Game Dev Blog #3 - My Previous Games

Hey everybody!  It's been a while since my last Game Dev Blog post.  For this one, I thought it might be interesting to give you a bit of history of the "text" games I've been making since 2009.

Here we go:

2009 - HaloSphere: A Halo Themed Game

So way back in 2007 I had a big Halo website called HaloCharts that was a stat tracking / leaderboard website for Halo 3 and Halo Reach.  For some reason, I thought it would be neat to build a text-based Halo game into the site.  At first, it was directly integrated into the HaloCharts website, but later broke off to be standalone and was called HaloSphere.  It had about 45,000 registered accounts and was a lot of fun back in those days.  It emulated Halo matchmaking in text-form with a lot of depth and grind.

Players would compete to reach 50 in certain playlists and could build out their Spartans with different skills and equipment.  It used a lot of the assets from Halo 3.  It was very competitive and sometimes frustrating because of player interactions.  You could show back up after being gone for a day or two and have all of your territories and items gone.  

Next up...

2011 - HaloShere2: A Halo Themed Game

HaloSphere2 was a direct sequel / rewrite of HaloSphere with a lot of differences.  HaloSphere2 was also playable on mobile devices.  It continued to emulate Halo matchmaking, but had much deeper systems overall including skill trees and more clan/faction type gameplay.  It did not have a large Halo site to funnel players to it though, so it didn't get as big as the original version.  HS2 had somewhere between 20-25k registered accounts.

Players would have their own spartan that they could equip and build as they played.  There was less player-to-player interactions and less drama overall.  It was also very grindy.

Next up...

2014 - Galaxy Warfare: Space-based Grid Strategy Game

Galaxy Warfare started from the codebase of HaloSphere2 and shared a lot of the same UI and features, but was a completely different game.  Galaxy Warfare focused on a giant 2D grid where each player has a ship and can move around space.  Players would find resources on planets, control them and battle to control the galaxy.  Battles would take place in a text view that involved whoever was faster to react.  It was a very very complicated game and never really took off.  I tried a lot of ideas with the game, including faction leadership, voting, warping, tons of ships and systems and some automated bots that would chase players around the game.

GW ended up with a lot of really strong players that could pretty much wipe out anybody new, so it had a rough beginning-game and it was too complicated to be popular.  

Next up...

2017 - Destiny RPG: Destiny-themed Text Game

Originally this game was going to be HaloSphere3, but I was playing the original version of Destiny and it inspired to make this instead.  It was the first game I built using Framework7 and was very mobile-friendly.  It had apps on iOS and Android and could be played on Desktop (very much like Farm RPG).  Destiny RPG blew up really fast and had well over 100k registered players in a very short amount of time.

Destiny RPG was PvE, but still competitive.  You could move around the "world" of the game, based on Destiny locations, and interact with other Guardians.  It was the first time I attempted to do mass events and I still remember pushing out alerts and 2,000 people would jump on for the events.  It was a really wild, busy game.  However, due to it being Destiny-themed, I could not monetize the game at all and it grew so large that maintaining it was costing me an arm and a leg.

So....

2019 - Titan Conquest: Futuristic Mythology-themed text RPG

Titan Conquest was a re-skin of Destiny RPG so that I could actually monetize the game and run it properly.  It also changed a lot from its Destiny roots and started its own lore with a lot of new gameplay elements.  It also includes multi-path stories (think 'choose your own adventure') and is very competitive and grindy.  It is still online, but not getting updates very often due to my focus on Farm RPG.

Farm RPG came from the codebase of Titan Conquest and shares a lot of the same systems and design.  They are very different games though with their own strengths and weaknesses.   Titan Conquest has just under 100k registered players. We have a number of players that play both TC and FRPG.

And now, here we are with Farm RPG...

2021 - Farm RPG: Farm, Fish, Craft and Explore

There's not much to say here except Farm RPG is doing really well so far.  Over 110k registered players in less than a year.  Tons of content weekly with no end in sight for planned updates and one heck of a great community!

Oh one more...

2019 - a barren wasteland

This is something I made over a weekend and made an app for it on Android.  It has a grid you can move around on with a not-so-great story, but it was a fun attempt to make a simple text game.  It never took off :)

So that's the last 13 years or so of my attempts at making fun online text games.  Thanks for reading!

... oh, I forgot one more