Thursday, June 7, 2007

Omerta history

The roots
Everything began in early 2001. I was in 9th grade, played various online massively multiplayer games with friends, when one day realized that there is no game which would be perfect to me. I had only choice - to create one myself. After searching the web a few weeks i found out, that it is not so difficult to create an online web-browser based game, one must learn PHP and mySQL to create those.

The team
One of my friends also had the same feeling about online games. We started learning and creating the game. So the first Omerta game team was born - Laurynas MaliĊĦauskas (Malas) and Indrius Kairys (Indrionas).

The idea
Our main idea was to make an online massively multiplayer mafia game, where every single job had to be made by a real person. In that way people should make relationship like in the real life. What is more, it is always more interesting to make business with other people than with some NPCs.
Another thing which makes Omerta exclusive from all other games is that there is no censorship (except child pornography and advertisments) in the game. People can say whatever they want to each other, that way natural relationship are made, some people talk respectfully and are respected, other tend to offend everyone and consequently fight with everyone.

First versions
The very first version had almost nothing. Just a registration/login, legal businesses and whacking. The frst few versions were played only by our classmates and the total registered players never exceeded 30. Almost everyone told us that our game will never evolve to something real. One of the most laughing ones was Mindaugas Zilionis a.k.a Katras, who is now one of our administration team members.

The official version
The first official version (v1.0) was released in 2007.04.04. Current black-red-white design was introduced, however due to major works moving from old to new design some of the game features were not working. Players called that round one of the worst in Omerta history. Despite that there were more than 150 active players and more than 400 registered players.
In this version of Omerta major work was done in the system of the game, it became faster, lighter and easier to maintain. What is more, we have started to develop a stand-alone admin application with code name "Bebras" ("Beaver" translated from Lithuanian). It's main target is to prevent cheating in Omerta.

The future
For today our main goal is to make Omerta bug-free, easy to play and profitable. We plan to add premium accounts in the nearest two versions (v1.1, v1.2) in order to raise some money monthly, add More advertisments to the site.
The greatesting thing for casual players will be brand new illegal family business. As fas as it was discussed with oldschool players, everyone liked the idea very much.

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