On The Road to Release - Part: 1

After having ported the map editor to HTML and Javascript, I also took the time to setup a domain and implement the player's website.

The final url for the game is: solrpg.com

There is still a lot of work to do, though, before I release the client in the Android Market and enable signups.
Here's a breakdown of what's needed or being worked on.

For reference, here is the hardware I'm developing the SolomonRPG server on:

1 Core CPU - AMD Duron(tm) 1.2GHz

1GB -  DDR RAM

80GB - PATA Hard Drive

Cent OS 5 - x86

Hosting - Linode
At the moment, the domain is hosted on my only spare computer at home.
Obviously, I can't release the game because my upload speed is pathetic.

Linode has a hosting plan that starts at $20 a month.  I've been hearing good things about them, and I'm excited to try them out.
Here's what the basic hosting plan includes:

4 Core CPU - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5420 @ 2.50GHz

512MB - RAM

16GB - Hard Drive

Cent OS 5 x86_64

The Solomon server holds a lot of small bits in memory ram, such as player credential, player location, status, tileset layouts, etc.
Simply storing a player and area definitions in memory can be a scaling issue
However, from preliminary tests reveal the real wall seems to be the game loop for each area.

Each area has a process that handles all the game logic for that area.  Each game loop runs at a variable 60FPS.
This is fairly CPU intensive, and my development machine starts giving out at barely 20 areas.

At the moment, I'm not sure if I can optimize this.  Perhaps by having a game loop for each Erlang node and try to squeeze the game logic there, but I haven't given it much thought.
I want to do some tests on the Linode host itself to see if its worth my time to optimize.

Content Creation
The fun part is creating content for the game.  Creating tilesets using Gimp and constantly testing them out and choosing which tiles to use.
I have choose carefully because tilesets have to be as small as possible.  The bigger the tileset, the longer it takes to load in a mobile phone.

Mapping out areas is also quite fun, I have to first map out the world on grid paper with a pencil.
Then, mapping out each area using the new editor. 

Story making is another challenging aspect.  For that, I'm turning to my favorite book in the world, The Bible.  In the coming months, I hope to continue carefully reading the Bible and implementing some of the cool stories into the game.  I want people to know that I'm Christian and that God was the only one who helped me make this game, I never would have been able to get this far by myself.

Polish, Polish, Polish
Continue to refine the SolomonRPG codebase and try to fix as many bugs as possible.
Make the client not drain the phone battery.
Lower the SolomonRPG CPU requirements.
Implement scripting in Erlang using erlang_js (MAYBE)
Make teleporting from area to area as smooth as possible.

Funds and Revenue
If I am unable to lower the CPU requirements, it'll be very expensive to release the website for the game.  Ideally, I'd like players to create as many areas as they'd like for free.
I will have advertisement in both the client and the website, but I'm not sure if it'll be enough.
I don't have a budget for the game at all, and I'm trying to save up enough to sign up for the Android Market and the first month of hosting.  Anyway, I'm thinking of adding a donation button to the blog.  We'll see though.