The end of the world
"Cold! I lay on a hard pallet made of steel. Rusty metal above me. I don't know who started the fire. But it doesn't matter." (Translation)
In the year 2053 almost every human being has been killed during a nuclear world war. The few who survived escaped to the so called "Alpha-colony", an abandoned under-water habitat which was meant to be a resort to overpopulation. But deep down on the floor of the ocean they suffer from a shortage of almost every resource they need and soon they have to fight again, when suddenly another strange organisation appears: The coalition of mutants...
A "Massive Multiplayer Online Game"
This is the scenario of Aquaphobia, an online game, created by MaxiTech, ChromXY and myself during our holidays in summer 2003. The game runs in real-time 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You use an ordinary browser to log in to the game and start to build extensions of your base, fire torpedos, built ships and initiate attacks. All these actions can last from a few ours up to several days, depending on distance and complexity. But everything keeps going even if your own PC is shut off.
Everything is continiously calculated on our server, which in the beginning offered enough capacity to host more than 1000 players.
A lot of work
Yet I have to admit that I stopped playing, coding and administering the game, only a few months after its release (15th September 2003). It was way to much work: In the few months during which I looked after it (with about 800 players), all of my spare time (next to school and job) had to be spent for playing, answering messages from users (complaints, of course - Nobody sends a message to the admin as long as everything is alright), deleting users and reading the forum containing the usual argues and flame-wars (you can never satisfy 800 users - there is always somebody who is annoyed and tells everybody about it).
Fortunately, Maxi kept Aquaphobia alive until an old veteran of this game took over everything. Definitely I will never complain about admins again, who just can't take care of every single user - I tried and failed.