The Kybernesis site and blog has been unavailable for some days now, and I must apologize for that.

It seems there has been some problems with my Dynamic DNS synchronizer against EasyDNS. But it seems like I finally fixed it by re-installing the application.

This gave me quite a lesson though.. I need to have a backup site for when these things happen, so I’m gonna have to put some time into that in the next few weeks.. *sigh* Even more to do! At least I enjoy the spelunkering

Oh! And I almost forgot.. I’m gonna try and post up the list of How-to guides about starting a game company in the next few days..”Only” a couple weeks late

Gamasutra has posted a talk from GDC: Dave Jones talks about APB[^].
This guy has some really good points!

He talks about how the level grind of the old days-MMO is absolete, or in his own words:

One MMO concept Jones also eschews is the traditional level grind. “How will people be playing this in six months? What’s going to keep them playing again and again and again?” He asks. “How long will I have to get all the cool stuff and level 99? …I think that’s wrong, it’s broken.”

I couldn’t agree more! There are so many other things one could incorporate into a MMO that don’t involve endless, boring grinding of some sorts..
Like player generated content, player-made stories, player-made communities. Put the player in control, and stop forcing them to blindly play with [the company’s] content.
Like he mentions too in his talk:

So Jones eliminated the concept of character levels for APB. “I didn’t want any grinding. It’s a very broken instrument to drive gameplay. It’s customization that’ll drive players.”

The day [Kybernesis] makes a MMO, we’re gonna focus on the same.. Customization, player-created content, making the world so the players make it their own world. And not giving players access to a static world of [Kybernesis’] design.

All MMO’s today brag about being dynamic, persistent, listening to their community.. Granted, MMO’s are persistent, but not all dynamic.. The only dynamic today is when the company decide to release a content-patch or an expansion. Then it just goes back to be static again… Ugh!
It has to stop!

Looking at our sad, sad excuse of a site @ kybernesis.com[^], and the fact that Joomla[The CMS we use] has just released their new version, I have been thinking of migrating the site over to Joomla 1.5.

So I started up a test site with Joomla 1.5 installed and started configuring and preparing for migration. I used several forum posts @ joomla.org[^] for help and other sources on the net.
I’m almost out of hair now from all the pain and frustration it has given me so far. It looks like the different Joomla versions are as compatible as different Java versions…. Not compatible at all!!

Then I stumbled over this blog by Christopher Price[^] and I decided to take Joomla out in my backyard and shoot it in all my mercy.
So now I have decided to make this blog site of mine into the main site instead. Which means I’m gonna migrate the Joomla site over to this Wordpress solution of mine instead.

So I started to look around for some tools to help me in that task, when I realized… The main site has next to NO content!! :O
The good news is that all the migrating I need to do, is to reroute the main address to this blog address instead.
At least here I have something to show for, albeit not so much about Kybernesis itself.. So that will have to change..

The final decision though, is to make a portal kind of site for this blog using Wordpress, where one can choose to view Kybernesis rants or developer Rants
So don’t be too shocked if you start to see changes happening here in the next few days/weeks.

Oh… And I did a major facelift of my blog site yesterday too!! Okay, maybe not THAT major.. It was only applying a theme and shuffle the widgets around.
And I am sure you have noticed that I have added an Amazon Associates widget and an Google Referral AdSense button. No income yet, but I hope it will improve in the future. Need monies to get this company going after all, and all $$ are good $$

Okay. So I decided to start my own blog.

You see, I’ve been dabbling with starting up an Indie Gamedeveloper company for half a year now, with a concrete game idea and everything.. Actually, several game ideas! I even got 2 modelers and 2 artists on my team to get the graphics done. Though that leaves only me as the programmer, eeep!

But I persevere. I’m looking into DX Studio these days, to see if it fits with my gamedev-goals. and I really like what I have seen so far, but more delving into that later. This is just a hello world post, so I can see how this blog-thingie works

Anyways, if you’ve stumbled over this blog for some reason and are disappointed din the lack of content, don’t fret. I will get this up and going in no-time and then I will blog about all my experience in starting up an Indie Gamdev Company from scratch. And I will try out tools like DX Studio, Torque, Endorphin and more in the process.

Oh and all input is heartily welcome of course!