The entirety of the BrowserQuests™ role-playing game (RPG) system and website has been conceived, authored and developed solely by Scott M. Huelsman (Waunakee, Wisconsin). The BrowserQuests™ system, website and original campaign "The Sorrow of Sisla" is the latest iteration of creative work from Scott spanning over the last 40 years.
Game History
While Scott served in the Air Force as a flight simulator technician in the mid 1980s, holds a bachelor's degree in environmental science (UW-Milwaukee), has managed his own web development business for over 25 years now and is currently a programmer and webmaster with a prominent Wisconsin state agency, Scott also has a strong creative streak and in the mid-1990s produced a "MediaNovel" that combined his own 100,000-word fantasy adventure novel with custom music, graphics, audio and even video. Originally entitled "Convictions" (and later changed to "Wizard Reborn"), Scott spent years on the project, growing first a CD-ROM and then web development company in order to learn the craft and support the vision.
Around 2008, Scott began tackling the Microsoft .NET learning curve and began working on an online game based on the novel, one in which the player became the protagonist within an interactive novel. Ten original episodes were developed for the game, but eventually Scott was pulled away to other more mundane client-based projects and his "role-playing novel" fell into disrepair. A strong proponent of the DNN content management system, Scott began a revisioning of the game in 2013 with a new literary-based RPG called "Dogma" and rewrote both the administrative component as well as game engine directly within DNN.
A Return to the RPG
In early 2014, Scott decided to move away from interactive literature and back to role-playing games, where it all started. Again leveraging DNN as the application/website framework, Scott rewrote the game engine to utilize a virtual "game master" (or "GM") to act as the storyteller, referee the game and provide an old-school, "paper-and-pencil" experience. Players create their own persistent "player character" (or "PC"), recruit an adventuring party of fellow heroes and interact with the GM one-on-one, progressing through a series of encounters; the GM provides a brief synopsis of the encounter, the player decides how best to react to the encounter and the encounter is resolved (usually resulting in a permanent change to the party and/or its members). Collections of encounters are combined into individual quests and those quests into modules and campaigns that tell a grander story.
Future of BrowserQuests™
The BrowserQuests™ RPG is a labor of love for Scott, the creative outlet he enjoys to accompany his full-time job, part-time web development business ("The Huelsman Way") and weekly support of his wife Susie's DJ, wedding and karaoke business "The Susie Show" and "Susie Show Weddings." Hence, new quests will take some time to develop but Scott plans to continue the storyline within BrowserQuests™ well into the foreseeable future!