HISTORY OF IBGAMES AND FEDERATION 2
PART SEVEN
All You Can Eat
AOL announced its plans in December 1996 to stop charging by the hour and institute a flat-rate pricing scheme.
We could have told them what the effect of this would be on their games, had they bothered to ask... we remember the ill-fated basic services on GEnie!
To the players, this meant just one thing - Free Fed!
Immediately the limits on the amount people could play Fed were removed. All the games then on AOL had been designed on the assumption that the cost would limit usage. Players didn't have to watch their budgets any more; they could stay in Fed all day and every day. And they did!
Hungry games players immediately ate up all of AOL's limited resources.
Numbers jumped to six or seven hundred players in the game at one time during peak times. A banner on the front page resulted in thousands of new players each day. Of course, only a fraction of those players actually stayed more than a few seconds, or became regular players.
The game started to slow down under the weight of numbers - the computer just couldn't cope.
The object shortage became critical.
Sleeper macros were born to ensure that players could run their factories while they were at school, at work, or asleep. To counteract this, we increased the profit requirement for the JP and GM promotions, but that simply made it more difficult for players who didn't want to use sleeper macros.
The combination of the enormous numbers, and the flat-rate pricing, meant that in order to continue functioning Fed would have needed an extensive re-design. But we couldn't think what else to do... there was nowhere else to go; AOL was the largest consumer network, and the other big ones - MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy - weren't interested in games.
Finally, AOL solved the problem for us - by deciding to get rid of all its extant games.
Another new game - Explorer
Meanwhile, before the flat-rate pricing, AOL contracted us to do a new game for them - Explorer, a graphic role-playing game set in the Victorian era, where players would explore the uncharted areas of the globe in search of treasure and fame.
It is ironic that after over a year of work, with the game almost ready to go into beta-test, AOL pulled the plug on us.
We've then changed the name of the game to Age of Adventure because Explorer was too easy to confuse with Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, and so on - one early tester managed to replace her computer's Windows Explorer with our game program!
Age of Adventure went into free play-test on the web but was never completed. It's not currently running but who knows, maybe one day...
Foreign Language Fed
While on AOL we signed a deal with them to incorporate foreign language support into the game. To tie in with the new International services, the project would have allowed players from the different AOL services to play in the same game, but receiving the game text in their native language.
This involved a large amount of recoding, and a large amount of translation work, initially into French and German. (And trying to translate some of Fed's wierder parts was not easy!)
The bulk of this was available just before AOL went flat-rate.
Foreign language Fed resulted in several popular features being removed from the game, such as moods, and buying customized rounds. When we left AOL we dropped the support for foreign languages and were therefore able to bring these commands back.
