From Troy Chard:

A few years ago my friend Ryan introduced me to WWII here on GamesByEmail. I was really impressed with the game. I had bought my own copy of Axis & Allies back in '92 and then moved and never had a chance to play the game. Now, on this site, I could play WWII to my heart's content... and it's free!

I've always wanted to make my own video game. After walking through the GamesByEmail tutorial, it seemed like this could be a pretty good foundation for writing a game. Then Scott here at GBE released Politics (back in March of 2008). That sealed the deal. I wanted to make my own game, and I wanted to give back to the community.

So in March of 2008 I started working on Empires. It turned out to be a much bigger project than I'd anticipated (what's that thing they say about writing code? "After the first 90% is done, it's time to write the other 90%" ). A year and a half later and this is what I've got. 15,000 lines of javascript code. It's still rough in places, but it's playable.

So for all those die-hard "History of The World" fans, here it is... play to your hearts content. It's free!

I cannot say enough about the effort Troy put in and the accomplishment he has achieved. It is really a beautiful game. He has also been spurring me on, which is nice. Having someone else using your foundation really forces you to make sure it is clean, and clear up those nagging items on your to-do list. Troy slugged through more than a few alterations to the foundation with aplomb.

He was also the catalyst for me to finally create game API and full API documentation. That has been an enormous help for myself as well.

Empires is the second game currently hosted on GamesByEmail that was written by someone else. Sean Hunt wrote Reflektit (a clone of Khet) last year. Anyone with interest in writing a game is certainly encouraged to do so. You can read a bit more about it on the Developers page. If you have any questions at all, let me know.

Thanks as always for playing,
Scott Nesin

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