For those of you who don’t know what a PBBG is, find out here. It stands for persistent browser-based games. Basically, it’s a game whose world is persistent (i.e. it doesn’t go away when you shut it down– it keeps running), and you interface with it via your browser. I’m sure there’s some debate as to whether or not Flash is allowed in one, and I’m of the persuasion that that is fine. You have to download html code to run all the others, and basically everyone has Flash installed.
But I digress.
I’m going to be making one in the near future, hopefully. My plan is to reverse-engineer some features in some neat ones that I’ve played and write up some articles on how I did so. Part of this all though is market research– I like to look at what other games are out there to get some ideas. So I go to pbbg.org and follow their links to the list of games they have. Then I click on a lot of those games to check them out. That’s the process of market research for me anyway.
In it all I have this to say: INCLUDE SCREENSHOTS! Take that all caps as simply raising the volume, not yelling in the I-hate-you sense of yelling. Seriously though, the games that don’t have screenshots lose me instantly. I’m not going to sign up, providing email address and all that jazz, for a game I know 0 about except the title. While a screenshot doesn’t really give a feel for how the game will play, it is to me an essential bit of pre-information before trying a game out.
Anyone else feel the same or different?
