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June 02nd 2013

My significant other released her first book called The Bride of the Immortal. It's free in the next few hours. It has several really cool moments, so even though a romantic story might not be your cup of tea, you should definitely check it out! (I suggested a word and she even included it, so I helped writing 0.00000001% of it!)

TheMrVictim created an awesome video named Hostage, utilizing the song Pills by Nameless.

And as for me - I've uploaded Taskless Sheep's Meadow Mayhem on YouTube. The new album is about half-way finished, too!

And finally, if you haven't seen it yet, here's my latest experiment: Node City

May 05th 2013

A Decade of Personal Halfquake



I woke up one day during the middle of the night and had an idea to make a browser game, in which players could build and manage farms. Cows, pigs, sheep, hens, windmills, fields of corn - the whole shebang.
It was a time shortly after the release of Halfquake Amen. I'd just begun learning Perl, the new version of The Farm was out, Halfquake Amen Comics were in its infancy, and I was eager to do more with Perl, MySQL and Javascript.
So, I thought to myself: That's boring. I'd rather let everyone kill victims instead to get experience points. Everyone would have his or her very own personal victim murdering space and be able to hire contracts to collect more of them every day. Personal Halfquake was born.



Back then I didn't have a webspace that supported Perl and MySQL databases, so I was given some space on a friend's server. Note that this server was also host to some other sites for LAN parties and Counter-Strike clans.
When PHQ went online on March 1st 2003, I noticed that players (or rather sadists) liked to destroy each other's institutes by sending thousands of dragons to battle, taking apart traps and victims. So much in fact, that the server got slowed down. I remember sitting next to my girlfriend's brother, watching the attack script slowly display the results of him sending a lot of dragons to another player. I had to implement a limit of dragons, and a way to defend yourself (by building lots of Super Victims).
Players could also open a Box of Sadism and either get rewards or nothing. There was no limit to that action, so one could test one's luck forever.


One day, I visited Jazzymike and he showed me a HTML page with a dozen frames, each of them loading the script that opened the box. And he kept reloading those frames. I didn't know whether to be amazed or terrified. I laughed with him back then, but when I got home, my friend who's server PHQ was hosted on wrote me a message via ICQ: "What's phq_surprise.cgi?"
Apparently, Jazzymike had caused the script to run a few hundred times in succession, breaking the game by receiving millions of SD (Sadism Dollars), and killing the server's performance.
Instead of putting a limit on it, I simply moved the script into a subfolder called "banned".
Another exploit involved selling victims on the black market (instantly) for a higher price than they could be caught via contracts. It allowed someone to climb up the ranking list in basically no time.

There were a lot of lessons to be learned. There had to be limits to everything. I started throwing values of traps and contracts into excel sheets and calculated sane numbers, that would not break the game and allow for a steady and safe rise in levels.
A reset had to happen, and I learned that people did not like resets. I even went so far as to fake a reset for April 1st 2003 (those things never go well).




I introduced rounds, based on an idea posted in the forums. Players rightfully weren't happy with losing their progress, so I saved the ranking list of previous rounds and displayed them on the start page.

Fights broke out in the forum because of PvP. On the one side you had players that sought the thrill of destroying someone's base, on the other you had the ones who'd rather just build up and manage their economy. Three months after the release, I put PHQ offline for almost two months, and when it went back up online, PvP was gone.


Some people have pointed out to me that this was the point when PHQ lost its edge. I've tried to replace PvP with Bomb Victims II, Heal The Dragon, Chosen Victims fighting other Chosen Victims, Draversi, and three different direct attack systems, one involving all creatures, one where you could send someone a bomb to dismantle, and the current one that allows you to Inflict Insanity upon somebody else.



Things never really stuck and PHQ reached a point where nearly everyone agreed that there were too many things to do and, well, people simply got tired of it. Trying to remedy that, I produced vast updates every now and then for seven years, pushing PHQ to its final version V in 2010. After the release of Halfquake Sunrise, I gave up. Having announced the end of development multiple times since 2003, this was the point of no return for me.

