ProtoRPG 0.1.0 released

Posted in ProtoRPG | Sunday, April 13th, 2008 | Trackback

I’m releasing the first version of ProtoRPG today. I’ve always had a fondness for classic RPG games (starting with Ultima V running on a 8086 PC) and thought that running something like this should be doable in a modern browser. So what is ProtoRPG exactly ?

  • It’s a RPG game that runs in a browser.
  • It’s written in Javascript and built with the Prototype and Script.aculo.us frameworks. No plugin, no Flash, no download, no installation required.
  • It runs in all the modern browsers out there (tested on Firefox, IE 7.0, Opera 9, Safari 3, etc.).
  • It makes it easy to write your own games without doing any coding : all the content is in plain text and standard graphic files.

It’s free for non-commercial uses (provided you give proper credits and link back). I wrote a mini-adventure as a demo, but due to my lack of any artistic skill it looks “somewhat average” (cough cough).

What’s left to do?

As implied by the version number, this is very much a work in progress, and there are millions of things that I need to add, like :

  • Saving and loading (via AJAX and/or using the new Local Storage API that comes with newer browsers)
  • Sounds (using the new <sound> tag provided by HTML 5.0)
  • A magic system for casting spells and making potions
  • More commands for in-game scripting
  • Cut-scenes

6 Comments

  1. The Cooking Ninja Says:

    Congrats!

    It looks pretty cool to me for someone who said he doesn’t have any artistic skill. ;)

    Look forward to the sounds and magic spells. :)

  2. Robert Says:

    First, congrats on the game!
    I’m sure you had a blast creating it.

    Second, if you ever decide to add sound to the game, but want to preserve the no-flash approach, I created some JavaScript for this:
    http://www.ajaxonomy.com/2008/ajax/cross-browser-sound-flash-only-as-a-last-resort

    It will use built in sound before falling back to other methods such as plug ins and flash (and still then only if detected as available).

  3. admin Says:

    Thanks Robert, I’ll look into that option.

  4. Rufex Says:

    Cool Work!

    I would be interested to help to extend your lib. Please contact me by mail an send me your messanger id if you wont.

    Anyhow .. where do we get the source? ;o)

  5. Chip Says:

    I started a game once, it was called Dawn and it was built on top of Illumia RPG. I abandoned it, but as I see such daring scripts, I’m thinking of updating and modernizing my Dawn game. Do you think we could work together on such project? The link to my game is in my name.

    Good (awesome, great) work!

  6. Pierre Says:

    Thanks Chip! At the moment I’m spreading myself thin over several projects so I’m affraid I can’t reasonably get myself into something extra. Feel free to see if my code is of any use however, I just made the demo downloadable so that making a new game is as easy as modifying an existing one.

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