It's Monday afternoon and I'm in a Bentley car dealership. I've already been to a Soho gentlemen's club, several upmarket antique shops and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Not that I'm whiling away my working day. Nor am I on an extravagant shopping spree. After all, Gameking.tv purports to be a savvy dotcom. I peer inside an Azure convertible, scrutinise the polished walnut veneer dash and whip out my digital camera: a fine example of the wood grain I need for our website design.
We've assembled our team and we are ready to start building our online games system. The first step? Plan the production. This time-consuming stage involves the research and writing of a lot of documents. Design briefs, database definitions, business models and market analyses; these detailed specifications define the business. As we develop our ideas, they will be refined. It's an ongoing process that helps us all to understand and communicate what we are doing.
To create our site, we decided to behave like a rock band that dumps the demo tapes and gigs its way to success instead. We had the expertise to create our product first, prove it will work, gather a following and then show it to potential backers.
To do this, we needed to keep our costs down and Open Source allowed us to do just that, while also providing us with the best tools. This global community of millions of programmers lets anyone use, redistribute, and modify the source code for its software. The software evolves rapidly as people re-upload it - adapted, improved and bug-free.
For our "back end" software - the code on our Serverstream servers that runs our web site - we opted for the powerful combination of the Linux operating system, Apache web server, mySQL database and PHP / Perl/ Python scripting languages collectively known as Lamp. We chose to substitute Linux with its more stripped-down and secure cousin, FreeBSD, and choose PHP, now used by Yahoo, as the fastest and most flexible of the scripting languages. We also needed software to handle all of the real-time communications that will be happening in our games, and Open Source provided us with the lot.
For our "front end" software - what users see in their browsers when they visit our site - the decision was less complex. Solaris Media, the digital media company I founded, has worked with Macromedia Flash for five years to build websites, online games and digital art installations. We already have a library of game engines and proprietary code that we have used for clients such as Dotmusic, the ICA and the BBC. We are experienced in pushing the boundaries with Flash and making it communicate with all the other software it needs to in the web environment.
Our core application will be a dynamic, colourful front-end client built with Flash MX, but making the programme do all we require of it has been no trivial task. We need to move bits of data between browsers on different users' computers and several servers simultaneously, whilst handling timing, security and authentication. Our skills with ActionScript, the programming language for Flash, have been tested to the maximum as we build an application consisting of 50 interconnected code "objects" and over 15,000 lines of code.
After some R&D, our first test of multiplayer action was to control the movement of blocks of colour on the screens of remote computers connected via the internet. Then we built our first multiplayer test game, Tic Tac Toe. Very simple in terms of gameplay, it is a gentle introduction to online gaming and will appear free on Gameking.tv as a practice game.
Meanwhile, we are developing game ideas and creating sample graphics and design specs. A visit to the GameOn exhibition at the Barbican gave us the opportunity to spend a slightly guilty few days "researching" more than 50 classic arcade games. We plan to launch the beta site with seven games, varying from familiar favourites to fresh innovations. All of the games will be easy to use, with clear instructions and in-game help. We are getting ready for our first beta tests, where the entire site will be subjected to rigorous testing and a merciless pounding by our beta team and Userface, our usability analysts.
The pressure is on now to iron out software glitches, make the site user friendly and optimise game playability. The cafe in our east London building has become an impromptu testing area, with diners being loaned laptops to play as they eat. We discovered that some games are immediately addictive, making Gameking.tv a regular feature of Aldgate lunchtimes. Others will need more work before they become popular, and we will develop them further before testing again.
· Rob Davis is founder of Solaris Media and founder and director of Gameking.tv
