An Idea

The gaming industry is one of many catalysts fueling the growth of the Internet. One of the latest popular games to emerge, Spymaster, combines elements of popular social network games (like Mafia Wars) with Twitter. Before the rise of social networks, however, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) like World of Warcraft occupied people’s time and bandwidth, and they continue to do so. Even earlier, there were MUDs and MOOs.

These network games often leverage the latest advancements in technology and push its limits. But their basic design requirements remain the same. First, each virtual world needs a set of users to play the game. Those users often belong to groups—or clans or classes or castes or guilds or races. A user’s interaction with other users and the virtual world sets off chains of events and reactions. Although WebGUI is not designed for game development per se, it supports all these three technical requirements and perhaps more.

WebGUI has built-in support for users. Those users have profiles, metadata, and individual preferences. Perhaps those users have gold, powers, and weapons too.

WebGUI has built-in support for groups. Those groups can comprise an intricate social network that allow users to interact with each other. Perhaps those groups can try to assassinate each other.

WebGUI has built-in support for workflows. Those workflows can execute jobs according to different specified schedules—like starting forest fires or flooding a village.

WebGUI is not the ultimate framework for developing a real-time network game, but developing one in WebGUI is entirely possible.