Potential Games™ is developing Potential RPG: the brand-new old-school MMORPG™ (working title)

Thank you for your interest in Potential Games!

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The story so far…

So far, Potential Games is just me and my keyboard. This project is born of a passion for writing software and a dream of running massively multiplayer games. The dream began before any RPG was MMO, when my self-taught BASIC skills would barely produce meagerly-single-player games. From BASIC beginnings, my background includes plenty of hard-core Computer Science and a good bit of corporate coding, always with special interest in networking communications protocols (and security thereof). Now possessing the experience to produce an MMORPG, and with the stalwart support of my wife and family, I find myself back in zealous pursuit of potential games.

Alpha Testing

Potential RPG has entered the Alpha testing phase. Alpha testing is not publicly available, but we are making significant progress toward Beta, which will be more open. Watch the Potential Blog for updates.

Potential Platform

A prominent feature of this project is developing my own software. I’m a software engineer first and a (potential) game developer second. I’m developing the (so far, so-called) Potential Platform from scratch as a general-purpose MMO platform.

The client-server system includes a content distribution model featuring an efficient byte-level (pseudo-)real-time game object update protocol. The client features tiled geometry (rectangular and hexagonal) and sprite rendering capability. Game rules are available to the client for decision making and enforced by the server for cheat prevention and detection.

A technical goal of the project is to run on Linux as well as Windows and other platforms. The client and server can run on modest hardware (but final performance has yet to be measured). Currently, I can play the Alpha-edition client on a 5-year-old Linux machine with no graphics hardware acceleration, along with the server and development environment. (UPDATE: I now have a spunkier Athlon II x2, but I still test for the P4.)

Development Tech

I’m developing this MMO(RPG) engine from scratch, entirely in 100% Pure Java.

My development environment is Debian Linux (UPDATE: Ubuntu). I edit all my code in jEdit and use Subversion, Ant, and Flyspray. So far, all graphics are hand-drawn by me in the GIMP, except for some experimentation with freely licensed art. Other applications used on this project include DokuWiki, phpBB, and WordPress.

See Potential RPG for project status information.