Timeline
Submitted by aaron on Sun, 2006-01-15 14:17.
Obviously, much of the timeline for Spindowners depends largely on the timeline in which the Game API is developed. I hope to have an initial game in progress by this summer, although it will be in a rough form. By the fall, we might be able to call it a late alpha or early beta. We might have to have a game reset once or twice before the final launch early 2007.
So that's a rough idea. Meanwhile, character creation should be started by February. You'll be free to play around with that and give feedback once it's up. Maybe soon after that, we'll have a location or two up that you can even explore around in. That'll help us all get a better feel for the game as it evolves.
Sounds good...
One question I have is regarding area exploration (and even basic site navigation). I've only played a few browser based games, and only one called Eternal Duel where you could wander around areas and such. The problem I've found is the page load time. It's really a pain to play Eternal Duel because of its lag, even though I think it's a pretty neat game idea. It could just be their code stinks, but it could just be basic net lag. I was wondering if Game-API or you will address the issue. I could see XHTML being used to update a central "room frame" instead of the entire page, but I'm not sure how feasible that is within Drupal or if it would make much difference.
In any event, I'm sure I'll get over it and explore plenty come February. ^_^
Drupal and Hosting
My experience with Drupal is that it's fairly fast loading. There are some Drupal sites with some heavy load on them that are still fast to load, such as Air America Radio, The Onion, and Drupal itself.
Because the Game API will use Drupal as its core for page loading, so long as a game is being hosted on a decent server, it should load up decently. The downside is that we won't be able to cache the game pages, since they're so dynamic, so the speed might be about 25% less than it would be otherwise. But Drupal is still mighty fast. And as far as hosting, Spindowners is hosted on the same datacenter that hosts Air America Radio, so that shouldn't be a problem.
The real problem will be if/when I reach my monthly bandwidth limit. Then it simply becomes finding the money to upgrade my account, if necessary.