Chroma Coders — Fun Game Dev Club :)

Building an MMO in 5 Days…

Introduction:

This book (series of blog posts) is meant to help you build an MMO in 5 days. Over the past few years, many things have changed.

When people think of an MMO, they are thinking about traditional MMOs where you have to download a huge client and requires massive art work.

You have to keep in mind that all games are systems (as Raph Koster) has said. When we talk about building an MMO, we are talking about building a system.

We are not talking about extensive graphics and audio and other visual candy and fluff that helps to make the experience more immersive. Our goal here is to build a game system as quickly as possible.

With that said, we’re going to skip using C++ and other traditional technologies to get things done. We’re going to leverage the connectivity of the web to make this MMO.

Specifically, we’re going to build an MMO in PHP using the basic LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySql, and PHP).

This book is organized in an iterative manner. We’ll focus on getting the MMO up and running and then we’ll talk about the theory and other items to make the MMO more fun.

The goal of this book is to help you get an MMO up as quickly as possible. You are required to know PHP, MySql, and other aspects of the LAMP stack.

Now, I know that last line will trigger the traditional reaction among developers…”I don’t know PHP” or some other technology. If you know Java, C++, or some other language, it is easy to pick up these languages and items. The interfaces are easy.

Btw, if you’re running Windows and need to get access to the “LAMP” stack for development…you can download XAMPP:

http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html

To also speed things up, we’re going to build the MMO as a Facebook app…so that you don’t have to think about the login system and other basic underlying infrastructures for an MMO.

The examples in this book will refer to MMOs on Facebook.

The example for this book will be a simple car-themed MMO called “Green Vigilante”…where you steal cars to save the environment.

Thanks for reading and feel free to ask questions/clarifications in the comments