fine but didn't cater for a particular situation.

So I'm going back to the drawing board, without throwing anything away, and deciding which elements of the design are essential, which elements are desirable (not essential but would be nice), and which elements are really not worth the hassle (unnecessary).

The essential parts of the design will naturally stay in as otherwise they wouldn't be essential.  This will include the core game mechanics and what input/output is needed to allow the player to actually play the game.  At its very raw state, a browser game should be playable in a text browser.  It may not be attractive, but it should work.  I've tested my game (a long time ago) in this state and it worked fine.  Only when I started to add complexity and 'pretty' it up, did the project slow to a crawl.

The desirable parts of the design come next but have to be further broken down.  For example, an attractive interface is not essential to the running of the game, but is desirable as it adds a cosmetic, appealing interface to the player.  This interface can range from very simple to very complex which means that each desirable feature needs to broken down into its own essential/desirable/unnecessary aspects.

The unnecessary parts of the design will be put to one side to trigger potential game updates in the future, but that's where they should live, as part of an upgrade to an already functioning game.

Also remember that your aim should be to get a solid, working game 'out there'.  This is why you should plan to have working versions of the game in its raw state (essentials only) so that you can test it and make sure it functions.  You can then plan which desirable features (and which versions of each) you really want in version 1.0 of your game and which ones can be added later.

If you decide that you really want every feature you have thought of in the game at the very start, you are setting yourself up for a very long development time where you still don't know if the game will be received well.  Also, be wary of showing off everything at launch.  Players expect games to mature and change over time (to a point) and if you already have a series of upgrades planned (more desirable features), then you already have things to keep your players interested as the months go by.

What the first problem you think of when you think of making a framework for games? For me it was databases. We all approach these differently, and will want different info to be stored. After a bit of thinking, the easiest way to do something like this would be to put objects of data into the database and have your code know the schema of the info.
Doing some searching it seems Google beat me to the punch with this idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigTable

So this gives me the impression its plausible to do what I'm thinking, but is it really efficient? Can it be done is such as way so that each call isn't grabbing ALL the info related to a player. The goal would be to return a query then to deserialize it. And not to perform string manipulations on it during the query.

Let me give an example of the problem of having all of ones data in a single object.
You have 5 stats, experiences, weapons, armour, magic, a guild, quests, inventory, gold, friends, mail, an attack history...

I think you start to get the point. That's a large amount of info when you only want your players names and id. I can think of a number of problems for using a large scale solution like bigtable, but is there a way to keep a similar structure on a smaller scale?

To make descent framework for games, the DB needs to be incredibly flexible and this is the only thing that comes to mind when I try to think of a solution.

So for you all DB guru's out there, what are your thoughts? Can it be done? I will try to put more thought into it over the weekend.

Also, does anyone know of any good database stress testing tools?

This post is in response to a comment by jmucchiello on another post. He has suggested that I write this, and since I have been looking for topics, here it is.

Lets define what a PBBG is.

http://www.pbbg.org/

And by extension should not involve being continuously connected to the host system

Kotaku is reporting that EA's new browser based FPS shooter Battlefield: Heroes has just opened up signup for their beta. You can try and go HERE and sign up, but the website seems to have crumbled under the weight of Kotaku readers trying to sign up.

Moshi Monsters, by MindCandy, is primarily for kids. I questioned posting about it here, but the game is pretty to look at and might be interesting to some. Also, MindCandy is known for engaging products. Game play is centered around your adopted monster. You care for your monster via puzzle games that award currency, feeding, customizing it's room, and generally interacting with it. Monsters can also interact with each other, via adding your friends to a friends list.

Metaplace from Areae Inc. is a platform for building virtual worlds and other mmos. The games are developed by users and hosted on Metaplace's servers. The platform itself appears to be open and extensive; allowing communication via rss, javascript, html, etc.

SparkPlay Media's Earth Eternal is an upcoming browser based mmorpg. Features include 16 character races, 4 character classes (with the ability to learn abilities from other classes), and a "grove" system which acts as a sort of camp/base for each character. Details are a little sparse at this point, but so far game play seems interesting.

Erepublik is a civilization/character building sim in which a player builds a character through various actions, which then affect the development of a character's country. The game world is based off the physical world, so you can join (and possibly become president of) actual countries. Erepublik is currently in closed beta.

For those that don't know what AIR is, it simply put is a desktop widget system. But it much more than that. It offers the user the chance to interact with your web content from their desktop. Just imagine a player getting a notification in the corner of their screen that they have been attacked in game, or that their research has completed or they have new mail. Imagine that they could easily respond or perform a new action using the same interface such as reply to the map, check their status, or attack back.

This could be a big step for game design.

But I'm more curious as to what everyone elses thoughts on this is. This AIR widget of course wouldn't be the core of your game. But just a way to always let your players interact with the game.

Bang! Howdy is a browser based, western, turn based strategy game. Game play is based on a series of turn based strategy games from which players accrue in-game currency. Players can use currency to alter their avatar, purchase additional units for game play, or purchase items that alter game play. In addition certain game play achievements can award special badges which award special units, additional items to alter your avatar, customization options, etc.

Three Rings' Whirled is a minigame/social browser based mmo. The site offers a series of minigames, some original and some clones of other successful games, from which you can obtain in-game currency to use for decorating your "room" or purchasing a pet. Whirled offers a few unique features. You can embed your room, with your pet, into any website. You can create custom pets and avatars. Currently Whirled seems a sort of clone Puzzle Pirates, only the minigames are slightly more original and not quite pirate-based. However, the site is in open beta, which suggest room for much more expansion.

Then you have your strats. Clones of Tarvian (Again,  anyone know the first game of this type in it's genre?).

Oh and I can't forget the slew of games that have maps that you control your character on. Some of these games are pretty damn cool, but again, the vast majority are clones and just suck.

Here's what I do. I go to the voting sites and sign up to the top 5 games if I haven't played them before. I give most of these games two or three days of play. And sadly only one of the new ones I've start (Omerta) has kept my attention.

Am I the only one with this problem?  I know PBBGs are difficult to design (I've actually pushed my own development back again to learn more advanced PHP), and I know that coming up with original, and fun idea's can be difficult, but com on! We are a large community. Or the last few years I've considered PBBGs to be the one last adventurous computer gaming platform, but it is starting to seem to me I may have been wrong.

So, let us bring this post to a point: What are your views on this? Where do you think PBBGs are now and how does the future look? Are we cursed to just clone each other, each time using slightly better interfaces and tech?  Has gameplay advanced stalled? And if it has, do you think it's from laziness of developers or technical hurdles?