Web Weeklyskimask



Surfing the World Wide Web, as one does, I stumbled upon a website home to a unique browser-based game. Although a little confused at first by how the game works, I soon became fascinated by Board Game Online. Personally, I had never seen a browser-based game quite like this, and it's appeal is not hard to miss. BGO has a very active community of players, and a extremely devoted team that is Frostbolt Games. I reached out to DysprosiumDy, who is one half of Frostbolt, to speak with them about their decades-old development of BGO. 


                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                                
                                                                                                                          Badgermein skimask

"Hello DysprosiumDy, and welcome to Web Weekly. Thank you once again for taking the time out of your evening for an interview. Could you start by introducing yourself?"


DysprosiumDy  
"Thank you for having me! My name is Dys, I'm a Dutch indie game developer and I've been working on web games for the past 14 years roughly. That'll give you enough to estimate my age. (^_^;)"


Badgermein skimask

"That's certainly a long time to be developing. Obviously, you have a passion for it. How did Frostbolt Games come into fruition?"


DysprosiumDy
"When I started studying Computer Science I met my best friend and colleague Silicon. Back then I'd started work on my biggest passion project called "Board Game Online" and he loved it. Originally I started a business called Dysprostar with another friend of mine (the legendary player with player ID #1: Ishtar), but he left and Sil and I founded Frostbolt Games to develop games together.

After our study we first went to work on Frostbolt Games part time, but later on I went full time. Sil is still a part time indie dev and has a job on the side."


Badgermein skimask
"I see, so Board Game Online (BGO) predates Frostbolt's founding. The indie development scene can certainly be challenging, and BGO seems to have gained a lot of attention, not to mention a dedicated player base. How would you describe BGO to a new player?"


DysprosiumDy
"BGO is a multiplayer, rogue-like race to the finish line. Turn-based, but with loads of actions you can perform outside of your turns. It has a massive amount of content, wacky humor and more references than you could possibly dream of. You could play it a thousand times and still no two games would be the same! Basically, it's a must play for every true game fanatic out there. It has more depth than almost any game I know."



Of course, BGO has it's own wiki, important for
understanding the vast amount of items, classes, and game modes.


Badgermein skimask
"BGO is certainly a unique game with lots of different moving parts. At first glance, I could feel that sense of chaos that you've instilled into this game. But closer inspection reveals a very fleshed-out, carefully crafted experience. What was the inspiration for such a project?"


DysprosiumDy

"The original inspiration for BGO actually goes way back! In highschool I taught myself to do some basic programming on our calculators. The first programs were very simple menu interfaces, but I got inspired to create a multiplayer board game on it that students could play by passing the calculator around and taking turns. It had "Board Game" as its working title and it actually became a hype at our school! I freaking loved it that so many students would play this silly turn-based game by passing their devices around. I was extremely proud of it!

Years later when I quit my first study (biology) I decided to go for my true passion of creating games and started Computer Science. A friend of mine mentioned "Board Game" and told me I should make an online version of it. And that same summer I drove around France for the summer holidays and spent a lot of my time concepting what this "Board Game Online" would look like. I had downloaded a full reference of the JavaScript language and tried to teach myself to code.

One year later and the very first version of BGO was a reality! Two friends of mine, twins studying at the art academy, made the original art for the game. Later on, our current artist Yel Zamor became the main developer and fleshed out BGO's art style. Yel's amazing! <3"



A much earlier version of BGO.


Badgermein skimask
"BGO is truly a passion project, exemplified by you and your team's dedication to it's development all these years later. BGO remains your most popular project, and you really seem to have struck gold with it. I imagine this story is inspiring for all of those small-time indie developers out there (heck, I know I'm inspired). What are some challenges you've faced with the development process?"
DysprosiumDy
"The biggest challenge is the one I recommend every aspiring game developer to overcome. When we first started working on BGO, for the first year we had pretty much no players. Very rarely we'd have 2 concurrent players and we'd be very excited. But overall it was pretty dead. Even though we loved the concept and thought it had a lot of potential, we lost the will to work on it. I was lucky, because Sil asked me if he could work on it. If it weren't for him, we might've let the project die then and there.

