This is part of a blog series to document the evolution of this community, year over year.

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HullBreach Goes Online

2007 was the year of HB Online: hours a day were dedicated to building up the database, designing the planets and moons, scouring open source and government websites (mainly NASA) for photographs, creating starships in Google SketchUp, writing code, and learning the newly-released Wii Remote API for the Internet Channel.

A few close friends and relatives became the early beta testers in the spring, as development progressed. Little could be done in the game for several months, aside from just traveling inside the local solar system. Status updates were posted at [a=http:/my.opera.com]My Opera[/a], under my old username GeekRecon (from a defunct Tech news aggregator website made with friends). As the Internet Channel started gaining popularity, I would speak with developers of other Wii-targeted websites at My Opera, like Jerason Banes of WiiCade, and Nintendo fans on the old Club Nintendo forums, which Nintendo of America scrapped the next year. We would share tips and tricks that benefited development and just speak our minds about features supported and unsupported in the Internet Channel.

As the capabilities of the game and its interface grew more complex, part of the JavaScript engine spun off to become the Wii Opera SDK on June 14th. This early development tool took on its own development cycle, as it continued to grow, gaining support for 4 Wii Remotes and advancing graphical features. The general release for this came December 19th, allowing those with JavaScript knowledge an easy way to seamlessly support either the Wii Remotes or a keyboard and mouse with the same code-base, for any game or Web app projects they would make.

By late summer, a few members of My Opera asked to be beta testers of HB Online, so they were given account access and would provide feedback. This continued through some of the fall, when the general beta release came on October 23rd.

The success was beyond what I could imagine, with close to 20 players in some of the 576 sectors of the game galaxy. This held on for weeks. As popularity grew, I kept creating more planets, missions, ships, and NPCs, to expand the game universe. The homepage of the website took on a format similar to the Smash Bros Dojo in its lead-up to the release of Super Smash Bros Brawl, in that there were daily blog-style updates that revealed new game content to the fast-growing community.

During this year also came an early chatroom (ported from BreakdanceCrew.com), an unreleased mailing app (later scrapped for the eventual "SDK Mail" system), and several interactive tech demos. Many of the latter would be incorporated into later websites for the community.