Indie-Resource.com

I would like to develop a game website that is very similar to evony.com or ikariam.com. Would someone be able to help guide me on the best way to go about doing this? Is there a game engine that I can use that will help me do this or is it something that needs to be developed from scratch? Sorry I am a newbie to this. However I am a successful web developer and run a network of websites that do very well, however I am wanting to try and get into the game business and would really like to get something put together that functions and works like one of these websites. Any help would be highly appreciated.

*Edit also, if anyone has a game like this that would they would like to sell I am interested.

Thanks!

I think at least Evony is made with Javascript, but that is a highly complex, major studio production. The art alone could take a lone developer over a year or more to create.

Flash would make the development process much faster, but keep in mind we are still talking about games that likely had 10+ developers in full-time development for over a year. Your best bet would be to watch the video tutorials on here and start with the basics. Games like Evony would probably need to be a 2nd or 3rd game project at the soonest, even for an experienced web developer.

EDIT: As far as game engines go, you could try out The Isogenic Engine, which was just released a few days ago. There is a free version for non-commercial use that you can download now and check out. You could even develop most of your game in the free version and then buy a commercial license later before release. Keep in mind that to use it, you do need a solid foundation in node.js

Evony is actually with done with flash but I think I would like to do this in javascript. The graphics are not really that great for that game. There are a couple icons for different buildings and some very simple interface stuff. I wouldn't think that it would take a designer but MAYBE a month to make some of the graphics needed. I'll check that engine out and see how it looks. But I am not going to get this project done by myself. I'd like to find someone or some people that know what they are doing and pay to have this project done as I couldn't do this myself.

Evony is made with Flash? I could have sworn about a year or so I went in there and right-clicked all over the place and never got the "About Flash" option, which usually means it is Javascript. Maybe they added more features that required Flash and remade the core or something. Anyway, I guess that isn't really important. It just surprised me to hear that. Maybe I am confused with another one of the heavy-graphical strategy games that are popular now.

As far as the asset development, I think it would take longer than you think. The level of detail on the graphics is quite high, regardless of how good or bad you think they look. A single state of a single building or unit could take an artist a couple of days from concept through to complete and ready to use graphic asset. And how many units, buildings and states of each are in the whole game, not even counting the interface graphics, backgrounds, etc. I am thinking the units, once all states are considered, would probably be in the hundreds if not thousands.

I guess I am just getting at the idea that making a game of this scope always seems much easier than it is until you get on the inside and finally have an understanding of how much work it is. Making a game of Evony's scope and graphical content would take a small indie team 1 - 3 years easily. Of course, you can do it, and likely would be greatly rewarded for doing so (with minimal advertising, you could likely get several thousands players, since these players are almost always looking for new games to play). It is just a lot of work.

Yes, very true. Well. I am willing to find someone that has one already to created and purchase or I also have the funds to put together a team to get this done. Is there an engine that you would suggest using for something like this or do you think that it would be better if done from scratch?

Without having used either one, I would suggest The Isogenic Engine for HTML5 (linked and mentioned above), or maybe OpenSpace for Flash (don't get thrown off by the cutesy graphics for OpenSpace, as those are just sample graphics, and you can use whatever style you want obviously). Of the two I would assume OpenSpace is probably more complete and stable, because Isogenic just released a few days ago, whereas OpenSpace has been out for at least a year, if not much longer (it is on version 2.0+). Both engines contain almost a full stack, meaning they include the client, server and may even include some kind of database or at least the connectivity to a database.

Both engines allow you to develop your game in some kind of a restricted engine version for free, and only buy a license if you like it, so there really isn't much reason to not download them both tonight and try them out!

It is a pity that art assets have been pointed to as a/the major stumbling-block, because depending on exactly how identical to evony you want to be there might be solutions out there but some of them might come from the "private server" type of mentality that seems to like stealing art assets so that while you do have code you are stuck with making new art if you do not share their love of stealing other people's art.

Are you familiar with Devana? Is Devana too different from Evony to meet your needs? Devana has the virtue of having its own art instead of stealing the art of the commercial games that it wants to provide at least some degree of similarity to.

Are you familiar with Travian? There is lots of code out their for "Travian Clones" but it seems most people looking for a Travian-like game want to actually outright steal Travian's graphics not run a game similar to Travian that has its own graphics. Such people do not, for example, seem to consider Devana as fitting their concept at all, they reject it outright in favour of systems that let them steal Travian's graphics.

So I see two "relatively easy" routes you could take: one is start with Devana and work from there. The other is start by making your own art assets sufficient to fill all the needs of a "Travian Clone", plug them into a "Travian Clone" and work from there.

The Devana approach might be better since a lot of the "Travian Clone" types also tend to make their code license murky too, claiming they are open source, even to the extent of hosting them on GitHub or SourceForge where only true open source is even allowed, then starting to get all uppity about who can use the code and for what. Devana's license is much less murky/suspect. But does anyone even play Devana? The people using the Travian-clones seem to at least think they have players to play them. I would love to have graphics for such a thing since I actually set up one of those instead of Devana and got players playing before starting to notice that some of the graphics look a little too much like some that seemed to be associated with the commercial Travian. I don't know if the clone fans would even use a free open source set of graphics if one was available, they seem so dedicated to image-piracy, but at least if such graphics existed the option of running Evony/Travian/Etc type games without pirated graphics would exist.

It would be nice to work on something of this kind because a while back I played one called Imperial Warfare or something like that that looked as if it had great potential, with all kinds of lovely details like individually levelling merchants and heros and all kinds of merchandise the traders could carry and so on but it turned out to be horrible, such a waste of all those nice elements. If it had been open source we could have fixed it, with things like allowing individual players to play individual heroes and merchants and so on, and making actual uses for all those different types of merchandise; as it was, there was no way even playing 8 hours a day one player could even make use of all their heroes and and merchants; meanwhile I couldn't even use my money, it became pointless to even bother trying to get more money. Such a waste of such nice assets to have them restricted to such a pointless/useless game!

-MarkM-

Wow, Devana is very pretty! I see it is open source, but what is the license on its art assets? I know sometimes open source projects reserve the rights for their art.

I didn't even think to dig that deep yet actually, I thought it was the generic olld style code license where you don't think of using a different license for art than for the code, like Freeciv that still as far as I know lumps its art into the GPL license that covers the code.

I think it tends to be artists that start fussing over that, because they like to hide and keep proprietary the source code of their art, giving games just flat single-layer .jpg or .gif or whatever of a limited resolution instead of releasing the full scale high resolution multiple-layer sources that they build those assets out of.

I think devana's art is basically source, not lower resolution throwaways some artist generated from higher resolution artist-tool systems that let them keep the good stuff to themselves and only release the compiled-into-a-single-layer gif or png or whatever to the masses.

When you see people arguing that GPL cannot apply to their art, suspect that they are basically only releasing compiled lower resolution and not the real source layers they used to generate them.

-MarkM-