Seeking testers for my website

[Vigilia.Procuratio]

 
Good morning,

I have been developing a browser game for some years now, but I tend to pick it and get some good, honest work done and then maybe forget about it for some months. I haven't touched it lately as I've been around here, but at some point I'll be back on it.

It is aptly called Space Frontiers.

If ever you played Frontier: Elite II on the Commodore Amiga then you'll see instantly that it is derived directly from that game. I actually intend to change it slightly so that it isn't exactly the same, but that depends on whether or not the original author decides to support it. As it happens, I did speak with David Braben a few years ago and while he confirmed that the product is still under copyright, he felt the idea was interesting and could be something he'd look at if the was any serious progress made. What I hope for is to be able to turn this into a full-on multi-player game, but at present it is simply single-player. For now, it's only possible to attack pirates, but I'll be updating this so that a list of ships is shown and the player can take a desired action against them, including robbing them. There is also a cargo scan implemented but having contraband has no consequences at this time.

I would be delighted if I could garner some thoughts and bug reports from the community here. I'm always ironing out problems and there are likely many floating around, some I'm aware of and others which haven't yet surfaced.

One particular issue right now is cross- browser and platform compatibility. It looks flawless on my Firefox installation, but it might render differently elsewhere. As for Internet Explorer, it looks terrible. Chrome? Dunno, my installation is broken and it won't reinstall so I can't check that one. If anybody would like to submit some screen-shots of their browser that'd be fantastic (I don't need to see your desktop stuff or the tool-bars on the browser, just the main web screen).

In addition, the site is currently hosted for free so there might be some restrictions as to what I can do, how much space and bandwidth I have, how fast the pages load and so forth, but if ever it went proper then I'd look at paying for a better host.

Another thing I'd like to know is what sort of interest there might be in a game like this and if people might be willing to pay a small subscription fee in order to access restricted content. Examples might be advanced ships, weapons, upgrades and other abilities such as placing game-related advertisements. Everybody would be able to play for free, but some such features might be unavailable to non-upgraded accounts.

Thoughts?

Link: http://spacefrontiers.co.uk

Cheers!

If you do take a look, please note these short-cut keys (mostly not working in IE)...

Code:

Numbers access numbered buttons, where present

Equipment Yard, Shipyard and Market...

Up, down, page up, page down, home, end and mouse scroll navigates the list
Insert and delete buy and sell and item, respectively (where possible)

Map...

Up, down, left and right moves to the next sector accordingly
Page up, page down and mouse scroll focuses on the next star
Home and end focuses on the home and target system, respectively
Insert sets the focused star as the target for warping
Delete sets no target at all
Single-click focuses on the star
Double-click or middle-mouse on a star loads the info page

Oh, and I'm aware that the shipyard is currently broken so I don't think a new ship can be purchased. Dunno what happened there, I gotta check that out. Might be related to a Firefox update; seems to be a conflict between JavaScript alerts and header redirects. So, ships might be purchasable actually, there just might not be any confirmation.