Although, it turns out that the actual game was only the initial reason why people joined PHQ, they actually stayed for something else: the community.


I've met the nicest persons and made dozens of new best friends on PHQ, most of them I will remember until I die. I've started working with a handful of individuals, creating games, music and stories. I tried to turn PHQ into a full fledged community network, giving everyone the opportunity to create Personal Pages, write blog entries and articles, just so their minds could shine.

I have so many fond memories; staying up late talking in HQ Chat, hosting the Draversi Tournament and LordAsriel winning it, all the PHQ contest entries, the time when we sent Ally her "get-better-soon" poster, seeing you guys actually play the things I created, talking to EskimboBob and Legion while testing the first version of I'm a Dragon, the endless forum posts, that awesome Cause of Absence picture we made together...



To this day I believe that was the whole purpose of PHQ: to meet amazing friends. And even though most of you have moved on with your lives, let me just say: Thank you. For everything.


5angel
Actine
Ally
ArseTroll
Chamber
CyberCowboyZombie
Darrn
Deagle_Sadist
denikover
Elkian
EskimoBob
EvilSun
flo
Funnycreature
GeeZeR
H4ndy
Hagbard_Celine
HailtotheKing
hollow
Insidious_nOOb
JohnIncognito
Khimitsu
KiddiKai
kowi
Legion
Lemuun
Loony99
LordAsriel
LupusRex
MadHatter
Malastrome15
nightsmoke
Panterdjuret
PatchySheep
Pinkerator
pospi
psychomessiahs
Ralexand
ReBoot
righteous Scaleskin
scip1o
Seth275
shICEpANCK
SibbTigre
SonOfMan
Spam
spoiler
Steltie
Strifer
Syndel
Szaladin
TaskBeenden
TheDarkOne
TheNameless
Toyoch
vampire1402
Vas
Vino
xenoess

April 03rd 2013

Carlos posted some nice fan art on Facebook:

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And here's another list of awesomeness!
I've fixed a few errors in I'm a Dragon as well, it should be playable for everyone now.

April 01st 2013


I thought long and hard about what to do for this year's April Fool's day, and since Personal Halfquake is celebrating ten years of killing victims (first release was March 1st 2003), instead of the (almost) annual short story, I've decided to open the doors of an old game of mine - I'm a Dragon.



The content hasn't changed from the last version that used to be online back in 2005. The only thing that is different is how the content gets displayed. And a lot of features are missing. In the version that is available now you can:
  • Sign Dragonbooks
  • Complete WaterQuests
  • Complete PictureQuests
  • Ask the Fortune Teller where the next picture is located in the arena
  • Fight monsters in the arena (dice roll)
  • Walk around using WASD, arrow keys, or mouse clicks
  • Use 1 to 9 to select dialogue options while talking to NPCs
  • Explore Dragonland, Drageen's Empire and the Place of Nowhere (the exits are in the corners of the arena - you have to find the correct key)
Missing features:
  • Room creation
  • PvP
  • Seeing other people move around
  • IAD Sound Designer integration
It's really just a single-player game right now, letting you check out what I've made eight years ago. I may come back to IAD and finish the other planned areas and add the missing features, but for now I thought it was important to give it at least some kind of closure, after having been banned to development hell for so long.

At this point I'd also like to thank Steltie for giving IAD a try as well. He built up a really cool server-client communication a few years ago, but I failed to see it through. The current version that I've whipped up myself again is a quick new window based on the old database. It should suffice (and yes, it will probably once again blow up the server).

If you want to read the Making Of, click the question mark on the left side once you're logged in.

Happy April Fool's day, have fun!

March 03rd 2013

Fallen Sheep is back!

Unfortunately, some of the songs weren't available in more than 160kbps. Back in 2000 I didn't have a lot of harddrive space and I needed to convert all source WAV files into MP3 160kbps so I could burn as much as possible on CDs, thinking I wouldn't need a higher quality anyway. (Oh, how wrong I was!)

Just for your information, the domains halfquake.com and muddasheep.com will be transferred to a different company in the next few days, so things might get a little wonky around here (more than usual).

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