Paradox Play-By-Post Gets an Upgrade

My personal passion project - or it's latest iteration. Paradox is a type of play-by-post roleplaying game with system-managed characters, game progression, gold, and inventories. Players roleplay - similarly to Dungeons and Dragons - by taking turns telling parts of a story in forum posts. These posts earn them gold and experience which allow them to power up their characters and escalate their plotlines with whatever combat or drama crosses their minds.

Paradox is an interesting intersection between Text-Based and graphical RPGs, with graphical inventories and equipment, player-uploaded character art, and text-based action. What we sacrifice in graphical fidelity we gain in creativity and flexibility.

The project was built using PHPBB and an assortment of mods/extensions. I learned a lot about web development and design over the course of development, especially how to work with sparsely documented 3rd-party code! I also worked closely with Ingrid Kaat, leveraging our shared experiences to sort out the game mechanics and general user experience of the site together (the item icons in the above screenshots are her work.)

Paradox is currently offline, as I've decided to reinvent the game using ASP.NET MVC for a more modern, maintainable system.