"Not long after that, our server crashed when we had a sudden influx of players from a website called EpicMafia. It only took 50 concurrent players to melt our servers, but after some quick adjustments we could bring the servers back online and I was amazed to see so many players online!It only took one player to share the game with another community to breathe life into BGO.

"And from that day forward, BGO has always had players and an awesome community! <3 So the biggest challenge was finding the will to commit even when your project isn't kicking off just yet. When you know that your game is great, keeping working on it. Too many game devs start something, then quit and repeat that until they're burned out. It takes commitment to keep at it! All other challenges pale in comparison, to be honest."


Badgermein skimask
"Certainly, some advice to take to heart. Besides BGO, Frostbolt's other projects have also looked fun in every sense of the word. In particular, I personally enjoy Catamancer's look and gameplay. Looking at your Game Skinny interview, that was so long ago, around the time the kickstarter began for that project I believe. Is BGO the main project that Frostbolt is focused on at the moment?"



Inside an average BGO game.


DysprosiumDy

"Yes. We're very proud of Catamancer. We coded our very own web development library and tools and wanted to put them to the test. Catamancer was a type of game that was almost impossible to make using HTML and JavaScript, which made it an amazing challenge. And right now it plays well, has smooth graphics and doesn't feel like a web game at all!

"Unfortunately it's a dead project currently, because the market for Collectible Card Games is oversaturated. I do think the game still has serious potential to become a popular card game, but as a 2-person team we simply cannot spread ourselves thin and BGO has already proven itself.We're still very proud of our in-house game development framework and have been expanding it over the years. It now has capabilities that we haven't yet used in new game projects. For example, we've ported our code to NodeJS, allowing us to use it to code on the server side as well as the client side. This means that we can very easily create multiplayer games now that work in real-time. For example, games like the popular slither.io and agar.io

"And while we do have various cool projects we've been concepting and building in the background, BGO is still our main focus. Especially because we now have a new direction to steer BGO in thanks to our new bot technology, allowing players to play against computer-controlled opponents!Our next big step for BGO is very likely to be a sort of rogue-like adventure where players face opponents and collect weapons and upgrades over the course of multiple games. We have some very big plans for this!"


Badgermein skimask

"Wow, it certainly sounds like there is plenty to look forward to! Undoubtedly, BGO fans are looking forward to these big plans. The Frostbolt framework your team has developed sounds very promising as well. Before we wrap this up, how would one show support for these big plans? Surely, as passionate as you are, we all know that indie devs cannot work for free."


DysprosiumDy

"The first and most important way to show your support is by simply playing our games. We don't have any ads and we don't force anyone to pay to play. But by simply being there and keeping the game active you're really supporting us! Never ever feel bad about being unable to help us out financially. <3

For those who are willing and able, you can make a donation to BGO and unlock many skins and other fun rewards. And if you'd love to support us over time, then becoming a patron on Patreon helps us immensely! We funnel all this income into our games and the more we earn, the more we can do!

For our bigger plans, like the whole new game mode involving bot opponents, we'll likely do another crowdfunding campaign. This will possibly be on Kickstarter once more. And for those who are able to donate €500 to Board Game Online, it's good to know that you can then join us to design your very own item for the game! It still amazes us how many players have supported us for that amount. It's incredible and I urge everyone to look at this huge list of items designed by players: (https://www.boardgame-online.com/?page=donator_items)."


Badgermein skimask

"Thank you once again for your time, DysprosiumDy. Good luck in your future endeavors."


DysprosiumDy

"It was a pleasure to do this interview! Game development is my passion and being able to talk about BGO like this... it makes my heart pound with excitement! Thank you!         ( ▀ ͜͞ʖ▀)"