Merchant Seas is a 2d MMO that I started working on in September, and it's finally come far enough along to showcase:













You can see more screenshots, full-size at MerchantSeas.com.

Some of the Features:

• 17 unique towns (so far)
• A pretty large map - takes several minutes to sail the length of the Mediterranean Sea
• Can buy and sell goods between ports for profit
• Dynamic weather transitions: rain, clouds, day/night
• 3 different countries. Invest in ports to make them ally with your country
• Each town has unique ships for sale in the shipyard. Each ship can hold different amounts of cargo, supplies, and crew.
• Built-in ranking system based on experience earned from trading.

The MySQL Plugin:
The magic that made this all possible is a MySQL plugin created by our very own Joozey. I have a database set up and I simply send queries out about once a second to keep all players up to date. I then smoothly animate the ships' movement based on the info pulled from the database. Because of this little "trick" (if you want to think of it that way), the screen still updates at a nice 60 fps even though the data is only updated once a second.

Joozey is still working on some finishing touches for this plugin, and then plans to release it as open source. Feel free to message him and tell him how great he is.

Graphics Resources:
Since I'm a programmer and not an artist, I've used graphics from several sources:

• I created the world graphics using a tileset from RPG Palace. The tileset is free for non-commercial use.
• The town and icon graphics were created using tilesets from a licensed version of RPG Maker XP.
• The character portraits are from Hero Machine. They kindly gave me permission to use them at no charge. I have over 100 unique character portraits implemented currently.

Still left to do:

• I had to design the panels and GUI layout myself, so it's pretty ugly. I am having a freelance artist create new graphics for me in early January.
• There is a small issue with the MySQL plugin that Joozey is still looking into. It takes around 1/10th of a second for the call to the plugin to execute a query, and during this time, no other functions can execute. This causes a slight stutter in the game, which is a bit annoying.
• In order to publicly distribute libmySQL.dll (which is necessary for the plugin), I have to purchase a license from Sun. The estimated cost of this seems to vary based on the representative I talk to, but it's probably around $500-600. Ouch. The other option is to go entirely Open Source, which I am still considering.

Testing:
I could use about 3 people willing to help me test things out. If you have about 30-40 minutes to test my game over the next few days and let me know if you run into any bugs, that would be awesome - just send me a PM. I can't "publicly" test until I work out the license issue.

Feedback:
I would definitely appreciate any feedback on the screenshots, website, game idea, or anything else.