Mesh Concept Art 1
There are a lot of flash games on the internet. They are all fun, but most of them are single player. And all of them require an annoying, additional download – Flash. Annoying.
There are, in fact, a few games out there that are not plugin based. In this realm we have all sorts of games, ranging from text based — get as many clicks as you can games to obscure “read this paragraph about yourself and click these links to proceed” games. There’s a problem with these games as well. More often than not, they’re all text based. If they have images, it’s just a nice picture of little things that never change anyway — some shopkeeper, the enemy thing that smiles at you with crooked teeth, and possibly, if you’re lucky, a picture of your character that doesn’t even show the scar she has on her cheek (you have to read that in your description).
So basically, we have a problem. Web games can be separated into two groups. Those games with pretty graphics that require plugins like Flash and Java (most of which are single player), and those mostly-text-based browser games (most of which are, interestingly, multiplayer) in an increasingly graphical world. (Speaking of which, we need to invent graphical blogging in a fast and easy way.) I was talking with one of my friends, Corey, about this, joking about how someone needed to make a graphical non-flash based multiplayer game.
“Why don’t you make one?”
Mesh Login Screen
If it were real life (we live almost a state apart) I would be staring at him with a perplexed expression, trying to judge from his tone of voice whether it was a joke or not. It wasn’t a joke. We got to work almost immediately on a project we called Wave. We set up goals for it… and missed them all. Our original infinite scrolling map idea failed, people kept spawning in funny places, and the entire project was called off. Great.
That was two years ago.
Last week, Corey and I both remembered Wave at the exact same moment. And for some strange reason, we were both groggy (we’re not allowed to drink because we’re minors so getting drunk wasn’t a viable alternative) enough to decide we were going to start working on Wave again. But… to our dismay, Google had announced some sort of product called Google Wave… so we had to pick a new name. We started going off on a synonym search, and finally settled on my suggestion, Mesh. And then we started working. We learned from our past mistakes, and this time we decided not to have an infinitely scrolling map. Instead, we separated the world map into a grid of little maps, which we are calling ‘pages’ internally. In the game, we’ll call them ‘locations’ and ‘bases.’
Speaking of bases, we’re making a MMORTS. We plan to make them play like desktop graphical RTS games. (Think of the multiplayer portions StarCraft or Warcraft), with lots and lots of players spanning multiple maps. Good. Hold that vision in your head for a little longer. We’re working on it. 