Piper's free online games

2012-05-20T16:18:00.001-07:00

The Goblin and the Butterfly

http://the-green-leaf.de/tgatb.html

The Goblin and the Butterfly (TGATB) is an attempt to make a MMORPG with a graphical, 2D, client.

Since i am not an artist, i was quite happy, when i found http://www.reinerstilesets.de/de/ (a friend gave me that link), where i could get a lot of free artwork, including animations.

The game server was written in C, at least, it was a modified copy of the MUD game server, the client is too written in C, using the SDL libraries for all graphical stuff.

It was a little painful to start with that game, but after i was more familiar with SDL libs and finally was able to display the first bitmaps and draw some pixels in game, i was very soon able to make a 2D map editor.

With a map editor making a virtual world then was easy.

Well, easier than using the text files, i was using before as maps..

There were several problems with the client, national keyboard layouts and such, compiling the client under Linux and Windows.

So, after not a lot of players tried TGatB and unfortunately no one stayed for a longer time, i found a guy in a forum about online games, who had some ideas how to make a successful rogue-like game.

And that was, when i started to work on Hack&Slash Online, a browser game.

2012-05-17T17:39:00.002-07:00

The MUD - The Green Leaf

http://the-green-leaf.de/thegreenleaf.html

The Green Leaf was the first online game i made some years ago.

Why a MUD?

Because a MUD is quite easy to make, you don't have to care about graphics and a client, because it is a text based game, like the old text adventures made by Scott Adams, Adventure Land, Pirate Cove back in the time, when ppl used a VIC 20, C64 or Atari ST to play games.

If you still have no clue what i am talking about, wikipedia is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD

This MUD came to life as a bot for the MMORPG Eternal Lands, http://www.eternal-lands.com, when i got the idea, it might be somehow funny to run a MUD inside a MMORPG to entertain the players.

At that time i was running a few bots for Eternal Lands, including a trivia bot, which lets you play a trivia game inside of Eternal Lands.

So, why not play a MUD, when players play a trivia game inside Eternal Lands?

So, after starting to develop that MUD bot, the next idea then was: Why not create your own game, a MUD, get a server a website and run it on your own?

And that was the beginning of The Green Leaf, i rented a server, named it The Green Leaf, installed my fresh written MUD server there, including it's very own little world and thats it so far about the beginning of The Green Leaf.

And that was more or less my problem over the years, my very own little world.

First, i started to create a lot of text files, one for every room of my world, but that became very unhandy, i had had no overview finally about that world anymore.

And it was a pain to maintenance all those text files, when the structure of the world changed.

So i started to work on some map generators and editors for some years, and now i am finally using a self written map editor, which is able to handle maps with 256*256 rooms, which is right now more than enough for my little world.

The world itself is an ancient town, a fortress, which is more or less the town i am living at.

Right now i have only the town itself plus some outside maps like forests and meadows, the plan is to build the whole former fortress with all it's city walls, forts, outposts, secret tunnels and such.

The latest updates of The Green Leaf were a lot of bug fixes and mostly additions for administrating a game.

Today i added some more or less useful stuff, like no one is able to create an account with my name after a fresh server restart and players wipe, nearly all NPC's in game are now talking to players and such things.

Talking about the setup of the game:
It should be a medieaval game, role playing is allowed, but not needed to play, and there should be a lot of stuff to entertain players.

Right now there is a trivia bot, who plays a trivia game in channel 124.

And a NPC, which drops random stuff on the ground you can find, like armor and weapons and other things.

There are some quests you can play already.

And NPC's which run their own shop and buy and sell stuff, so you can get stuff and make money by selling stuff to them.

Further there is a theater, where a group of actors plays Shakespeare's Hamlet, if you want some more culture in game.

Future plans?

Expand the world, add more quests, add more bots players can play with and so on.

2012-05-17T17:10:00.001-07:00

This blog is about the free online games i am working on from time to time.

They are just a hobby project, but it's fun to work on them, i somehow love to create virtual worlds :)

As there are:

The Green Leaf - a MUD server, i have been working on for nearly 9 years.
http://the-green-leaf.de/thegreenleaf.html

The Goblin and the Butterfly - a graphical MMORPG with a graphical client written in C and using SDL libs.
http://the-green-leaf.de/tgatb.html

Hack 'n Slash Online - an attempt to create a rogue like dungeon crawler using a java applet as a client.
http://the-green-leaf.de/progue_applet.html

More details about the games will be posted later.

My website, where i post more or less useful stuff, can be found here:

http://the-green-leaf.de