That is correct. I REFUSE to play NEStalgia. Why? Because I want to. Huh?

Brilliant, I've confused you, now I get to make an explanation that will eventually lead to a point I'd like to make.

I have been quietly monitoring what's been going on with the game and SilkWizard's posts for a long time in regards to development of BYOND games. Two very interesting articles are found here and here.

Everything said in these two posts are valid. The idea of moving my games on BYOND to the outside world is one that I've talked about on this blog for years. I've never done it because I've never polished any of them to the point that I was 100% happy with. Even Exploder needs a little bit more tweaking, and then I feel that game will end up like current featured games Ultimatum, Feval, and Casual Quest as BYOND games that deserves to be played but rarely do.

That said, I do have a game that does get players and that is Wargames. When front page listings by "popularity" came about, Wargames did lean in the top 10-20 for awhile, but it gradually receded down due to Anime games. I'll admit this was a point in time when I stopped actively developing due to other circumstances and it ended up showing in the number of people logging into the game.

With the recent rollback in the de-listing of Anime games, Wargames crept back into the front page for the first time in a long time. I was pleasantly surprised by this, and amazingly I grew to like developing it again. I've watched it over the last few weeks how its crept up the page, from 20th up one by one to its current place in 16th. I won't lie, I want to see it higher.

I think I can do that, and get it featured by doing several things:

1) Do as I'm doing now, host. Its great when others can host, but I can do bug tracking and ensure the server stays up if I do it myself. For all the regular hosts who did keep their games up, thank you and your more than welcome to continue doing so if you wish in the future.

2) Ensure that, as I used to; as many bug fixes, tidy ups, balancing and new features are released after every major game hosted. I was updating regular every week in my high point, I don't see why that can't continue.

3) Tidy the damn looks of the game. I'm not talking about graphics, I'm talking the general feel, when 4.0 came out, I struggled to make an interface work for me and used a modified version of the default. I've had some practice now so I should be able to tidy this up.

4) Make good on my plans to create a tutorial. Yeah, my strongest weakpoint is the lack of accessible information on how to play the game. I've gradually improved it by making the hud describe the costs and features of the things they do when clicked, but general how-to on the game has remained rushed notepad works since the games inception.

5) Make a way for people to download the game outside of BYOND, and connect to an online game easily. This is probably the big one, wanting to find an easy way for non-byonders to connect to an online game rather than playing on their own not knowing what's going on. Any ideas on this is appreciated, but the best I can think of is to just upload the tutorial level of the game to other websites and then link to the hub page, hmm.

So there you have it, why don't I want to play NEStalgia? Because I'm jealous. I should be at that level by now with the level of commitment I have placed on Wargames over the years. I swear to ride off the backs of their success until I've had at least a taste of what they have had. I have made a bit of money from BYOND, but not at their level.

When I do, the first thing I'm going to do with that money is buy a lifetime subscription to NEStalgia and hide in my room for a week.