The Plan

• With the offer of hosting from Angel, a Co-Creator of the Graal Online playerworld Era Online, Zorg set out to remake the original game only in PHP with a MySQL database.

• It was decided to name this version of the game Gangsterz 2, as it would be a step up from the original. The hostname www.gangsterz2.com was registered and the game design started. Sk8erMJ88, one of the creators who helped run the original, had vanished but mehownzu joined this project, renaming himself Mehean.

The Story

• The key problem with this design was that Zorg was recreating a game he had no copy of or reference to work from, only memory. The initial systems were created without any real problems, but the graphics had to be redesigned. Wanting to fix old flaws in graphics on the past game, a new design for characters was made.

• However before any work could go underway on these graphics, Zorg found an old site he had used in the original called SigmaChat. From his account on this site, he was able to recover a single image of the old Gangsterz Character look, and from this he remade the heads / bodies and kept the style the same as the original.

• The game was set up and went in to Private and then Public Beta testing; it included most of the features from the old game. The attack system changed to a summary based system for speed, the new inventory system was designed with full graphics, and a custom forum, market and clan system were added.

• The game had no big problems. Mehean eventually quit as he lost interest, leaving Zorg as the sole creator. The player count was consistent and fairly high, but no real work was done on the game after its initial design phase, apart from Bug Fixes.

• However during this time, Angel became more and more distant- harder to contact, spending less time online. Eventually the game had database problems, and in moving the database between servers, Angel claimed to have lost it. Shortly after the site was closed down, the hosting company she ran fell apart, and Angel vanished.

The Aftermath

• Although the game was gone, the community for the most part stuck together by keeping in contact through various messengers. At this time, Zorg had a complete backup of all the scripts from the game, however, he did lose the database structure.

• Not long after, Angel returned, bringing with her promises of new servers. With the loss of the database, Zorg decided to start a new project rather than rebuild the old one. This new game would be a browser based strategy game called Space Coalition.

See Space Coalition to continue...