Anyone interested?

[Brandon]

I'm having fun with this game just because I always wanted to beat it when I was younger but really wasn't smart enough  Now I think I can do it and I'm having fun working towards that goal, but there is one thing missing.  It just isn't quite the same as it used to be when there were so many more active players.

I noticed a while back someone mentioned that they entered one of the games but decided not to continue playing because there weren't enough players.  So... I'm curious how many times that's happened where a potential player would have played, but lost their interest for this reason.

I have a solution to get more people involved and I'm wondering who would be interested in doing this...

1) Any time we see that a new recruit has joined a game were in we should send them a message that at the very least welcomes them.  That way they feel like they're playing with real players and won't leave so quickly.

2) We need to get everyones email who is really interested in playing the game.  Then each time a game starts over we should shoot them an email to let them know so they'll come back and play.  If we could email all the people who have come through here reminding them about the game I bet we could get back some players who have forgotten about it.

To accomplish the 2nd point would either require tarix's help (since he's at least got emails of people who join this forum.  I don't remember if you have to give your email to join the bbs, but if not then you should...).  However, I've tried to leave a couple messages for the sysop in the bbs and tried to leave a message on this website and haven't gotten any kind of reply.  Does any one know if tarix has been actively involved with this thing lately?

If anyone else has any ideas feel free to add them here...

[VACANTSTARE]

Emailing players when a game re-starts is a good idea, if you look in the past messages there are alot of "glory days" players who've stopped by, participated and then left. There are two issues to this though. The first is player number. To this end there are a fair number of people playing in the novice door, but they seem to play for a while and then give up. On the other hand, the hard door could stand to be a little harder for the grizzled, veteran, and maybe just a smidge masochistic players. Speed up the action combat scroll, or take off some letters. What would be great is some real team on team competition. I feel like I've missed out on the old bbs vs bbs days. In the end it's up to us players to try and build up the community and make the games more of a multiplayer experience.

[Tarix]

You get a lot of flash interest in the game.  A group of people find out that its running and they play for a while and/or play sporadically.  After a few times of killing Overkill though their play tends to drop off.

It does occasionally attract new players looking for something different, but the age of the game and having to use a telnet client to connect makes the barrier to entry pretty high.

I would love to erase a lot of those problems.  To be honest I would love to hire Dustin as a full time designer and make a MMO-style game straight from the concepts over Overkill.  I don't think anyone has made a really great game in this sort of post-apocalyptic genre and I've tried quite a few.

The reality is that I don't even have time to track down and fix all of the little problems that are in the current version.  I have an aging Pascal code base and there are no good pascal tools to speak of to support it.  I have a half completed C++ game, but no real time to finish that off.

I wish I had a realistic solution to this as I'd love to have a nice big game going too.

Let's keep the discussion up though.  Discussion here always motivates me to action, but honestly lately I don't know what action I should take.  For example making the current game have any concept of email would be a pretty large undertaking.  It was actually a lot of coding just to get the auto-reset in, but the 32bit code base isn't anywhere near stable enough for release and I doubt it ever will be.

Anyway, I'm rambling a bit.  I will say one last thing though.  I've been maintaining this code now for 3 or 4 years and its been really hard to reach any sort of critical mass.  If there is anyone that can dedicate time and energy to the maintenance please speak up.  Any sort of computer skills should be useful.  (Web, programming, art, etc.)

[dgbehrends]

I'm interested in getting an email when a new game gets started.  Tarix mentioned something about an autoreset or autostart.  What exactly is this?  My email is dbehrend@hotmail.com.

[Mercury]

auto restart means after overkill is defeated, a new game starts three days after the old one ended automatically.  between the tiem overkill is defeated and when the new game starts, you can vote on the next map in the headquarters/briefing room

[Tarix]

I haven't been monitoring it very well, mostly due to lack of time, but the auto-reset seems to work well.

The problem with emailing is really a legacy issue.  Overkill barely understands Windows right now.  Getting it to understand enough of the world to send an email is actually tricky business.

When stuff like this comes up it makes me want to revive the rewrite, but there's still a ton of work left to get it up and running.  Also, the code has rotted a bit and now the rewrite needs some parts rewritten.

(The funny thing is that I thought by going back to school I would have more free-time to work on this sort of stuff.  Unfortunately I have less!)

[dgbehrends]

It doesn't matter how the interested OOII parties get notified, just that they get a notice of some sort.  Right now there are only two active players playing the game.  Myself and Mercury.  When the board gets reset one of us will post here, but since we don't have a collection of emails, we can't send that info to those who don't monitor the forums regularly.  Could we set up some sort of sign up on these forums that is not quite as public as this post is?  I'm sure there are people that do not wish to post their email in a forum to avoid getting spammed.