3 Dec, ’24

It's All Coming TogetherBoth? Both. Both is good.

by Cal

A brief apology/confession/something: I was off visiting family for a couple weeks, right? So I thought to myself, "hey, this will be a great time to get some work done on my projects and blog posts written up". But then I was too busy, you know, visiting with family to actually get anything done. I know, it's crazy. Who could possibly have forseen this outcome.

I've been posting on here about Browser Games :tm: and Cozy MMORPGs, right? They have been, unsurprisingly, high on my mind when it comes to thinking about game dev, with any given day being more on one side than the other just based on, I don't know, my mood. What I was looking at most recently. And then, about a week or so ago, I was mulling over my "but if I made a browser game, what would it BE" dilemma once again, when the obvious solution struck me.

• I want to make a browser game.
• I want to make a cozy MMORPG.
• I can just... make both. At the same time. AS THE SAME GAME.

With that revelation, everything I'd been struggling with just immediately fell into place, an entire game's design instantaneously crystallizing in my mind, as though I had just cracked open a knobby rock and revealed it as a beautiful geode.

My personal dev time since then has all been entirely focused on bringing this game to life. Since it's a website game, I've returned to my ancient roots of PHP - modernizing to that fancy new PHP framework, Symfony¹ - with just a light side dose of Python for some timed back-end processing like changing the weather or daily turn refreshes.

It is going fantastically. I started out by stealing my own character creator from an older pure-PHP project and converted it to (a very minimalist install of) Symfony+Twig, which was both a great way to learn how to work with Symfony and also a solid confirmation that I was making the right choice, since the new code is so much easier to work with, I mean holy shit you have no idea. ...Ahem.

I don't have an official name or logo assets for this yet - names are hard - but you can rest assured I will be posting about this game A Lot, and that I will be yelling the name from every rooftop once I have something. And what I do have are extensive - and I do mean extensive - design notes about everything I want this game to be, and an initial set of implementation tasks to keep me on track and organized. So everything is looking great!

...Aaand here's hoping I didn't just jinx it.