Hack Wars: Then and Now

Remember the smell of fresh Hack Wars updates when you woke up in the morning?

http://www.hackwars.net/200803/scripting-update

Unfortunately, here's an update that is still flawed, one year and 3 months later.

...Just an observation.

I'd like to pay a little tribute to Hacktendo and how utterly unloved it has been since it was introduced about a year ago.

http://www.hackwars.net/200807/hacktendo

First, let's consider the amount of people that developed at least one (playable) game in Hacktendo. Johnny made Galaxium, Geckotoss made Breakout, I made ...various things. I'd say that's a pretty pathetic list of Hacktendo developers. TTJ also has done some development, but nothing that was actually released. What is it about Hacktendo that everyone hates so much? Is it too difficult to do or does no one have any interest in learning how to make a game? It seems to me it may be a combination of both, coupled with the fact that most people play games to relax and have fun. If you don't think the challenge of creating a game is fun, that's fine. But I would like to think that most programmers would have fun with it, which leads me to believe that most Hack Wars players are not that interested in programming to begin with.

This leads me to another observation. The game's two huge highlights are the scripting and RPG elements. But, if you're not that into scripting, and all you're experiencing are the frantic hours of clicking buttons, you're going to get bored fast. What can be added to Hack Wars that will keep players interested when scripting doesn't?

The Great Hiatus was a horrible time for Hack Wars and potentially everyone involved with it. To this date I do not know the exact circumstances that caused this horrific event, but what I do know is that not everyone gave up hope. The devout Hack Wars followers congregated and discussed the possibilities, and our hope for its return. I checked the Hack Wars website quite frequently, and once sent an email to Johnny. Unfortunately, there was no reply, and everyone was left hanging with no message from the developers whatsoever. The game (and website) was down for about three months. Three long terrible months. But when it returned, it came back better than ever, with new updates, new Developers, and a renewed sense of hope.

The Great Hiatus will hopefully be the only incident of its kind.

But we're certainly hanging around in limbo until the prophesied Great Reboot occurs.

I hated those long months. I was so happy when I just happened to see if the site was up and it was. It was put in Closed Beta testing and slowly came together. We also got two awesome new developers in the process. Mecha and Sixteen. Then we started getting updates all the time. But I don't think Hack Wars ever fully healed. We don't get as nearly as many people playing. For a while we had lots of people playing but not any more. But I sometimes wish the old times would come back. With lots of people playing and lots of chat.

After its return in November, Hack Wars received some major updates, which included the addition of the HWiki to the website, and a revised in-game network with new skills and quests. The Wiki has been extremely useful and is one of the most important features of the website. The changes to the game added more to the gameplay, but many veterans were disappointed in the lack of difficult NPCs.

Some of us were told about their grand plan to add tons of new varied networks, which would make the game have a much more expansive world to explore. Today, we do not know how much of this has been finished, but I assume that it is still in the works.

Then came the 3D Hacktendo update, which would bring many more possibilities to Hacktendo and the types of games that could be made. Unfortunately, it was even more unsuccessful than the original Hacktendo was, if that is even possible. To this date, the only 3D Hacktendo application to be released (Johnny's example does not count) is my Map Creator tool, originally designed to create maps for Doom. Technically though, this tool could be used for any 3D game.

3D Hacktendo also brought with it some new problems, specifically with 2D games. While there may now be many more functions for a 3D environment, using them in a 2D context does not work as well as the previous version of Hacktendo did. Problems such as Perspective in 2D games, and Flickering Text Of Doom plague Hacktendo. And more recently, Hacktendo was completely disabled due to an unresolved error that occurred upon loading the client.

Sometimes I wonder if I did all the work on Hacktendo for nothing, but I just remind myself that it has given me great experience and at the very least, I enjoyed it. There's a lot of work that I may never finish, but I had hoped that someone would eventually use my Map Creator for their game, which I probably put more work into than anything else that I have ever done in Hack Wars. We totally need more programmers in this game...

I admit that I touched Hacktendo only once so far, and only to use it to test something. One problem of Hacktendo is the lack of a written manual about how to write a simple hello world-like hacktendo game.
Another was that I was not interested in it.
But from the hacktendo functions I see in the wiki I think Hacktendo can teach how to work with 3D objects and how to control them.
It is much simpler than the 3D games in real programming but it can be a helpful and worthy experience.

I see what you mean Silver, it isn't exactly easy to get into. But most people tend not to realize that Hacktendo can be used for more than just making games - it can be used to perform complex operations that you can't do in normal scripts due to operation limits (what you were testing maybe?). In one project I ended up making a bruteforcer to test my "hash"-like encryption, to see how easily it would come up with duplicates. But certainly there are other applications you can make within Hacktendo, and no one (to my knowledge) has made any of those either. So I still conclude that Hacktendo is lonely because there aren't enough programmers.

Perhaps someday I will write an in-depth tutorial for making a complete game.